Clan of the Hand is sort of like the Hall of Fame for wilderness therapy. Held at the RedCliff kiva, it honors the men and women who have been industry pioneers. Their work is recognized as the foundation of a profession that has changed the lives of thousands of families. In honor of their leadership, RedCliff invites these individuals to a ceremony where they leave their handprint on the kiva walls,  just as they have left their influence on our lives.

This year we are pleased to honor David Holladay and Karen Wells. We invite you to share in their ceremony at  http://www.utahvod.com/clan

Walking down the path from the Tiki camp to the pavillion at Outpost the dust swirls up in little poofs around my boots. The dry stream bed is smooth and sandy from all those springs when water rushed the rocks away, leaving only the soft sand behind. I am thinking of all the times I have seen grads do their run-ins on this path. I’m thinking of how odd their clean white T-shirts looked. How some of them loped toward their parents and others did a full out sprint. I am remembering the cries of their parents as they saw their child for the first time in many, many weeks. Tears come to my own eyes as I remember how parents and children fell into each others arms, weeping with joy, both changed during the absence. Walking down their path I feel honored. I am wondering where they are today. I am wondering if the silence and the solitude of the desert have remained with them in ways that let them reflect upon the strength and resolve they worked so hard to achieve. Do they remember? Can they feel it still? The dust will settle and eventually erase our tracks from this path. The rains will come again and the water will wash away our mark. Although we will no longer be part of the desert, it will always be part of us. Our true selves glimpsed, we can never again claim blindness.

Once parents have made the decision to send their child to RedCliff, getting them here can pose a new set of problems. Students may have threatened to runaway or harm themselves if they are sent away for treatment.  Or parents may simply feel ill equipped to handle the stress of removing the child from home and boarding a cross-country flight. In these circumstances, families often turn to specially trained transport teams.

Transport companies operate independently from RedCliff. Those we recommend are all licensed and bonded. Generally speaking, each provider sends two people to escort a student to our program. Some transport teams have backgrounds in law enforcement. All of them specialize in working with teens in a respectful manner that de-escalates anger and encourages cooperation. Fees for transport services vary, depending on current air fares and how quickly the student needs to be picked up.

Here’s what one parent had to say about her family’s experience using a professional transport service:

“Having our son go away with strangers to a foreign place was one of the hardest things we have done. It shows we felt his poor choices were placing him in dire situations and we were desperate. Having him leave with two people who we felt not only knew what they were doing, but also cared about our family as people, helped greatly. Your recommendation of Eddie and Tyna was invaluable. They were excellent in providing information on where he was while traveling to RCA plus how he was doing on a very timely basis. A special thank you to you and to them from our family.”  Terry T.

Please look under Additional Resources on our web page for a listing of transport providers. Our admissions counselors will be happy to answer any questions. Call Cheryl Bennett at 800-898-1244 or Barbara Davis at 775-265-6565.

           “I’m going to do whatever I want and I don’t care any more.” That’s how Emily T. describes her attitude in the spring of 2008. “My life was falling apart before RedCliff. I was into a lot of heavy drugs and drinking. I had a lot of issues with self-harm. I didn’t know who I was and I didn’t want to know who I was.”

            Emily dropped out of school and says she lost herself. “I had no self-esteem.” When a close friend died, Emily felt she had hit rock bottom. She says, “One night I woke up and I really just had one of those moments. It was like, ‘What am I doing to my life?’ I got fired from my job. I’ve lost everything and I’ve lost myself.”

            Her father approached her with the idea of RedCliff. “When my dad presented it to me first I said no. Then I had a wake up call and I just knew I needed to do this. I didn’t know exactly what was facing me. I just knew I was going to Utah.”

            Thousands of miles from her home in Australia, without drugs or drinking to fall back on, Emily loathed her first weeks in the Utah desert. She hated her father for sending her and hated herself for agreeing to go. “I hated everyone. I remember being so angry.”  

            “I was angry for a long time,” she says. “I was very unmotivated. I didn’t want to do anything. I don’t remember what it was but I just remember having a turning point.”

            That point, Emily says, was when she began asking herself why she was angry. “I just started really looking into why – why am I angry? I started trying to find answers. I realized my father had done nothing to deserve this anger.”

