Family Services
Family Services provides comprehensive supports for families immersed in Deschutes Wilderness Therapy, Deschutes Young Adults, as well as independent families.
Comprehensive Supports Include:
- Family, couples, and individual intensives based on trauma-responsive relational care
- Parent coaching, family coaching, and multifamily regional skill-building workshops
For our immersive families, comprehensive support includes:
- In person family therapy visits
- In person family intensives
- Virtual parent coaching
Family involvement is an essential element of our programming here at Deschutes Wilderness Therapy. Family Services uses a family systems and attachment focused approach. While your child is in the field with our treatment team engaged in their therapeutic journey, Family Services supports your family in what is referred to as the “parallel process.” Through this process, you will be working on your own insight and skill development. Family dynamics and patterns will be explored, as well as how families communicate, manage conflict, establish boundaries and express their identities. Parent and caregiver involvement and growth and development are integral to overall success in our program and in what follows post-transition.
Intensives
Intensives are customized to meet your individual and family's specific needs. Your family deserves an experience as unique as you are.
Intensives generally take place over 3-5 days.
Family Services works with families, couples, and individuals looking to:
- deepen relationship
- improve communication
- find new ways of connecting with each other
- establish new healthy boundaries
- learn how to be present
- regulate and engage with each other effectively
- strengthen bonds
Family Services works effectively with those who are committed, motivated and simply need to learn and practice implementing new tools and patterns.
Families
- Family size of 2-6 participants *Note: can accommodate larger family if needed
- Ages 10+
- All races, religions, genders, LGBTQIA+
- Families who have a history of relationship challenges, attachment disruption, acute trauma, grief/ loss, stuck in unhealthy patterns, adoption, large changes in the family system or families with political or spiritual disagreements.
Couples
- All races, religions, genders, LGBTQIA+
- Ages 18+
- Couples with a history of relationship challenges, communication struggles, attachment disruption, acute trauma, grief/ loss, stuck in unhealthy patterns, couples with political or spiritual disagreements.
Individuals
- All races, religions, genders, LGBTQIA+
- Ages 18- 99yo
- Individuals who want to deep dive into their internal work without the hour constraint of outpatient therapy. Individuals who are looking to uproot and process through trauma, address attachment wounds, understand their unhealthy patterns and how to implement change. Individuals who have a history of anxiety, depression, developmental trauma, acute trauma or trying to manage the challenges of life.
Parent Coaching
The student is the focal point on the calls with the therapist, even when you are doing the family work. “What is the therapeutic work they are doing, and what work do I need to do to work better for them.”
Parent coaching is an essential part of the process of addressing needed changes in the family system.
While parent coaching centers on the student, the focus is on how you parent. Coaching allows parents to show up with their own experiences in the their journey. Parent coaching will touch on your family of origin, or put another way, how you were raised and how your upbringing plays a part in your parenting style today.
Parent coaching emphasizes doing your therapeutic work as part of the parallel process. An excellent analogy is that we are not just focusing on repairing one part of the clock but fixing the whole clock because we want to work on the entire family system.
The main distinction between the weekly call with your child's primary therapist and parent coaching is that the primary therapist call is about what you need to do to best support your child. The coaching is how you step into your past and your own work so that you can start to show up differently for your child and the primary therapist to engage in more healthy communication.
All parent coaches are licensed therapists, which aligns with our trauma and attachment-based therapeutic model. It goes beyond just learning "skills "and steps into helping you regulate and guiding you in your growth and healing.
Therapeutic Family Visit
Approximately halfway through a student's process in the immersive wilderness experience, the team facilitates a family therapy day.
Day One - Family Workshop
A family therapist will conduct a five-hour family workshop. Depending on enrollments, this could be with multiple families (between two-four). During the workshop, you will:
Learn about how to regulate and understand CASA (Commitment, Attunement, Security, Acceptance) more effectively. You will have the opportunity to practice some things they will experience the next day in the field with your child.
Learn, and practice with other families. You will connect with other families at the workshop and feel less alone in this experience. Families are encouraged to stay connected after their time here at Deschutes, and many form strong bonds as they embark on this visit together.
Day two - Family therapy day in the field (two parts)
Part one: You will engage in an experiential activity with your child facilitated by a field instructor and supported by a family therapist. There will be both multifamily and single-family experiential activities. The multifamily activity could be, for example, an intro circle, where everyone meets and connects and shares something about themselves. Another example is the blindfolded hike, where parents are blindfolded, and your child leads you into the intro circle.
The experiential activity could include primitive skills such as shelter building or fire building, where the family works together and steps into communication and regulation as challenges surface.
Part two: You will have a two-hour session with your child's primary therapist. A special closing ceremony follows this, and you then leave the field and head back to the office.
Family Services Therapeutic Approach/Relational Approach (The How)
The CASA Model is integral in stepping into the relationship with others and self. Everything Family Services does can be cradled into the framework of CASA.
- Commitment- Showing up for others or yourself. How can you be present in the family, with your partner or with yourself?
- Acceptance- Of the person, not the behavior. Where do you struggle to accept a person, how do you step into acceptance when values differ?
- Security- Creating healthy boundaries, establishing personal boundaries and how to uphold them to create safety in self and in relationships.
- Attunement- Being with self, being with loved ones, feeling with your loved one without fixing or changing
When we can step into these actions, we can learn how to co-regulate. When we can be co-regulated with, we feel seen, heard, understood, worthy- building self-esteem. When we build self-worth/ self-esteem we open the opportunity for self-regulation.
When we engage in family, couple or individual work within Family Services, we are working towards creating secure bonds.
Admissions
To find out more about Family Services and for admissions assistance, please email admissions@DWTBend.com or call 866.282.3024