Why Experiential Teen Therapy Builds Trust Faster Than Talk Alone

Host Kevin Zundl sits down with Program Director Enoch Stump and Clinical Manager Sean Carlin, MS, PCLC to explore how experiential therapy strengthens connection, trust, and emotional growth in ways traditional treatment settings often cannot.

They reflect on a recent multi-day backpacking trek near the Canadian border and unpack the clinical intention behind taking a small group of students out of their daily routine and into nature. Far from being an escape, these trips are carefully structured to reinforce goal setting, independence, emotional regulation, and healthy reliance on support systems.

You will hear how morning check-ins, shared challenges, and nightly processing around the campfire create powerful moments of vulnerability for both staff and students. By stepping into discomfort together, relationships deepen, trust accelerates, and therapeutic momentum carries back onto campus.

This conversation also highlights why relationship is the foundation of effective clinical work and how shared experience allows teens to internalize skills they can later carry forward with less external support.

If you are curious how Turning Winds integrates structure, flexibility, and experiential learning into treatment, this episode offers a clear and grounded look into what makes that work stick.  

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Trust the Process: What Long-Term Change Really Looks Like · Why progress often unfolds through consistency, patience, and relationship.

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At Turning Winds, Therapy Goes Deeper · How clinical work is intentionally layered into daily life and experience.

Working with Children in a Therapeutic Environment · Why trust and structure must coexist for real change to occur.

Leadership Training at Turning Winds · How responsibility and mentorship are developed through experience.

For more teen parenting tips and treatment information | turningwinds.com | 800-845-1380.

Transcript

 This is what it sounds like when treatment isn't cold and institutional, but innovative and relationship based, and so that then you create some sort of this momentum for kids to be able to take that feeling and then be able to manage it with less support. Welcome to the Turning Winds Podcast. My name is Kevin Zundl.

Turning Winds has a full continuum of care for teens, would benefit from life changing support clinically and academically. Today I speak with program director Enoch Stump and clinical manager Sean Carlin, to hear about a recent truck they did. At first glance, it might seem like pure adventure, but this experience is built on powerful clinical purpose.

You do a lot of activities here that people, I think wouldn't necessarily expect. And I think one of those is the trek that you just did, and how does it sort of break things up in terms of the routine, but also I'm just curious what is the clinical components to it to maybe have a different way to connect with them and have a different way to share and maybe break shells?

One one. One of the great things about the location that we're at is we have this beautiful mount scenery around, and so we take advantage of that. We get our kids out. Ideally just to be in the wilderness. It's too beautiful of a place to not to miss out on. And so we take 'em, we took 'em last month backpacking up into, as close to the Canadian border, and, and we took them backpacking and we went to a mountain lake and some cabins, and we took six boys and Sean and I, a therapist, and then myself as a program director.

And we had an event and a, and a theme plan for every day with those six kids. Those six kids had been in our program. At least four months. So they're all in a similar place. They had a great foundation of great clinical work and taking it outside of our walls gives 'em an opportunity to practice some of those skills a little bit more in real life.

And it lists gets to focus in a little bit more specifically on on them as opposed to be within the group of 25 boys. And so we took advantage of that. Sean, what are some of the favorite. Processes that, that we engage our kids in. We don't, we still be grouped like we would on campus every day with our kids.

In fact, we start a morning group as they're cooking their breakfast around the stove, and we talk about a theme for the day. One of the themes were, were with goal setting and just talking about independence, because out there, there's no cooks. There's nobody putting away their backpacks or their tents.

They're doing all of that themselves. And so they're managing all of their life themselves. So it's this balance of when I'm struggling, when I'm looking for, when I'm dealing with something hard, how do I manage those things internally? And then how do I use my support system around that? So we'll talk about the goals for the day.

What do we wanna accomplish? What do we afraid of? We start the day with that theme. We check in at lunchtime to review how the first half of the day went, and then set new goals for the afternoon. And then our favorite groups for sure. Always after you've had a really challenging day, physically and sometimes emotionally around the fire at night, to be able to process the events.

I grew up back out here with my family and love backpacking me and when you do it with a very concerted effort on what you're trying to achieve, it becomes a very powerful experience. And so backpacking was, turning Winds is a more. Clinically powerful process of just doing it when I did it with my family because you have an agenda to process when you're out there, and so yeah, we, I always grow a lot from those experiences.

Looking forward to sharing some of my own challenges with our kids and then hearing their process, it's been pretty, pretty valuable for me. Yeah, just getting these boys outside in nature. So the beauty of it is we're able to take six boys. So these boys are able to step away from turning winds for three to four days and just get into nature around turning winds.

It can be pretty hectic at times. You're around all these kids. We got 36, 37 kids on campus right now. You're constantly going. There's constantly stimulation going on around you. So to break these kids off into a smaller group, get 'em outdoors into nature. The lot quieter. There's only, you just have your natural stimuli.

You don't have all these sets going on, or other kids that are upset. We get frustrated and got kid dealing with that, so we're able to disconnect these kids, get 'em outta nature. We start out the TRE by doing four miles. The boys have 45 pound. We do a four mile tre up to this, uh, camp spot, probably a thousand foot elevation game, maybe a couple thousand feet elevator.

It was like four or 5,000, but maybe it was just a thousand or two. So you jump right into the trip and these boys are getting worked pretty good right out the gate. And then we get to our campsite and we're setting up camps. So for a lot of these boys, this is the first time they've fed up a tent that they're using a jet boil to cook.

And it's just nice. It's nice to get 'em out of their normal environment. We're still doing the clinical stuff. They just don't realize at what level we're doing it, and honestly, we're getting more value for our money. We've got these six out there alone and we're able to spend an entire day on goal setting where our final day we talk about what it's like to be a man in today's society that often we, you get so many mixed messages on what it does mean to be a man in today's society and to hear from them, this is what I see as a man in today's society, and we're able to work through that throughout the trip.

