Friday, 11 July 2014

Wilderness Therapy: What The Wilderness Does Best

By Saleem Rana


John Hunt, Executive Director and Founder of Jason William Hunt Foundation, and author of Walking with Jason answered questions on what the wilderness does best for at-risk children when interviewed by Lon Woodbury and Elizabeth McGhee on Parent Choices for Struggling Teens hosted on L.A. Talk Radio. He also talked about his memoir on his late son, Jason, who had learned how to be an effective Wilderness Guide to help at-risk children.

Lon Woodbury, the host of the show is the publisher of Woodbury Reports and founder of Struggling Teens. He is an independent educational consultant and an author of numerous Kindle books on at-risk teens. He has worked with families and struggling adolescents since 1984. Elizabeth McGhee, the co-host of the radio show, is the Director of Admissions and Referral Relations at Sandhill Child Development Center. She has almost two decades of clinical, consulting, and referral relations experience.

Bio on John Hunt

John Hunt is the Executive Director of the Jason William Hunt Organization. He has invested the last 10 years providing scholarships. His work has introduced new attitudes in children at-risk. The foundation introduces them to restorative wilderness developing programs. The foundation assists families and therapeutic boarding schools and wilderness programs across the nation. John and his family took over the job Jason did prior to his accidental death. He is a local of Connecticut, but now his family lives in south west Ohio.

The book "Walking with Jason" demonstrates "Just What the Wilderness Does Better"

Wilderness therapy works as well as it does, explained John Hunt, due to the fact that the wilderness is unfamiliar to most children. He explained that Mother Nature is demanding and preparations have to be made to survive. What's more, the wilderness offers the children time to reflect on their lives. Additionally, trekking and camping in the wild creates the willpower to endure severe weather and unusual hardships. Wilderness therapy helps children that may have been abandoned by parents or caretakers. It helps those that may have been stigmatized by trauma. It helps those that may have dealt with life in a passive way. And it helps those that may have a form of addiction, either as witnesses or actual participants. Wilderness therapy helps teens become self-reliant and form a vision of a life outside their familiar surroundings.

The guest also talked about the formative forces and challenges Jason faced in becoming a very dedicated and skilled wilderness educator. He talked about the influence of Danielle, Jason's elder sister, a wilderness educator in helping Jason with finding a way to combine his love of the outdoors with making a living and about how Jason developed a passion for rock-climbing in his high school and college years. John also described the circumstances surrounding Jason's death during a climbing accident while on the last day of his rock-climbing vacation on October 13, 2001 in Squamish, British Columbia.

Jason was someone who spent long days in mud, rain, cold, heat, and high humidity guiding young people to find and develop their inner strengths and skills. He mastered the hard skills of rock climbing with the soft skills of relating to troubled adolescents. Today the foundation named after him continues the work that he began because what the wilderness does best is take people on an archetypal hero's journey.




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