One of the unique aspects of TurnAround is the core wilderness trail experience at the beginning and the end of each programme. The youth participants are accompanied by the volunteer coaches who will work with them after return from trail for the next nine months.
Although this makes for a lot of people traveling together, TurnAround believe that the experience spent together in the wild enables the coaches and youth to get to know each other very well thus helping to see everyone through with the more difficult moments on the return home to families and peer groups.
Last November our TurnAround group spent eight days on the Isle of Mull in the Inner Hebrides, Scotland.
Using a remote house on the island as base camp, the group were involved in a facilitated course of team and trust building, working together to agree ground rules and principles of engagement, outdoor skills such a putting up tents, using trangia stoves and setting up rotas for work such as cleaning and cooking.
Underlying all the activities is the wilderness therapy process with our two resident psychologists, Nick Ray and Ruth Bradbury. Group and individual discussions with all the participants were held on a regular basis throughout the week.
Time was also spent with the volunteer coaches helping them understand the behavioral issues and group dynamics that inevitably occur in a residential programme like this. This was particularly helpful to them and very much appreciated. During these coach sessions, the young participants were in workshops to explore their own ideas and thoughts for the project and how they were feeling about the project and the relationships. These aspects were then merged together to start to consolidate for the future.
After three days at base, the group then spent three days in the most beautiful, but utterly wild section of the island near the Ross of Mull.
Carrying heavy packs and wild camping in winter weather is a challenge to all and both groups had their moments of having to dig very deep into themselves in order to keep going. However, for everyone concerned, the wilderness trail seemed to be the most memorable part of the journey, quoted by the youth often as the greatest challenge they had faced as a group and as individuals.
That is just the way it is
The most commonly used phrase on the trip was “this is just the way it is”. Nature presents all sorts of challenges and one cannot fight it. The therapy lies in having to adapt and change to accommodate this without losing a sense of where one is going – literally and metaphorically.
Many lessons were learned for all of us – adults, guides, therapists and youth – and will probably stay with us for the rest of our lives. For the adults, it probably made us better parents and partners on return, the guides and the therapists an appreciation that no programme is the same and for the youth, that they have great strengths to positively use for their futures and an appreciation of the challenges they also need to face in order to make progress towards their goals.