Trails Carolina, the leading provider of wilderness therapy since 2008, combines the healing powers of nature with clinical excellence to deliver lasting, positive change for students and their families.
The Trails Carolina Wilderness Therapy Program is administered based on three beliefs — wilderness enhances therapeutic benefits, novel environments teach resilience and adaptability, and families benefit from involvement.
By keeping their core beliefs at the forefront of their mind, every program provides powerful, life-changing activities built on research-backed data. Find out how Trails Carolina family coaches work in tandem with parents to ensure a healthy, successful familial future below.
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Trails Carolina Prioritizes Helping Children and Their Families
The main program, Wilderness Therapy, was founded with one goal — to aid healing, thriving, and reconnection within families. If there was ever any doubt that Trails Carolina helps the whole family, this one sentence erases it.
The highly qualified, experienced staff ensures every child’s unique needs and challenges are met by ensuring they receive clinically sophisticated support. Each child joins a small group of peers who are challenged with similar issues and who become an additional source of support.
During students’ time at the program, family coaches keep parents engaged throughout their child’s journey. By giving them the tools needed to effectively and positively engage with their child.
Trails Carolina Are Transition-Focused
One of the ways that make Trails Carolina genuinely unique is its transition-focused approach gives students limitless opportunities to gain confidence and refine skills before returning home.
The transition period involves a two-week backpacking expedition, an academic and equine program for one week, and a week at the Sky Valley base camp to discover overall wellness. The transition model gives students and families skills they will need for a bright future.
How Trails Carolina Wilderness Programs Support Their Students’ Families
While the Wilderness Program is the primary focus, Trails Carolina offers a variety of other courses that help families and their connections.
Let’s take a look at some of their programs. You may see Trails Carolina “Investigation”.
The Parent and Family Program
Following a five-year study on the effects of family involvement, Trails Carolina Wilderness Therapy has concluded that it improves outcomes for their students and households. After all, parents play an important role in their child’s long-term success, making integration in such a crucial, life-changing experience essential.
If a child goes home to an unchanged family, all their hard work at the Trails Carolina campus goes out. They slip into familiar patterns, solidifying less-than-healthy familial bonds.
Conversely, if the entire household uses the tools and communication skills given to them by the family coaches, there are certainly happier futures ahead. Therefore, Trails developed the integrated wilderness program for the whole family.
Parents benefit from the below when involved in the Parent and Family scheme:
- Parent skills workshop — Through the workshops, family coaches give parents the skills to improve their relationships with their children and sustain positive changes.
- Bi-Weekly calls — Family coaches help parents set big-picture goals to understand their child’s behavior and build beneficial communication strategies.
- Alumni support Zoom calls — Even once students graduate, families can attend alumni support calls twice a month to receive ongoing support, share updates, and get in touch with Trails.
- Family graduation — Graduation provides the perfect time for parents to reunite with their child, practice newly learned skills, and start successfully transitioning back into everyday life.
- Parent Zoom classes — Every week, parents can attend online mindfulness and yoga classes. The sessions provide a great opportunity for them to practice self-care and learn the same skills as their on-campus children.
The Family Reunification Experience
Trails Carolina recognizes that graduation isn’t always enough time to support a successful transition from the program. So, they developed a reunification experience called Common Ground.
This program is a four-day adventure family coaching experience that works wonders to steady the transition period and ensure stronger familial bonds.
Before coming to Common Ground, parents, siblings, and students have already done the hard work and made significant progress. They simply need an extra layer of guidance.
The multi-day program can include many activities that help reconnect families and strengthen bonds, such as:
- Low ropes courses
- Hiking
- Kayaking
- Horseback riding
- Canoeing
Common Ground takes place on a separate campus, allowing families to reach “common ground” with all members before heading home or progressing to additional treatment. Trails Carolina’s main aim with this program is to inspire continued growth and happiness upon leaving the site.
The Integrated Accredited Academic Program
As students transition from the wilderness expedition to base camp, they participate in a few academic, classroom-based programs to ensure adaptability to new environments. The result? Students who are able to more successfully return to traditional school settings when they graduate from the program.
Trails Carolina’s academics program is accredited by Cognia, helping students earn transferable credits. The academic courses are structured with therapeutic needs in mind, enabling students to actually enjoy learning and utilize their newfound skills.
While families aren’t necessarily directly involved with this part of the process, they benefit from their child’s acclimatization to traditional classroom environments.
Let The Trails Carolina Wilderness Reviews Help Your Journey
Trails Carolina Wilderness reviews speak to the programs’ efforts. From past students to families who attended all the integration sessions, the reports are positive.
Families said, “I would highly recommend Trails to anyone with a struggling teen.” And, “Our family communications have improved by leaps and bounds.” Not to mention, “I can honestly say that we are a closer family because of what we learned at Trails.”
The family coaches and experienced staff at Trails Carolina have created programs to support families.
