Rab Erskine from Scottish Borders Wilderness Therapy presentation to Spaces 2012

1.  For tens of thousands of years, people had passed on traditional agrarian
(land based) roles from generation to generation.
 Then suddenly, with the advent of the industrial age, the human
conditions changed.
 The conditioned roles and responses that had given stability to society no
longer worked.
 Work roles evolved ... People moved from villages into cities.
 Extended families were scattered.
 The changes were incessant.
 People needed to learn new responses.
 As a result the human condition was changed ...gone was the stability
that traditional roles allowed.
 Now , people battle competitively for new opportunities.
 Some people are left behind, feeling increasingly betrayed as contract
after contract is broken.
 Comfort is no longer assured, hard work does not yield security.
 Stripped of their former roles, people begin to search for the answer to the
basic question of human experience: “who am I?” Robert R. Carkhuff 1993.

2. Fire

11.  I need to be very patient
 I need to accept that you might not get the end
result you want.
 It takes a lot of skill
 It takes a lot of practice
 Sometimes you have to keep going back to the
start
 Sometimes you feel like you have achieved the
next stage, then it all falls apart again
 Others?

12.  In Client-Centred/Experiential Psychotherapy, fragile process is
described as follows:

“Many clients have a fragile style of processing experience that
makes it difficult for them to work in standard psychotherapy
formats.
 Therapists often find the experiences of these clients hard to
understand and feel thwarted in their therapeutic efforts.
 Such clients are often diagnosed as having
borderline, narcissistic, or schizoid personality disorders......
 ...working with these clients is only effective once the therapist is
able to understand the sorts of experiences clients are having”.
Margaret S. Warner, PhD
Chicago Counseling Center
Illinois School of Professional Psychology

15. A Pre-Therapy
orientated,
Wilderness
Therapy

22. In the beginning – being
close enough

29. Taking lots of photographs

30. The ‘Going Places’ project uses the model of an
on-going, interrupted rather than terminated,
therapeutic engagement. i.e. once part of the
project individuals can ask to be re-connected at
any time with the on-going programme of
activities.
(Interruption replaces termination in focused, intermittent Psychotherapy
throughout a life cycle. Cummings,N.A. 2007)

35. Treatment
should be
an active
verb
rather
than a
noun.
R.D. Laing 1986.

50. At the end of the day or the week one feels worn
out, ready for a break or respite. The worn out state is
not physical but mental (fatigue).
However, people so fatigued that they can hardly
function can non the less spring into action when an
emergency arises or when something of particular
interest happens to come along.
William James (1892) Identified two types of attention:
(distinguished in terms of the effort involved in their use)
Involuntary attention (attention that requires no effort at
all. )
Voluntary attention (directed attention) where paying
attention demands a good deal of effort.
As James envisioned it, the way one maintains directed
attention is by inhibiting everything else.

51. Increased specialisation has meant that each
of us spends longer hours pursuing a single
activity,
Such persistence requires discipline, which
depends heavily on directed attention.
The struggle to pay attention in cluttered and
confusing environments turns out to be central
to what is experienced as mental fatigue.
Achieving rest from directed attention fatigue
requires environments and task that make
minimal demands on directed attention.
The effects of the wilderness environment are
powerful (studied) and deeply restorative.

52. Environments that are restorative have a
quality of “being in a whole other world”.
The Experience of nature – A Psychological
Perspective. Rachel Kaplan and Stephen
kaplan. 1989.

58. So:
What
is
Pre-Therapy?

59. The term schizoid refers to an
individual the totality of whose
experience is split in two main ways:
In the first place, there is a rent in his
relation with his world and,
In the second, there is a disruption in his
relation with himself. The Existential-phenomenological
foundations for a science of persons. „The Divided Self. R.D. Laing 1960.

60.  Pre-Therapy is used with clients who cannot
utilise relationships because they are
experiencing a level of „Contact‟ impairment‟.
 „Contact‟ is defined as a necessary condition of
any therapeutic relationship.
 Underpinning all therapeutic interventions is
the assumption that someone is able to be in
Contact.

61.  What are the Contact functions –
 Awareness of the world,
 Awareness of moods, feelings and emotions
 Communication of personal experience and self
to others through words or sentences.

66. On 5th June 1901, 40 patients (with TB )were moved into
two large tents on the grounds of a New York State
Psychiatric hospital.
The physical and mental improvements were so marked
that the camp size was extended to 60.
At the end of the summer most were moved back in.
Physicians noted that many regressed to incontinence and
withdrawal.
Those left outside in tents continued to improve.
By the following summer several formely hopeless
patients showed enough improvement to be discharged.
Taken From: Camping Therapy its uses in psychiatry and rehabilitation. 1974