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Adventure Therapy: The Wilderness as a Healing Place

The very basic core of a mans living spirit is his passion for adventure.
Christopher McCandless said this quote in one of his journal entries while making his
expedition towards Alaska. All of us are born with a sense of adventure and curiosity
within us. As a baby, the world is a foreign and unknown place to us, but as we grow
older we explore the places around us to find our niche, or where we belong. We
find ourselves through the adventure of life. Adventure can be utilized as a tool for a
multitude of things like: knowledge, recovering, spiritual healing, or it can just
provide a sense of peace. A new form of therapy has risen throughout the 21st
century know as, Adventure Therapy. Being in the outdoors has been proven to
actually heal. Most people who take part in Adventure Therapy are recovering drug
addicts, adolescents with behavioral problems, or people struggling with mental
disorders. But, anyone can find benefits from Adventure Therapy even if they are
not struggling with anything at all. Adventure and the wilderness can provide a
sense of balance that the world we live in today could never even fathom.

Michael A. Gass, Ph.D. is Chair of the Department of Kinesiology and CoCoordinator of the Outdoor Education Program at the University of New Hampshire.
Gass is one of the main figures who has pushed for the experimental therapy,
Adventure Therapy, to become mainstream in todays society. His work in
Adventure Therapy has enabled him to write for the past 10 years on the

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prescriptive use of adventure experiences to produce lasting functional change.
Gass wrote an informational book called, Adventure Therapy: Therapeutic
Applications of Adventure Programming. The book contain six sections: The
overview and theory of Adventure Therapy, Applications of adventure Therapy,
Programming of Adventure Therapy experiences, Processing of Adventure Therapy
experiences, Research of Adventure Therapy programs, and the future of Adventure
Therapy. These sections help the reader have a full and well-rounded sense about
what Adventure Therapy is as a whole. I am going to use section 3 of Gass book to
explain how and what effects that the wilderness can have on the human soul.

John Muir is considered to be the founding father of Adventure Therapy

(even though he had no idea he was). Muir was one of the first people to experience
the benefits of the wilderness and adventure therapy and documenting it, without
knowing what adventure therapy even was. Muir studied botany and geology at the
University of Wisconsin. He walked all the way from Indiana to Florida, creating
botanical sketches of the land around him. From there he sailed to California and
walked from San Francisco to Nevada, the range of light that would change his life
Muir felt a spiritual connection to nature. He believed that man-kind is part of an
interconnected natural world, and that God was revealed to him through nature.
Muir preached his gospel of nature by writing articles for leading magazines that
made him internationally famous. Muirs love of the wild gave his writings a spiritual

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quality. His readers were inspired and often moved to action by the enthusiasm of
Muirs own unbounded love for nature. When Muir spoke about the wilderness he
said things like, cares will drop off like autumn leaves and in the great fresh,
unblighted, unredeemed wilderness people will find hope. When Muirs work took
too much of a toll on him, he took would seek restoration in the wild. He bid others
to do the same.
Nearly a century has passed since Muir, but many people have followed and
are still following his advice. Many people have sought out the healing effects of the
wilderness that Muir wrote about. The healing that Muir referred to has become
institutionalized, which has ultimately lead to the organized therapy, Adventure
Therapy.
What is Adventure Therapy?
Adventure Therapy is an alternative sense of healing that uses nature to
connect us to our outside surroundings. The goals of Adventure Therapy is to offer
fun, challenging yourself, and to create experiences where reflection, selfawareness and discovery can occur. Many Adventure Therapy programs offer their
services to anyone, but the most common type who seek out this therapy are
adolescents. In these program people are engaged in educational lesson, as well as
hands-on experiences. Some examples of wilderness experiences could be: rock
climbing, mountain biking, yoga, kayaking, camping, and backpacking. The main
goal of Adventure Therapy is to produce a positive change in a persons mental and
physical health.
How does wilderness contribute to health?

