Parents who send their kids to Turning Winds usually have been through a lot. James and Amy Turner are no exceptions. Their son Jim Jr. is currently at Turning Winds and doing much better. Twelve months ago, it was a different picture.
“It began about a year ago,” remembers Amy. “We thought we ran a pretty tight ship but we were clueless. He was sneaking out with us not knowing and one day, he ran away. He was on the five o’clock news. He was missing for four days. And that’s when things just started snowballing.”
After he was found, Jim Jr. was admitted to a psychiatric hospital and after his discharge entered a 30-day residential program. While he was in treatment, his parents moved to a different location but it didn’t make a difference. “His troubles just followed, they came with us,” remembers his mother.
Police officers showed up at the house and Jim Jr. refused to go to school. His parents discovered that he was using drugs. “He ended up in another mental hospital,” says Amy. “He said he was suicidal and he was running away constantly.”
He was put on medication but refused to take it. “Once he stopped taking his medication and with the marijuana use, he was just a very angry teenager,” Amy recalls. The couple realized their child needed a comprehensive treatment program.
After many hours of meticulous research they decided on Turning Winds as the best option for their 15-year-old son. Turning Winds admissions director Eric Loesch “helped us coordinate everything. Jim Jr. didn’t have to come home first from the mental hospital and my husband flew him straight to Montana,” says Amy. At that point Jim Jr. started to realize himself that he needed help.
Even though he was willing to go it took some time for Jim to buy into the program. In his book Not By Chance, teen therapy expert Tim Thayne emphasized the importance of allowing enough time for change to occur. “To create deep internal change, teens need to be immersed in a carefully crafted milieu, with positive values and solid principles, long enough for these changes to sink in.”
Initially Jim was “treating it like a prison sentence,” says his father. “There was definitely resistance” and there were delays caused by a change in medications but about seven months into the treatment program “he’s definitely come back on track,” reports James. “We have definitely seen a big change.”
Jim Jr. has been catching up academically, too, at Turning Winds. “He’s done a lot better there than he ever did at school,” says James. Turning Winds offers a high-quality academic experience for each of our teenage clients. “Turning Winds is a lot more interactive than your traditional school,” says James. “That certainly has something to do with it. If Jim had to come home and do homework, he just wouldn’t do it.”
There have been interpersonal improvements as well. “He can talk to us about what he is actually doing, when before we had to pull it out of him after school,” says James.
The Turning Winds experience provided the Turners with new insights. “We’re definitely going to parent differently,” says Amy, who wants to keep Jim’s therapist on speed-dial. “She’s been phenomenal,” says James, who also like the family workshop very much. “We took back a lot of the stuff Dr. Foster Cline talked about because we have two younger kids and we’re now utilizing those skills.”
Sending a child to residential treatment is almost never an easy decision. “I was very resistant the first month he was there, wondering whether we had made the right decision,” remembers Amy. “You see all these horrible things on the internet. I was scared for him but the regret of not making a choice like this would have been much bigger. I’m glad we made the choice that we did.”
James was nervous, too, but his first interactions with program director Enoch Stump put him at ease: “I felt like Jimmy was going to be safe.”
Turning Winds is a family-run residential treatment center accredited by The Joint Commission, combined with a fully accredited academic program specializing in working with youth who are struggling with mental health or substance use issues. Over the past twenty years, Turning Winds has matured into a sophisticated residential treatment center that blends the benefits of wilderness therapy, inpatient treatment, and a therapeutic boarding school.
Our mission is to rescue teens from crises, renew their belief in their potential, reunite them with their families, and put them on a sustainable path to success. Contact us online for more information, or call us at 800-845-1380. If your call isn’t answered personally, someone will get back to you as soon as possible.
Please note that to protect the privacy of our clients, the names have been changed.