            “I had one of those moments where I realized I need to take this opportunity and help myself,” she says. “When I made that decision, that’s when things started changing in my life.” 

            She began opening up – first in her phase work and her therapy sessions. “Each phase you had to write about a certain topic with certain questions. That’s really where it started – asking myself those questions and starting to write about it.”

            “My whole attitude changed towards everything. I wasn’t miserable any more. It wasn’t like I have to do this. It was like, OK, let’s do it!”

            Emily says what she learned at RedCliff, and later at Discovery Ranch, gave her the skills she would rely on for life. A year after completing those programs, facing the pressures of her first semester of college and life on her own, she started smoking pot. “I stopped myself,” she explains. “I said, ‘Whoa! What am I doing? I can’t ruin my life again.’ I realized that’s not what I want for myself.”

            Emily says, “RedCliff was the first thing I had finished from beginning to end and really gone through everything. It was finding that inner courage in myself that I can do what I set my mind to. I really can do it!”

            “In the past I would always give up. Now it’s like when I struggle I just go back to that place and I remind myself I can do it. It helps me on my way in many aspects of my life. It’s helped me set goals and have those goals. I will be able to achieve if I just do it.”

             One of those goals is graduating from college. She will finish her Associate’s Degree in 2011 and is planning a career in law enforcement.

            “Being at RedCliff I really started a journey of finding who I was.”

RedCliff is pleased to introduce Graham Cook, a consultant in the UK. Graham is happy to help UK families learn more about our program as well as other therapeutic options for troubled teens. Watch the video and meet Graham Cook

We’re getting ready for the bi-annual Clan of the Hand celebration in August. It may seem kind of weird that we make a big deal out of honoring wilderness pioneers in other therapy programs. But that’s exactly what happens. RedCliff is about excellence in wilderness therapy – programs that promote real change in a safe and responsible manner. So it also makes sense that we recognize it wherever we find it. Yeah, we still think our program is the best in the industry. But we’re honored to recognize men and women who have devoted their lives to changing children for the better. They’ve left their mark on individuals and the industry as a whole. And at Clan of the Hand they’ll leave they’re handprint in the RedCliff kiva.

            RedCliff Ascent is now on Facebook. We’ve enjoyed hearing from so many of our grads about their experiences, then and now. If you have a Facebook page, be sure to friend us. In the meantime, we hope you’ll enjoy these stories of former grads who contacted us to give us their updates. We also welcome your comments on our blog.

            For Lauren H. the road to recovery was not a one stop destination. But the 20-year-old college student credits RedCliff Ascent for being the first, possibly most important, stop on her journey.

            In 2007 Lauren was an angry 16-year-old who found herself in the Utah wilderness after an unhealthy relationship ended in a suicide attempt. Besides anger issues and depression, Lauren had substance abuse problems her parents feared would ultimately kill her.

            She spent 105 days in the Utah desert. “It felt like forever!” she says with a groan.  “I didn’t make fire until day 70.”

            It was hard. It was frustrating. It was horrible, she says. And, she adds, “I think it was the best experience of my entire life.  I was able to prove to myself that I could do something. All my life I had people bailing me out of everything,” she says. “I learned I was able to fend for myself and build up my own strength.”

            Lauren would need that strength. After her return from RedCliff she fell back into bad relationships and drug abuse. She tried a local rehab clinic but relapsed again.

            One day as she sat thinking about her RedCliff experience she had an awakening. “I realized I was worth something,” Lauren recalls. “I was worth something to myself because of everything I overcame at RedCliff. I was worth not using drugs any more.”

            “That gave me a foundation. I had to finally decide I don’t want to do this with my life. I don’t want to be an addict.”

            Lauren started attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings a little over a year ago. She’s been sober ever since.

            She’s a straight ‘A’ student in college, studying psychology and English. And she’s in a healthy relationship.

            “At RedCliff,” she says with a laugh, “I remember we wrote on our shoes ‘This too shall pass.’ At the time, I hated RedCliff and I thought my life was completely over. Now I look back and, in the grand scheme of things, three months is so tiny compared to life.”

            “I know I’m capable of doing a lot more than I think I’m capable of. I’m a lot stronger than I give myself credit for. When things get tough I don’t just give up any more.” She adds, “I’ve learned I can overcome things that I didn’t think I could overcome.”

