Adventure Group Psychotherapy

An Experiential Approach to Treatment

Tony G. Alvarez, Gary Stauffer, D. Maurie Lung, Kim Sacksteder, Bobbi Beale, Anita R. Tucker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000228762
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

Adventure Group Psychotherapy: An Experiential Approach to Treatment explores what is necessary for an experiential therapy group to function effectively, and the practical skills needed to inspire success.

The authors describe how to use activities in a manner that produces the greatest opportunity for clients to reach their goals. Issues such as how to actively assess client functioning in the group, how to select the appropriate activity, how to shape an effective environment, and how to help clients process their experience are a few of the aspects examined to help clients move toward their goals. The practical skills the authors describe enable readers to immediately learn and apply their practice with groups.

This book will be an important tool in any group therapy class, in practice settings to train practitioners, and for any clinician trying to expand their group work capabilities.

1An Introduction

The introduction to this book begins with a story:

In the fall of 1995, after spending her summer attending a National Outdoor Leadership School 28-day backpacking course in the Pacific Northwest, one of the authors began her first year at the University of Michigan in her master’s in social work program. Although she had always loved the outdoors and experiential learning, at that point in her life, she had never thought of a career that would include them. One of her first classes at Michigan was called “Social Work in the Schools,” as she had really wanted to work with youth specifically in a school setting. About three weeks into the course, the professor of the course had all of the students go outside and began to present the activity for the day. In front of the graduate students he had laid a variety of different common items: two milk crates, several wooden 2×4s, a couple of chairs, and several mats from his car. At this point, the author remembers being completely confused but intrigued. The professor proceeded to explain to the class:

Working in the schools can be both a challenging and fulfilling path for a career. In our work in the schools we will need to use a variety of resources and supports to help us on our journey [he points to the objects on the ground he had laid out]. Based on your understanding of social work in the schools, what things do you [the class] think will be needed to do that work?

He proceeded to ask the class members to name the types of supports and resources they felt they would need to be successful; these responses were then written on masking tape and taped on the objects on the ground. Next he laid out two ropes in a line about 30–40 feet apart and explained that the class’s task was to move the entire group from behind the first rope across to the second rope without touching the ground, using only the resources they had (the objects). The class was told that they needed to keep in contact at all times with these objects and if any of the students lost contact with any of the resources, they would no longer have access to them (he literally would take them away). Finally, he said, “Any questions?”

That student was Anita Tucker, that classic adventure activity was “Stepping Stones” (Rohnke & Butler, 1995), and that professor happened to be Tony Alvarez. In that one day, in that one class over 25 years ago, Anita was introduced to adventure group psychotherapy (the focus of this book), or what we refer to as “adventure therapy.” All of the authors have different stories on how we landed where we are in adventure therapy, but all of our stories are connected in our use of the Facilitated Wave Model. We are drawn to this model developed over 30 years by Tony Alvarez and Gary Stauffer due to its ability to take a complicated and nuanced intervention like adventure therapy and frame it in a way that others can learn and do it. In fact, over the years through either being taught by Tony or Gary, or having attended a training or workshop given by them, hundreds of practitioners have been exposed to their model of adventure therapy facilitation and brought it back with them to their communities of clients, staff, and/or students. We knew it was time to formally share this model beyond our collective communities.

We believe this model of adventure group psychotherapy is unique due to how it is anchored around the importance of the environment. We also recognize that the impacts of trauma, oppression, and other experiences within our clients’ environments must be given as much attention as other factors. Each person is significantly influenced by their environment and the practitioner’s role is to build and attend to the therapeutic environment in order to provide an optimal space for healing. This is a simple concept, but a complicated task.

For many reasons, this book is personal, and its publication is deeply important. We know that a significant percentage of mental health practitioners are using experiential and adventure-based group techniques but are lacking in access to training and education (Tucker & Norton, 2013). The key to the effective use of experiential and adventure-based group work is the role of the practitioner in the selection and processing of the activities in which clients engage, as well as the practitioner’s ability to maintain the physical and emotional safety of participants (Gass et al., 2012). These skills must be developed through effective training.

Each of the authors has been highly involved in training practitioners on how to facilitate adventure therapy groups; however a significant limitation to our ability to train others is the absence of a book that comprehensively addresses facilitation of experiential and adventure activities for use in therapy. Nothing has been published since Exploring Islands of Healing (Schoel & Maizell, 2002) specifically focused on how to use adventure and experiential activities with groups in therapeutic settings. Hence, the need for this book is crucial.

