Clinical Approach

Our team of wilderness therapy experts utilizes the following philosophies and therapeutic modalities to ensure we are meeting the diverse needs of the families we serve.

Introduction to the 12-Step Philosophy

Woven into the Phoenix Outdoor therapeutic curriculum are activities designed to help teens evaluate their substance use and the impact it has had on their family, friends, schoolwork, and themselves. The 12-Step program is introduced with an emphasis on Steps 1 through 3, which ask the teens to consider that drugs and alcohol have made their lives unmanageable and they need help to make necessary changes.

At Phoenix Outdoor, we recognize that not all adolescents will want to attend 12 Step meetings once they have graduated from the program. But group sessions, including 12 Step meetings, help the adolescent learn how to use a support group to develop strategies to stay substance-free. Additional drug and alcohol education is offered each week so that the teens can better understand the effects of substance use on their brains, bodies, and lives.

Family Systems Approach

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), “family and friends can play critical roles in motivating individuals with drug/alcohol problems to enter and stay in treatment. Family therapy is also important, especially for adolescents. Involvement of the family can strengthen and extend treatment benefits.”

Phoenix Outdoor provides a more comprehensive family therapy approach than most wilderness programs for troubled teens. Our base camp model allows us to provide an interactive family therapy session bi-monthly with each student and his/her parents. Parents are invited to participate in a weekly teleconference about substance abuse education as well as a mid-program two-day intensive parent workshop.

The family systems theory is a theory introduced by Dr. Murray Bowen that suggests that individuals cannot be understood in isolation from one another, but rather as a part of their family, as the family is an emotional unit. Families are systems of interconnected and interdependent individuals, none of whom can be understood in isolation from the system.

For this reason, it is important when making personal changes to also have strategies in place to address the family unit. When one person makes a change in the system, it will impact the other members’ roles. Those effects may be subtle or intense, and the resulting change will create "stresses" for others. If these stresses are not addressed in healthy ways, the family unit may break down or the personal change may not be successful.

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) is utilized in individual therapy sessions and in group settings at base camp and in the field. Family members receive instruction on DBT via psycho-educational conference calls.

The four basic skill modules of DBT are:

• Mindfulness Meditation Skills. These skills center on learning to observe, describe, and participate in all experiences (including thoughts, sensations, emotions, and events happening externally in the environment) without judging these experiences as "good" or "bad." These are considered "core" skills that are necessary in order to successfully implement the other DBT skills.
• Interpersonal Effectiveness Skills. The focus of this skill module is on learning to successfully assert your needs and to manage conflict in relationships.
• Distress Tolerance Skills. The distress tolerance skills module promotes learning ways to accept and tolerate distress without doing anything that will make the distress worse in the long run (e.g., engaging in drug or alcohol use).
• Emotion Regulation Skills. In this module, students learn to identify and manage their emotional reactions.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is based on the idea that feelings and behaviors are caused by a person's thoughts, not outside stimuli like people, situations, or events. People may not be able to change their circumstances, but they can change how they think about them, and therefore change how they feel and behave.

The clinicians at Phoenix Outdoor use CBT techniques with teens who are using alcohol or drugs in order to help them recognize situations that are likely to trigger drug or alcohol use, and then avoid those circumstances.

Motivational Enhancement Therapy

Motivational Interviewing (MI) is a treatment approach designed to help teens move through the stages of change and find internal motivation for change.

Motivational interviewing has been shown to work extremely well with adolescents who are resistant to changing their behavior. Many times, the therapist is able to use MI to increase the teen's motivation to change by taking a non-argumentative approach and turning the problems and questions back on the adolescent.

A common conflict for drug and alcohol users is the notion that "I can't live with it, and I can't live without it." This ambivalence freezes the user from committing to treatment. MI focuses on getting teens "unstuck" by identifying and exploring the sources of their ambivalence.