Melissa Little
“The first thing I remember is pulling in and getting introduced to two people who didn’t have normal names,” Melissa Little recalls. “What? You’re telling me that’s really what you go by? Are you guys crazy?” she says with a laugh.
Melissa has a lot to smile about these days. A 2004 graduate of RedCliff, she is currently attending Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington. She’s working on a Bachelor’s degree in psychology and hopes to work with troubled children.
“I’ll be doing an internship at a child care center,” she says. “It sounds like it’s going to be really difficult but really rewarding at the same time.”
That’s much the same way she feels about the 100 days she spent at RedCliff.
Melissa’s RedCliff journey began four years ago. After her former boyfriend committed suicide, Melissa made a suicide attempt as well. Then she started running away from home.
“At that point, I really wasn’t processing anything,” she says. “I was still in such shock that when my parents sat me at the kitchen table and said, ‘This is driving us apart. It’s driving our whole family apart.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, whatever.’ I was thinking I was fine and nothing was wrong. I had no idea what I was in for.”
She continues, “The hardest part was accepting the fact that it had gotten so bad I actually needed help.”
At RedCliff, she struggled. “It took a long time for me to start changing. I had a hard time getting fires. It was frustrating and I would give up really easily.”
Each time she gave up she berated herself, saying “I’m a failure” or “I’m never going to get out of here.”
She finally broke through the frustration of fire making. Her confidence grew as the tiny ember flamed. “As soon as I actually started getting fires it really boosted my self confidence and I thought if I can do this I can do anything,” she says.
From that moment, she became the mentor. Her focus changed from getting her own phase work done to helping others in her group accomplish their goals. “I ended up becoming a mother hen to a lot of the new kids in the group.”
She notes, “I think my best memory was when I got my earth name – Gentle Deer.”
Melissa says the months at RedCliff definitely changed her relationship with her parents. “It was very hard for me to listen to them say, ‘We can’t handle you.’ Being able to see them again at grad camp just meant so much to me.”
Now it’s her RedCliff family she misses. And that family, too, is proud of her accomplishments. “People still come to me for help and advice,” Melissa says. Gentle Deer is still using her gifts.
Tyson Rowley
“I was a trouble maker,” Tyson Rowley acknowledges. “Running away, getting into drugs, getting into trouble.”
It was those behaviors that landed him at RedCliff in 2000. “At first I was mad at my parents for sending me,” he says. “No kid wants to be dropped off in the desert. After a while I stopped being mad at them.”
Tyson loved camping and had little trouble getting his first fire. “It only took about a week,” he recalls. “I got my fire patch after about two months.”
Married now with two children of his own, Tyson says it was his own drive for attention that took him down destructive paths. “I liked getting into trouble. I liked everybody thinking I was a bad ass,” he admits. “Now I’m a boring, boring person,” he adds with a laugh.
After RedCliff, Tyson finished high school and attended college briefly. “I’m more of a hands-on person,” he says. He left college and became a land surveyor, a career he’s enjoyed for the last few years.
What Tyson remembers most about his days at RedCliff are the “goodhearted staff” and a fellow student who later died in a car crash. “I still keep in contact with his mom,” Tyson says.
Now a different man in a different place, Tyson says he will never forget his time at RedCliff. “I still have my leather pouch and leather strips,” he says. He adds with a chuckle, “I had to show my wife how to make hand drill fire.”
What will he tell his young son about his own teen years? “Stay out of trouble,” Tyson says without hesitation. Then he adds, “I hope I’m doing a good enough job that he doesn’t follow my path.”
Mark Noe
Director of Staff Services
It was supposed to be a twelve week internship – the last course he needed to complete before earning his Bachelor’s degree. That was five years ago. Mark Noe returned to Illinois just long enough to attend graduation exercises at Western Illinois University before making RedCliff a permanent job.
He started with the company as a field staff, then became the Quality Assurance Director. This summer he was promoted to Director of Staff Services.
“The thing that keeps me here are the good people I work with and the opportunity to grow,” he says. “I have the freedom and flexibility to try new things.”
Learning and improving have always been priorities for Mark. As a college student majoring in recreation, parks and tourism, he took a class called Leadership and Youth Services. “I remember sitting there thinking, ‘This is what I want to do. I want to help kids,’” he recalls. He met someone who knew of the RedCliff program and offered to introduce him.
That meeting changed his career and his life. In the five years since, Mark has continuously worked to strengthen and improve the RedCliff culture.