            We watch them leave Grad Camp and wonder what they will do with their new-found skills. Sometimes parents take a minute to send an email or leave a post on Facebook to update us on their student’s progress.

            Here’s a message we received from Mike C. about his son, Jordan:

            “Jor is doing well, finishing up his junior year at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He’s an honor student and intends to graduate next year and further his education at USC. He has his sites on a law degree and MBA at the same time. He doesn’t want to be a lawyer, but rather an agent in the entertainment industry. He’s clean, sober, and learned at RCA that ‘Red Sky Cobra’ could do anything he put his mind to and followed that with effort. Thank you, Doc Dan and the RCA staff, for taking a chance on a very troubled kid. Without you, I don’t know what would have happened to my son.”

            When we contacted Mike to ask for permission to share his story, he wanted us to add this:

            “I’m so proud of that kid. He’s come a long way from those dark drug and alcohol days. The battle scars from his days on the dark side are fading and his success in developing as a fine human being grows daily. I remember it like it was yesterday – him sitting in jail and me trying desperately to find a program that would take a chance on him. RCA said yes and Doc Dan took a personal interest. I’m proud to be part of the RCA family – RCA saved his life!”

             If you’ve ever placed a young child in a disciplinary time out, you know the scenario usually goes something like this:

            Parent: I want you to sit on that chair and think about what you’ve done until the timer goes off.

            Child: (30 seconds later) Is it time yet?

            Parent: Not yet.

            Child: (another 30 seconds later) Now is it time?

            And so it continues, with the child continuously asking if he’s paid his penance by waiting out the kitchen timer. While they may have no concept how long the time span is, even small children know when the time is up they are once again free. When toddlers become teens, it’s a lot harder to disrupt their behavior patterns.

            Dr. Daniel Sanderson, RedCliff’s clinical director, says most students arriving at RedCliff come with a time out mentality. “Much of what these students do in the initial part of treatment is asking is it time yet,” Doc Dan says. 

            Students assume that when a certain amount of time has passed, their parents will release them and the student will be free to resume his/her life.

            What they fail to realize, Doc Dan says, is the time out mentality is over. RedCliff is really an opportunity for what he calls a “do-over.”

            “Parents are done with timeouts,” he says. “They’re not sending their students to pay a penance. They’re not just immediately removing them because they need a break. They’re sending them for treatment.”

            The do-over philosophy means parents are giving students an opportunity to re-establish the relationship at a different level.            Parents effectively say to their student, “I need you to grow up enough to reset the relationship. If you can, we’ll reset to the point where we can begin to re-establish trust.”

            The Parent Narratives help parents understand the nature of their interaction doesn’t have to mirror the same kind of process the student has encountered so many times before.

            These assignments teach parents teach how to identify what their expectations are. “Just paying penance is not a part of that,” Doc Dan says. “There are actually some things the student needs to do.”

            At RedCliff, the focus is on disrupting the dynamic. When the student asks if the time is up he gets a response that is far different than ever before.

            “With a do over mindset, the amount of time becomes irrelevant,” Dan says. “The student is there until they have done what they need to do, or until they show that they have no interest whatsoever in a do-over.” He adds, “Then the parents have to make decisions based on the level of commitment the student has made.”

            Doc Dan says some programs really are simply a time out. The parents get a rest from the student’s behaviors, the student waits out a certain amount of time, and then the whole process begins again right where it left off.

            At RedCliff, there are concrete expectations of what the student should achieve. “That gives the parents and the therapist an opportunity to assess,” he explains. “It lets us assess whether or not the relationship with the parents really is the most important thing to the child or if they’re still all about staying in control.”

            When parents ask how to tell if their student is really after a do-over, Doc Dan tells them this, “If it’s a do-over, we see this child living their life differently. The child has re-established, or maybe for the first time established the parent as the parent. The child is giving indications they want to be trusted and they’re willing to do whatever is necessary to earn that trust. The student is willing to respond to whatever level of structure the parent is establishing.”

            Doc Dan says the student who is constantly checking on whether it’s long enough is actually interfering with the process of creating the do-over. “As long as the student has a time out mentality there’s a disconnect.”

            Treatment, he says, is always focused on the relationship between the student and the parent. Neither the clock nor the calendar is accurate assessments of that commitment.

            “The students determine that themselves,” Dan says.