Program Description
OUR TOP RATED NATURE-BASED THERAPY PROGRAM
REMOTENESS/FREE FROM DISTRACTIONS
When teens arrive at Second Nature, the distractions and escapes that often shape their daily lives fall away. Without constant technology, social pressures, or familiar avoidance strategies, they’re able to focus inward and engage more fully in the therapeutic process. The natural environment gently brings underlying patterns and behaviors to the surface—often mirroring the very challenges that led them here—so they can be addressed directly and constructively. Within the group setting, students learn to respond to peers and adults in real, honest ways, rather than shutting down, withdrawing, or running away. This shift creates meaningful opportunities for accountability, growth, and change.
ACCOUNTABILITY
Nature offers lessons that cannot be negotiated or avoided. At Second Nature, adolescents live within the rhythms of the natural world and discover what it means to meet challenges directly and authentically. Experienced therapists, field instructors, and peers who are further along in their journey help hold boundaries and create natural, logical consequences that reflect the skills needed for a healthy life. At the same time, parents engage in their own therapeutic work—receiving coaching, support, and structured opportunities to reconnect with their child through letters and family therapy calls. Together, these parallel experiences provide a steady, unshakable foundation that allows old coping strategies to fall away and invites both adolescents and parents to practice new tools and healthier ways of relating.
METAPHOR
In nature, lessons are learned through experience rather than lectures. Therapeutic metaphors—like the patience and persistence required to create fire with a Native American bow-drill set, or the preparation and planning woven into daily camping skills—bypass adolescent resistance and allow qualities such as focus, resilience, and work ethic to emerge naturally. Because these lessons are discovered rather than imposed, they are often received with openness instead of pushback. Therapists and staff then help students “decode” the metaphors, connecting the experiences to real-life challenges and goals. Through this process, time in nature becomes more than an experience—it becomes a catalyst for healing, personal growth, and lasting change.
EXPERIENTIAL
Perhaps most obvious is the experiential value of nature-based therapy. Parents often refer to their child’s ability to manipulate or say what he/she thinks others want to hear. The experiential aspect of nature allows the therapist to require more than just lip service or promises to change. Adolescents must demonstrate and live that change. The narrow experience of group therapy becomes a microcosm from which the adolescent and the therapist can extrapolate the lessons and experiences to broader contexts of living. The adolescent will often unconsciously recreate, however subtly, the same type of relationships, patterns, symptoms and dynamics he/she did at home and the therapist can use these characteristics to help the child first see the problem in this new light, and then change behaviors using new insights and skills.
CLINICAL INTEGRATION
Second Nature boasts one of the most experienced and respected clinical teams in the nation. In contrast to many other programs in which the therapy and field experience are more disjointed, Second Nature's approach involves sophisticated, well-trained, and experienced therapists and field instructors who work closely together to integrate remoteness, accountability, metaphor, and experiential components of the program with advanced therapeutic expertise to create a powerful microcosm of change. Therapists work in tandem with the field instructors to ensure effective implementation of the individualized treatment plan. The consistency of this powerful combination essentially requires in a positive way that students change rapidly to adapt to the expectations and role modeling present in their environment, and the subsequent growth and insight is much more deeply internalized than in other models. Outcome studies indicate that Second Nature students make significant change while in the program and maintain much of it after they transition home or to their next supportive environment.
PERSONAL GROWTH
The immersive nomadic nature experience is foreign to most adolescents and as such, represents a challenge even to the experienced camper. The child’s poor self-image is often manifested in the initial stages with an “I can’t do this” response. To which skilled Second Nature staff and parents respond, “I know it is challenging, but I believe you can and I will help you get there.” Adolescents often cultivate the skills to avoid challenges and discomfort in its infinite forms, but the muscles of adaptation, resilience, and other coping attributes have atrophied. Thus the adolescent is again required to align himself with the immovable object and create, or access in himself, the ability to adapt. Feelings of confidence, competence, and strength will emanate from the child as the short weeks unfold. It is one of the common denominators of the experience for the parents to hear and see things in their child they never knew existed or believed were long lost. This new sense of confidence and strength carries into other areas of life. Therapists support parents in allowing their child the opportunity to struggle through some of these growing pains. A parent’s instinct is often to fix, rescue, or enable the child. The Second nature therapist, embedded in a nurturing and firm context, communicates to the child, “I know you can do this.” There is no message more empowering. Success is only a surprise to the child. And most often the child internalizes self-respect, self-efficacy, and confidence.