“As staff director, I manage all the staff. It’s my responsibility to make sure not only are we hiring the highest quality staff we can, but that the staff are being trained and getting certifications that are required to effectively run a group and keep students safe,” he says.
Among others, those certifications include positive control systems, first aid, and wilderness first responder medical training.
Mark also works closely with RedCliff’s clinical team, keeping communication between field staff and therapists open and effective.
“It can be hard work,” he admits. “It’s a good thing I have a great quality assurance director and administrative assistant. They take a huge burden off my shoulders.”
Does he ever think about taking an easier path? Not a chance.
“I enjoy and trust my peers in the field and the administration. I understand what we’re trying to do as a company and I enjoy being part of it.”
Blogging, Facebook, and YouTube – they’re all ways of communicating for RedCliff parents, staffers and alums.
If you haven’t seen the posts, just search for RedCliff on Facebook and YouTube. Our blog is part of the RedCliff website. Each site contains messages, photos and videos to keep the RedCliff family connected. Check them out!
One of the unique facets of the RedCliff therapeutic experience is the Parent Narratives. Parents use the narratives to tell the story of their child from the child’s very earliest beginnings. While their student is working on his autobiography through phase work in the field, parents are re-constructing the child’s life in writing. It’s an exercise that is unique to RedCliff with specific therapeutic benefits to both parent and child.
“The narratives are not a lecture, they’re not a letter, they’re not a newsy. They’re a fairly structured story that is told in an elemental fashion so that the child is hearing the story of their life when they are in a place to actually hear it,” Doc Dan, Clinical Director at RedCliff explains.
“It surprises me to find kids that really don’t have that sense of what was happening at the time that their parents decided for them to be born,” he continues. “What was happening during their mother’s pregnancy with them? What was going on in the family? What were the kinds of things that the parents were doing? Usually a child doesn’t know that. They don’t know even the story about for instance how did they come to be named the name that they have, those kinds of things.”
According to Doc Dan, students on Developmental Vacation ™, who insist on maintaining their fantasy world, can’t allow themselves to hear the truth. For the fantasy to continue, they must see their parents only as obstacles in their path to freedom.
“We find that once we have disrupted that dynamic and the child is actually in a place where they’re not just worrying about what they are going to say to argue, that it’s easier for them to hear the story and it becomes therapeutically very valuable,” Doc Dan explains.
Parents complete the narratives online in RedCliff’s exclusive Parent Portal. Each narrative lists the correlating questions the student is responding to in the field. Then parents are asked to respond to their set of questions.
Therapists print the narratives and take them to the field where they are read to the students.
“We want them read in the adult voice because this is actually coming from the child’s parents,” Doc Dan says. “In a way, the parents now have a voice in that therapy session.”
Just observing the child’s reaction as he hears the narrative often provides the therapist with valuable insight. So, too, does the parent’s willingness or unwillingness to complete the narratives.
“In those relationships where the parents are separated or in those relationships where there’s been some alienation within the family, what happens with the Parent Narratives is that they recreate that relationship for us in real time while the child is in the field, even though the parent is not there,” Doc Dan explains. “Then we can move it in that direction and allow them to understand, here’s the reality of your life. Where do we go from here?”
He admits the narratives are a lot of work and most parents are relieved when their assignments are completed. But he also hears parents tell him time and again how much the Parent Narratives have helped them understand their relationship with their child.
Watch for a video on Parent Narratives on the RedCliff website under Videos.
Looking for a high adventure wilderness experience for your child? Keep looking. When it comes to extreme adventure, RedCliff Ascent is, well, boring. About the only aspect of wilderness RedCliff staffers take to the extreme is safety training.
“It’s a pain,” Scott Schill admits with a grin. As Field Director, it’s Scott’s job to work the staff services department to make sure all RedCliff staff have appropriate safety training. But the ‘appropriate’ part is where it gets a little extreme.
“State regulations aren’t very clear on what some of the training should include,” Scott explains. His solution: go way beyond the letter of the law and make sure his staff and his students are safe – all the time.
Take the example of an evacuation plan. State rules call for having a plan, but they don’t say what the plan should include. So Schill and his colleagues created a plan for transporting students by land and air.
That’s the part where the helicopter comes in. He contacted Las Vegas based Mercy Air and arranged for a flight nurse instructor and a helicopter to provide two training sessions for staff.
RedCliff staff got hands on experience learning how to set up a landing zone, safely approach the helicopter, and load patients. “We wanted to go above and beyond just providing the state with a letter saying Mercy Air could service us,” Scott says. “We wanted to be prepared in case we actually had to use them.”
