The Therapy Element

Therapy? Therapy on an outdoor adventure? Yeh; kinda-sorta. These family challenges are about intensive family relationship coaching toward therapeutic type changes, growth, healing, forgiveness, empowerment, endorsement, launching, establishing new beginnings, and "The Blessing”. You as a father, have the opportunity to give your son or daughter a blessing.

Biblically, The Blessing was an important time in a child's life. Esau gave up his birthright for a bowl of soup, and Jacob stole The Blessing. How have you felt about what your son or daughter has gotten from you?

If you are a son or daughter considering this for you and your father, you now have the opportunity to get off the hook of unforgiveness for dad's imperfections which has the potential to keep you tethered to your past as you are trying to move forward with your life.

Many of you have been working through what would be termed as traditional "sit-down" therapy. This type of therapy happens in the therapist’s office (as it does in my own practice), and can take months to discard the masks we all have come to wear. During Outdoor Family Challenges, we use God’s wilderness to provide families with challenges that can quickly erode the masks and tear down the walls that act as defenses. The defenses have been erected over time as an unconscious strategy to keep our hearts safe. Time is short with graduating kids leaving home. It may be the exact right time to expose areas of stalemates between some of our most loved and most important relationships?

Family pairs can choose to get through difficult relational blocks and choose new patterns that the therapist can help them learn! Along the trail that traverses deep canyons, thick black timber, and mountain streams, pairs deal with wilderness challenges (and of course there’s the goats, which provide their own challenges). There is authentic danger in the wild which the pairs can ignore or attend to and empower one another to overcome.

Archery, fishing, and climbing activities will provide for a different kind of experience that beckons the pairs to relate to one another in an authentic way without as many masks. Each member of the family pair will learn from, and teach the other about themselves. You will be supplied with a field manual to help you progress through many types of environmental challenges which will aid in recognizing the fractured and broken relationship bridges you have in your relationship, and then provide opportunities to learn better and healthier patterns of relating to one another. During Outdoor Family Challenges family pairs are taken through tough emotions that often are avoided at home because of how "messy" emotions can be.

The therapist is “on duty” 24 hours a day, during the hikes on the trail, setup of camp, packing of the goats, and around the camp fire. The therapist, Randy Stanko, will act as the coach to help you expose the maladaptive patterns of relating to one another; the wounds that each of you may have inflicted upon one another over the past few years, and then the arenas of growth and change to go proceed into. The primary goal of working with Randy will be guidance into forgiveness (though not prematurely), only when each is ready. And, a lauch into flight with a Blessing and a new start for the future of your relationship together as adults.

Jesus was unafraid of the realities of emotions. HE LOOKED AT FEAR DIRECTLY! He let himself cry. He was un-distracted by the temptation or be self-protective when he was in his temptation in the wilderness. On this adventure, you will be encouraged to face fear and sadness, and to not be distracted by the temptations to not repair your relationship. You will be encouraged and empowered to reject the choice to live your relationship in the old, unhealthy, and dysfunctional ways.

If you feel that you have been walking through the "valley of the shadow of death", you will find that through this intense and dramatic time, you and your loved one will walk out of the wilderness of disconnectedness. Randy Stanko is committed to helping each pair learn that by trusting God we can discover and live as who God says we are and how He designed us to be!