Are you seeking a transformative solution for your teen’s challenges? Turning Winds offers a unique, long-term residential treatment program for teens that fills the gaps left by conventional options. Our holistic and relational approach, guided by experts like Dr. John Gordon and CEO Owen Baisden, ensures profound and lasting change for your teen.
Turning Winds helps young people learn how to correctly perceive and purposefully engage with the world around them. The program’s holistic approach, relational focus, and emphasis on achieving authentic openness make Turning Winds especially effective at facilitating positive outcomes and long-term change.
“The simple, singular focus of our treatment program is to help each student improve their self-image and their self-confidence and change the behaviors that have been hindering their growth by teaching them to create stable patterns of living through education, process groups, and individualized treatment planning,” says CEO Baisden.
PURPOSEFUL REMOVAL TO FACILITATE HEALING
Sometimes parents have concerns about sending their child to a remote treatment campus in a place such as Troy, Montana, far away from the family home. It’s important to take note that with Turning Winds the geographical location is part of the program.
Most of our teenage clients heal more thoroughly when removed from what social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has criticized as a harmful “phone-based childhood” that is “making young people sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood.”
“Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board,” Dr. Haidt recently warned in The Atlantic. “Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity—all were affected.” In his 2022 book Digital Madness, psychologist Nicholas Kardaras even described the devastating impact of permanent internet access as “digital heroin.”
The Turning Winds program counteracts this unhealthy trend by removing smartphones, video games, and even television time to refocus attention on building crucial human, face-to-face relationships that all too often have been completely compromised.
As a healthy alternative to the infamous “doomscrolling” and nefarious cyber-bullying, Turning Winds offers plenty of therapeutic outdoor activities: Backcountry hiking, backpacking, mountain bike riding, white water rafting, fishing, snowshoeing, skiing/snowboarding, cross-country skiing, and many other activities. With a campus situated in the remote northern woods of Montana, Turning Winds offers young people purposeful remove to discover the self-agency essential to leading a purposeful life.
“We use the outdoors to combine adventure therapy, experiential education, and psycho-educational therapy,” says Turning Winds’ clinical director Jared Sartell, LCSW. “Experiential learning is based on the belief that lasting change occurs when people are placed outside familiar situations of comfort and immersed in new and unique circumstances. In this way, students are participants rather than spectators and learn to appreciate the power of the great outdoors on our beautiful school campus.”
THRIVING IN A POSITIVE ENVIRONMENT
No distractions, capable teachers to keep up with school during treatment, and positive reinforcement—it’s the kind of atmosphere in which most students excel. “We routinely praise our young people,” says science teacher Cathy Miller. “We make sure we let them know when they did really well. Or even compared to what they did before—usually there’s a vast improvement.”
But Cathy Miller also factors in that her students are at Turning Winds to heal mentally. “The most important thing to me for these young people is the therapeutic side of things. They’re not here because we have the most amazing, private academic school in Montana. They’re here because they need therapeutic help. So, I’m very flexible with them interweaving some therapeutic activity into our day.”
At Turning Winds, it’s the people who make the difference—teachers, therapists, and students. Over the course of more than twelve years, we’ve built a team of some of the world’s finest academic and therapeutic professionals, all of whom share the same goal: to help teens re-engage meaningfully with their lives, families, and their futures.
Is your teen struggling with anxiety, isolation, or unhealthy tech habits? Contact us online for more information, or call us at 800-845-1380. If your call isn’t answered personally, one of us will get back to you as soon as possible.