Scott says the company also provides Wilderness First Responder training for staff. “It costs about $500 per person to take the course,” he says. The First Responder program is more comprehensive than a regular first aid course. It focuses on treating injuries and illnesses in the field prior to a patient receiving professional care.
Although he’s got 19 years experience driving off-road vehicles, he enrolled himself in a safe training course for rugged terrain. “I learned a couple of things and I think it will be helpful,” he explains. Now he plans to teach other RedCliff staffers the new techniques he learned about safe driving in the field.
Although it means extra work for him and his colleagues in the staff services department, Scott says the on-going training is worth it. “All of this training provides a better quality of service for our students and their families.”
Dr. Jeffrey Kemp, head of the Student Services Department at St. Michael’s College on Australia’s Gold Coast, recently visited RedCliff Ascent.
For the past 20 years, Dr. Kemp has been responsible for special support services to more than one hundred Australian high schools. He also runs an expedition based therapeutic program.
The visit allowed him to evaluate several therapeutic programs in the United States, looking for ideas he could incorporate into his own work with troubled teens.
While all of the programs looked good on the Internet, Dr. Kemp says he wanted to know how they actually operated. “I was looking at the content, scope and integrity of the program.”
His research led him to Dr. Keith Russell, who recommended Kemp visit five different wilderness based programs. One of them was RedCliff.
“I found a number of programs went through the motions but the therapeutic element was lacking,” Dr. Kemp reports. “RedCliff was by far and away the best program that I saw,” he says.
“I went out into the field. The detail put into place for rituals and culture, the attention to safety, when you see what lies behind and what has to be put into place to work, you understand the cost.”
Dr. Kemp also observed the RedCliff team. “I was really impressed with the way the team works – always renewing what the central intent should be, getting to know the kids and walk with them over time,” he notes.
RedCliff’s warehouse area, fully stocked with all the gear students need for a safe wilderness experience, was another aspect of wilderness preparation that left a strong impression.
He intends to try and incorporate some RedCliff practices in his own program back home. He likes the references to Native American ritual and culture. “It gives these kids who are disaffected an anchor point and something to reach back to,” Dr. Kemp says. He also wants to add weekly staff training meetings similar to those held at RedCliff.
RedCliff graduates may be gone but they are definitely not forgotten. Mike Petree, Director of Follow-up Services, contacts each graduate three months after they have completed the program and then again six months after graduation. He wants to know how students and their families are doing and what they’ve been doing since their RedCliff days.
His work is part of an ongoing effort to create a research oriented data base that will ultimately be used to help assess and improve the effectiveness of the RedCliff program.
Mike says besides providing useful data, the follow-up interviews are part of RedCliff’s commitment to customer service. “As I’ve spoken with parents it’s been obvious to me that simply having a conversation with them about how their child is doing brings a lot of memories to mind,” he says.
He said it also helps to remind parents of the importance of having realistic expectations about how their student should be doing post wilderness.
“I was speaking with the mother of a student the other day and it was clear she was pretty down on her son,” Mike recalls. “She was irritated with him and felt he was being lazy. But this was a young man who had made and sustained substantial change. While he may not have been the ‘golden child’ his less troubled sister was, he was much better than before he went to RedCliff.”
Mike says as they talked, the mother realized her expectations for her son may have been unrealistic, that he was, in fact, a good kid. She determined that perhaps she should ease up a bit.
“I think the consequence of that discussion will be an improved relationship between them, which will compel more success,” Mike states.
“I’m really excited because I’m seeing a pattern emerge where the quality of the relationships may be affected by the realistic expectations of the parents. Parents are more accurately perceiving what their child should be doing appropriately at this stage and separating that from the “fantasy” child,” Mike explains. “It’s when they can’t separate the two that it generates tension.”
Mike says the difference is recognizing your child has improved, but he’s still a 16-year-old with all of the challenges that come with a healthy adolescence.
He’s compiling data that will not only be used to improve RedCliff, but will also serve as a foundation for a larger study on the stages of change itself, one he hopes to complete while earning his Master’s Degree in counseling psychology at Northwestern Oklahoma State University.
“A majority of the parents I’ve interviewed commented off hand that their child seemed to have a turning point around six weeks into the program,” Mike notes. “Why then and for which students? If we could find that out we could better address the length of stay issue. That could shed light on 30 day programs and help validate empirically why those programs can’t get through to kids as well as an open ended program might.”
“We will ultimately be able to better serve the students by knowing more about the process of change.”
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