Almost all parents have an experience or a Hollywood moment when their children come into their lives. As parents, we have a vision in which we project anticipated future shared experiences with our children. We envision those trembling first steps as our child propels himself the few inches unaided between the outstretched hands of the parent.
We anticipate the interests and playful activities our child will engage in. Like learning how to ride a bicycle, a tricycle, a skateboard, or other conveyances. We’re practicing with our children in the park or the backyard as they develop rudimentary sports or athletic skills. Then attending those first competitions, frantically yelling instructions and encouragement from the sideline. There is the anticipation of the first school experiences, preparing for homework sessions with our child at the kitchen table, attending parent day at school, or sitting in the audience as our child recites the poem they wrote, or presents the musical selection they have practiced and prepared.
Your Role In Your Child’s Life
There tends to be a thoughtful pondering about the kinds of things that will be interesting to our child. What would they like to do? What can we teach them? How can we best engage them in a world that they may find exciting? Perhaps there are visions of our children as they are maturing into adolescence. Those who are progressing through school and who are developing the skill sets they initiated at a young age into a particular competency in the classroom, in the athletic realm, and those forums would suggest a strong march towards mastery of young adulthood.
Typically, without exception, during these early moments of anxious anticipation, no parent expects that at some point in their child’s development, they will realize that as parents they have little to no influence in their child’s life. There is no expectation that the small infant that is wrapped so cozily in our arms at present will at some point find themselves out of control and be living a life that is completely fueled by dependencies and deception. No parent expects to have a child who will ultimately require some form of intervention for addiction which includes an actual separation from the immediate family residence.
What To Do When Your Child Has An Addiction
No parent anticipates the distress, worry, and confusion that dominate life when a child has become mired in addiction, dependency, and avoidance. Desperate parents ruminate concerning those questions of how life became so far removed from that early vision. How did it get to be like this? When and how did I lose my position as a parent in my child’s life and become nothing more than a droning object with less significance than the stimulation being mainlined into my child’s brain through their earbuds?
As a parent, am I merely resigned to abandoning that vision and embracing the contemptuous power struggle that has become the pervasive influence within the relationship with my child? Is there a reset mechanism that will return us to a neutral setting where the possibility of resuming the original vision can even be plausible? And as a parent, how do I determine the appropriateness of any one of the incredible array of interventions that appear to be available claiming to be that sought-after reset button for my child? Upon initial inspection, most addiction programs, particularly those that are administered in the out-of-doors, appear to be fundamentally similar.
The day-to-day activities of the students involved with outdoor behavioral health interventions do not vary much given that everything the student does will be at a relatively primitive level. This is an inherent disruption in the student’s routine which will have a significant impact. Nevertheless, unless the student’s ability to command the delivery of all of his or her dependencies is significantly disrupted, any treatment intervention will have little to no long-term effect.
Addiction Treatment at Star Guides Treatment Center
Overall, treatment environments differ solely in their capacity to disrupt the dynamic that creates and sustains the child’s dependencies as well as in the ability to reveal to the student the person they have become. Unless the treatment regimen is organized at every level around the concept of disruption, the student will progress through the experience gaining knowledge concerning the wilderness environment and his or her capacity to adapt to that environment. The dynamic between child and parent remains the same. The components of a program exist primarily to provide a consistent structure and environment in which the student is revealed.
Suppose the activities and elements of the program obfuscate who the child has become. In that case, the parents will continue to be unsettled as to their position in the relationship with their child as well as struggle to gain an accurate assessment concerning their child’s ability to engage in life without reliance upon dependencies. While enrolled in Star Guides, the things that students do daily are quite straightforward and will be directly linked to immediate tasks of welfare and comfort. There are new skills to be acquired and many opportunities to enhance learning on an experiential level.
Yes, there are many things for your child to do while enrolled in the Star Guides experience, but the most important of those tasks will be to recognize themselves as an individual whose competencies extend beyond their capacity to command various dependencies and to re-establish their parents as the parents in the relationship. When this happens, the original vision will once again have a fighting chance.