This book is built upon the success of The Power of One: Using Adventure and Experiential Activities Within One on One Counseling Sessions (Lung et al., 2008) and The Power of Family: An Experiential Approach to Family Treatment (Lung et al., 2015). Different than these previous ones, this book focuses instead solely on group practice using the Facilitated Wave Model as a guide. This book is not an “activity book.” Instead, it lays out a model to help practitioners understand how to choose and facilitate effective activities for diverse populations and clinical needs. It was written due to our own desire to have a textbook that we could use with the classes we teach, the new practitioners we mentor, and the staff or students we supervise. Each of us has a close relationship not only to each other, but to the field of adventure therapy. We are clinical practitioners who also see ourselves as teachers, mentors, and most importantly, stewards of adventure therapy. In these roles, we believe that the Facilitated Wave Model provides a clearly delineated way to explain the different processes associated with facilitating an adventure psychotherapy group.

The “Wave” term is not new in the field of adventure education and adventure therapy. Project Adventure (PA), an organization dedicated to the expansion of adventure-based counseling, introduced the concept of the adventure wave model in PA’s custom workshops as well as in one of the founding books on adventure therapy, Islands of Healing, in 1988 (Schoel et al., 1988), and revisited it in Schoel and Maizell (2002). The PA wave describes the facilitator’s role during an activity in three steps: briefing or presenting the activity, actually leading participants through the experience, and finally, debriefing what happens with participants (Schoel & Maizell, 2002; Schoel et al., 1988).

While our model is built upon this foundation, we believe that effective facilitation is broader than leading the actual event or activity. We think effective facilitation must focus on the natural cycle of the whole life experience. Viewing life experience as a process involves understanding that there is much more to an experience than just the outward event—more than can be defined by the observable actions that take place. Our hope in the chapters that follow is to build a connection between the natural process of life experience we have observed and the role the facilitator plays in leading experiential work. This is built on the belief that effective facilitation results from working intentionally to attend holistically to all aspects of life experience.

Similar to life, which does not always flow in a linear fashion, it is important to understand the interrelated nature of all of the tasks described throughout these chapters. This book introduces the Facilitated Wave Model in a chronological order of steps practitioners engage in when doing group therapy. Yes, just like in real life and in real groups, experiences do not always flow in a linear fashion and we are often called upon to engage in a variety of skills at any one moment.

Ultimately, our Facilitated Wave Model is meant to guide practitioners in assessing participants, planning and choosing activities, shaping the ongoing environment of an experience, and guiding that experience to meet the goals of the participants. This book is intended to help practitioners who wish to integrate adventure-based practices or adventure therapy within their work with clients, both young and old. We specifically will focus on using adventure practices in group therapy; however, since good facilitation adapts to the unique needs of any group, we believe this model can be used with a variety of groups with a variety of goals, therapeutic or not. It is our hope that students who wish to enter the field of adventure therapy, seasoned adventure therapy practitioners, as well as established mental health therapists unfamiliar to adventure therapy who want to begin to integrate these methods, will all find this book a useful resource for their work.

References

Gass, M. A., Gillis, H. L., & Russell, K. C. (2012). Adventure therapy: Theory, research, and practice. Routledge.

Lung, D. M., Stauffer, G., & Alvarez, T. (2008). The power of one: Using adventure and experiential activities within one on one counseling sessions. Wood ‘N’ Barnes Publishing.

Lung, D. M., Stauffer, G., Alvarez, T., & Conway, J. (2015). The power of family: An experiential approach to family treatment. Wood ‘N’ Barnes Publishing.

Rohnke, K., & Butler, S. (1995). Quicksilver: Adventure games, initiative problems, trust activities and a guide to effective leadership. Kendall Hunt Publishing.

Schoel, J., & Maizell, R. S. (2002). Exploring islands of healing: New perspectives on adventure based counseling. Project Adventure.

Schoel, J., Prouty, D., & Radcliffe, P. (1988). Islands of healing: A guide to adventure based counseling. Project Adventure.

