Health and Education

Thank you for your interest in Blue Ridge Therapeutic Wilderness. We are a licensed treatment program that uses the wilderness setting to provide a clinically-focused intervention, teaching clients accountability, communication skills and healthy emotional and behavioral habits. BRTW’s main office is in Clayton, GA, in the southern Appalachian Mountains and borders the Chattahoochee and Nantahala National Forests. Clayton is conveniently located between Atlanta, GA, and Asheville, NC. We are currently looking to fill the position(s) of Field Instructor. Qualified individuals will be asked to go on a week-long training. Our next training is September 27th to October 3rd. Download Blue Ridge Therapeutic Wilderness Field Instructor Application Instructors are pivotal to the success of BRTW.  Field instructors work an 8-day on, 6-day off schedule.  For the entire 8 days, instructors hike and camp with clients in the National Forest.  The program serves youth “in...

I discovered this incredible work by chance while searching through a listing of outdoor jobs on an online database in the summer of 2011. As a recent college graduate, I was neck deep in the angst of entering the job force. I had never heard of Wilderness Therapy before, and honestly, I remember feeling unsure if I wanted to do it or not. I pictured a boot camp where students just cried all day and yelled at each other as field instructors ran around saying things like, “take accountability for your actions!” or, “let the tears flow!” Nonetheless, something about it captivated my imagination. So I applied for a job as a Field Instructor and read every book about it I could get my hands on. As I read  Shouting At The Sky , a book describing a writer’s personal wilderness therapy experience, I started to understand that this wasn’t like anything else I had ever heard of; it sounded compassionate, powerful, raw, even sacred. Two months later I was asked to join a training gro...

As the  Family Support Therapist at Blue Ridge , I work with the parents of our students in the field. My role is to offer space for families to experience their own process, which often parallels the student process but is distinctly different for obvious reasons. Teens are in the woods, with both the discomfort that it brings and the luxury of not having to attend to their “normal” lives.  They get to be completely present with their feelings, wrapped up in 24/7 support. On the flip side, parents are trying to manage day to day life, kids, finances, responsibilities, etc. AND participate in this incredibly intense emotional experience. Parents have often been in crisis mode with their kids for months or years leading up to the wilderness experience and are quite simply exhausted. This sets the stage for discussion of self-care…before we can do meaningful work on family dynamics, parents must restore some semblance of their own emotional balance and stability. This is ...

Now that you know the basics about  mindfulness , let’s dive in a little bit more… The benefits of mindfulness So why practice mindfulness?  As we take time to be present to our experiences, and practice focusing on the present, we actually rewire our brains by creating new neural networks.  What are neural networks, you ask? When we learn behavior (how to swim, how to write the alphabet, how to drive a car) we create a neural network in the brain--neural networks, essentially, are neurons collecting signals from others and this creates an electric activity that creates connective branches in the brain. The more we repeat this behavior, the stronger the neural network becomes, and we establish this network as an “expert”—meaning that it is fully learned behavior (we don’t have to relearn it).  Students hiking through the wilderness is a beautiful metaphor for this process.  Imagine a single-track trail in the woods.  The more this single-track is u...

“ It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men’s hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air, that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit ” —Robert Louis Stevenson   The majority of teenagers that come to wilderness therapy enter the woods in a state of almost chronic stress and exhaustion. They are over-aroused and over-stressed. Many are carrying a  laundry list of diagnoses , specifically anxiety-related disorders, that are treated through a complex diet of psychotropic medications. When you hear their stories and get a sense of their lifestyle choices, you realize that many kids are constantly stimulated and stressed: by electronics, caffeine, drugs, social media, academic pressures, parental demands and the ever-mystifying challenge of growing up into adulthood. On a physiological level, these stressors trigger their sympathetic nervous systems, which governs fight-or-flight behavio...