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Wilderness and the outdoors helps building a strong foundation to life and
gives structure/restoration where it is needed. Many non-adventure therapy
programs use the outdoors as a therapeutic tactic. What people want to know is,
how the wilderness can contribute to the improvement of health (mental/physical)?
To explain this, Gass starts by defining the word healing. According to Gass, he
defines it as, to heal is to make sound or whole; it is to cause an undesirable
condition to be overcome; to make a person spiritually whole; or to restore to
original integrity. Healing involves an improvement of the condition of our
mind/body. We, as people, suffer, especially in todays world. There is terrorism,
racism, and so much hatred. We never given any time to heal from one traumatic
event before the next one occurs. We live our life with half-opened wounds and
think that it is completely normal to never feel whole. Adventure Therapy gives a
voice to that internal healing that we all desire. When we speak of healing here, we
are not referring to its usual meaning as applied to our physical selves but to a
process involving physical, emotional, and even spiritual dimension. Healing usually
involves all of these dimensions simultaneously. The wilderness engages the whole
person and thus may be an environment ideally suited to the holistic healing that
John Muir experienced and advocated to his fellows.
Psychological benefits of wilderness
Sometimes in life, when youre put into a stressful situation or just need a
minute, you walk outside. You breathe in the fresh air, and give yourself a minute
to think. This is only scratching the surface of what the outside world has to offer
your mental state of well-being. Some people question if there is any actual
evidence of psychological healing. Gass answers this with, There is, it turns out,

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but not as much evidence as we believers in the powers of wilderness experience
would like.
A trial conducted by four psychologist tested the effects that adventure
therapy has on mental illnesses, addiction, etc. This article is another trial
conducted by four psychologist testing the effect that adventure therapy has on
mental illnesses, addiction, etc. They explore the trends and differences in primary
diagnosis and over prevalence of disorders according to gender and age of the
patients (192 young adults and 737 adolescents). They conducted a secondary
analysis of medical records at found Nature Wilderness Program locations. Two of
the programs were located in Utah, one in Georgia, and one in Oregon. The
programs incorporated things like: primitive living, ceremony and metaphor, the
group process, and task accomplishment to build self-efficacy. They include a strong
clinical emphasis into the wilderness setting that uses staff as a part of the
treatment team instead just outdoor guides. The patient leaves the comfort of home
and is immersed in a new culture, where therapists, staff, and the group provide
ample opportunities for self-reflection and learning opportunities. At the end of the
program the patients were tested to see if their diagnosis had changed. The
psychologists did have enough evidence to prove that Adventure Therapy did help
reduce the effects that the participants were struggling with, but could not prove
that they were completely healed or cured.
in the wilderness experience people experience an increase in selfconfidence and a feeling of tranquility. They come to feel that they can deal with
whatever challenges the environment may offer them. This is a profoundly
satisfying and even surprising experience for people who have been struggling with

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their normal world...these are benefits that are in part attributable to the
realization that one cannot control the wilderness environment.
Wilderness enhances self-worth
Another way that wilderness can contribute to healing is by enhancing ones
self-worth. Many people struggle with two things in particular on a daily basis:
anomie and alienation. Our daily lives are consumed with discontinuity, which leads
to suffering from anomie. It makes us feel separated from everything around us.
And the uncertainty of that all can lead to alienation. People suffering from this
desire things like stability, security, and certainty. The certain activities that
Adventure Therapy provide like: canoeing, camping, hiking, skiing, fire-making, can
provide ways for people who seek control of their life and to break out of their
anomie or alienation. These activities allow people to enjoy a freedom and
creativity that disrupt their emotional treadmill with new possibilities for them.

Wilderness and physical fitness

Another way that in which wilderness

may

contribute to healing is by the physical demands that it makes upon people who
travel there. While participating in adventure therapy do entail physical strains on

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the body. The person endures experiences like hiking cross-country with no trail or
rough terrains. The ultimate wilderness adventure, like climbing a mountain or
rafting a wild and rough river, can demand considerable physical stamina and skill.
A fit-body can very much so effects a persons self-image, in a positive life, which
leads to that extra boost of confidence. An increase in confidence open new
possibilities of learning and growth within a person. When a person gains control
over his/her body, as must be done in wilderness travel, there may be a
corresponding gain in control in other areas. Perhaps there is also a metaphorical
dimension. Traveling to a wilderness objective requires taking one step at a time,
putting one foot in front of the other, pacing oneself. Physical fitness is an outlet
for self-expression, as well internal aggression.
We can argue that the wilderness has great potential to contribute to
improvements in physical well-being. It is known that it cannot cure an illness, but
it can place demands on us that force us to call upon physical and emotional
potential often unrealized. Adventure Therapy allows us to release everything that
we have pent-up inside of us in a healthy and positive way.

Works Cited
Hoag, Mathew J. "Dissecting the Wilderness Therapy
Client: Examining Clinical Trends, Findings, and

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Patterns." Journal of Experimental Education (20214):

n. pag. Web. 30 Oct. 2015.
"John Muir (18381914)." PBS. PBS, 2009. Web. 30
Oct. 2015.
"Why BlueFire Wilderness Therapy Works." Bluefire.
N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Oct. 2015.