Tucker, A. R., & Norton, C. L. (2013). The use of adventure therapy techniques by clinical social workers: Implications for practice and training. Clinical Social Work Journal, 41(4), 333–343. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10615-012-0411-4

2Foundations in Adventure Group Psychotherapy

Adventure Group Psychotherapy: Roots in Experiential Education

Adventure group psychotherapy, also referred to as adventure therapy, has a variety of roots from which it evolved, but is most heavily influenced by the tenets of experiential education. Experiential education focuses on how individuals learn best by doing and reflecting on the experience. John Dewey (1916), one of the founders of the concept of experiential education, said, “Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and if the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results” (p. 154). Dewey was an educator and philosopher during the Progressive Movement in the early 20th century. He and his colleagues believed that it was important to educate the whole person, that individuals learn best by being actively involved in the learning, especially when the learning had meaning for them, and when they had choice in their learning (Dewey, 1916). Put simply, it is through action and engagement in meaningful experiences, and reflecting on the impact of those experiences, that learning occurs.

The experiential learning cycle has been described and adapted by many different experiential educators, facilitators, as well as adventure therapy professionals, as an explanation of how people learn from experience. It is based primarily on Kolb’s (1984) model of experiential learning, in which individuals have a “Concrete Experience,” then they engage in “Reflective Observation” by reviewing and reflecting on what happened during the experience. Next, they engage in “Abstract Conceptualization,” where they give meaning to the experience and learning gained from the experience. Finally, they apply that new learning in the final phase of “Active Experimentation.” Simple questions that experiential educators may ask to facilitate the experiential learning cycle are:

•What? What happened during the experience?

•So what? How might what happened be important?

•Now what? What is done with this new information? How does that guide the next experience (Borton, 1970; Rohnke, 1989)?

In addition, experiential education is considered “holistic, in the sense that it addresses students in their entirety—as thinking, feeling, physical, emotional, spiritual and social beings” (Carver, 1996, p. 9). According to Carver (1996), at the center of experiential education is its ability to engage students’ sense of agency or power over their lives; create a shared experience in which students gain a sense of belonging; and help students to gain skills and knowledge that improve their competency. As most current practitioners would agree, this has been a long-standing and highly effective strategy, utilized prior to the general understanding of the impact of trauma and the subsequent tidal wave of neuroscience studies that underpin the importance of experience. Current research on the brain and learning aligns with the way in which adventure therapy is facilitated as well as its underlying tenets, including its relational and multisensorial nature, regulating activities, and reflective processes (Allan et al., 2012).

Adventure Therapy: What? So What? Now What?

What is Adventure Therapy?

While adventure therapy is rooted in experiential education, it is different in that it is a clinical field of mental health practice. It is not education; it is not recreation; and, although both education and recreation can have therapeutic effects that contribute to growth, they are not a form of clinical practice. Adventure therapy is considered clinical treatment within the behavioral health field as characterized by problem identification, specific targeted outcomes, use of specific interventions, foundational body of theoretical knowledge, and administration by clinically trained professionals (Williams, 2004).

Over the years there have been various definitions of adventure therapy, but the authors believe the best definition is provided by Gass et al. (2012): “Adventure therapy is the prescriptive use of adventure experiences provided by mental health professionals, often conducted in natural settings, that kinesthetically engage clients on cognitive, affective and behavioral levels” (p. 1). While adventure therapy is used for individual and family treatment, it is most frequently utilized as a group-based intervention (Tucker, 2009; Tucker et al., 2016), in which the shared experience of group memb...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 An Introduction
• 2 Foundations in Adventure Group Psychotherapy
• 3 Building Blocks of Adventure Group Psychotherapy: Moving Beyond Group Treatment Foundations with Experience
• 4 Overview of the Facilitated Wave
• 5 Guiding the Learning
• 6 Assessment
• 7 Matching
• 8 Shaping the Environment
• 9 Facilitating the Experience
• 10 Evaluating the Process
• 11 Concluding Invitation
• Appendix 3.1 Ethical Guidelines for the Therapeutic Adventure Professional
• Appendix 4.1 The Facilitated Wave: Full Model Overview
• Appendix 4.2 Action into Practice
• Appendix 6.1 The Four Corners Assessment Tool
• Appendix 7.1 Customizing Activities for Individuals on the Autism Spectrum
• Appendix 10.1 Evaluating the Experiential Process and Formal Evaluation
• Appendix 10.2 Adventure Therapy Experience Scale
• Appendix 10.3 Teamwork and Leadership Behavior Observation Checklist
• Appendix 10.4 Group Self-Evaluation Survey
• Index