You'd find out, okay, I, I share this in common with this person. This, were a little different, but it is just, you learn some extremely malleable stuff about these kids. I've been saying to six boys that we took on that trip. My, my relationship with those six boys reached an entirely different level than it was before that trip.

And I just, that helps me now that we're back at turning wins to do my daily work because I have a Dipper connection with these six boys. They trust me on a different level because they know me different. It is, it is interesting. We think, we talk a lot about clinical work at turning Wind and if you don't have the relationship as a base, clinical work gets lost really quickly.

And so yeah, I agree. Spending that time and creating that trust level with the kids. Where we're going through and hiking the mountain alongside with them, and we're going through our own process, enables our work when we're back on campus to be so much more rich because of the trust and the relationship connection and so, yeah, that what I actually think some of the best work that's done is I always think attorney wins is being able to connect with good, healthy people and be able to inspire them and to be able to have a foundation.

Before this call, Kevin, we were talking about. Alumni groups and post turning wins and the big picture, and I always connect, the alumni groups are effective because of the backpacking trips and because of the relationships. It's not because of like just the office work that's happened and the great insight that they gathered from their behavior.

It's about connecting with healthy people, liking who those people are, and being able to count on them for support moving forward. Yeah, that's been one of my, like that was what, six weeks ago that we took that trip. Those. I'm working closer with those six kids because they're eager to work closer with, and you just said something's important there.

Us doing the work with I, let's just say there, there was a certain guy on the back end of that hike that was always the tail end of that, and that was me and just trying to keep up with these six young, healthy bucks. And then you see this specimen right here. So it was Sean trailing in the back trying to keep up with the rest of the boys, but.

What was pretty cool about it is they took pride and I could see certain boys would look out for me at certain times, made sure, alright, Sean's, keep it up. But it's going through those shared experiences. You help you get your value and that, and that goes the same for like our parents in this program.

When the parents invest and they do the work alongside the kid. You see those kids produce way more because they know they're not just doing this by themselves. Not only am I in treatment and I'm doing my work, but mom and dad are back at home doing their work. Yeah. And the same goes for us. They see us pounding it out there and on the hikes and not giving in and overcoming our own challenges.

And we're pretty vulnerable when it comes to these frac trips. We're talking about our lives. We're talking about our struggles because we want them to learn from us and help them understand. Life isn't easy and you're gonna go through many challenges along the way. So this really, it's a safe place for us to be vulnerable and share with them some of our struggles and how we've dealt with it.

Yeah, that could, to speak of, we have, one of my favorite things about the trip was jaw security and up to be vulnerable with those kids. He set the tone, he struggled at the beginning and he didn't shy away from helping them to know, I'm nervous, this is hard. I'm not sure about it. To watch how he managed that in an open, authentic way is what set the tone for when group came.

They could be vulnerable, they could let their guard down because the adults were healthy enough and inspired enough to do it alongside of 'em. And, and so I, you really did set the tone and like the kids at the end of that trip, you know, we couldn't catch up with Sean. Like Sean had got it. Sean had got the sort process and that just mirrored their experience.

I love that you brought that up because best turning ones 1 0 1, and even this trip specifically, we had a couple boys on this trip that are pretty closed off to the rest of the world. Figuring out ways to get these guys to be vulnerable and to open up and express those things has not always been easy for us.

And this trip proved every one of those kids we had on this trip opened up at some point that shared something very. Personal view about themselves and to be fair, have launched from that term. Yeah, I've got a handful of kids that were stuck in some ways, but getting 'em out of their environment, getting them inspired, coming at it from a different perspective has really given them some great momentum moving forward.

Question I have for you both. And we think about how do we live with our lives with intent, and when you sometimes look at that, you think of routines, but in this case. I'm thinking is sometimes easy to get into roughs. And what does this allow us to do is have a more diverse sensory experience to get us out of our comfort zone and do the things like go out there and hike up, up the border to relate to people in different ways.

So how do use balance or look at routine and power of routine, but also knowing that there's a power in getting outta that comfort zone. Just right off, right out the gate. The structure is key here at Turning Wind even on, even on those trips now, those trips provide more flexibility, but they're still a very structured trip because if they're not Yeah, they'll go long very quickly.

Yeah, but you're right. You're, the kids know what to expect around turning. Seven days a week, they know what their data is gonna look like. They know where they're going. It is very structured so we can get them out, out of that structured environment. And it was, we, we took a couple boys on this trip that we had to have a lot of careful discussions around whether or not they were ready for this trip based on behaviors going into the trip, based on their ability to regulate their emotions.

We had a couple kids on this trip that were dealing with increased anxiety and, and in fact had said, I'm not dealing with this trip, and then getting them out of this trip helps them get outta those ruts, as you said. It just gives them a little different viewpoint, a little different way of looking at things and doing treatment, and it was money.

Those kids are able to overcome the anxiety that they dealt with prior to the trip or those kids that were our wild cards going into this trip. They were money behaviorally. We were able to look at that, that three four day span and go, man, how'd you do that 10,000? The fur won. Maybe we could just talk about.

How do we, what are the ways that we create structure in a less structured process? What are the ways that we kept engaged with the kids? If I would've had a three hour period of time on any one of those days where we weren't checking with kids and had a mission for those hours, kids would've gotten away from themselves.

But we talked about expectations before we did things. We talked about potential pitfalls and things that might come. We're always helping the kids prepare ahead of time and then processing those. And so we will go for an hour, whether it be mealtime, cleaning up the gear, interactions on the trail, we'll talk about what we wanna look at, where it gets away from us, and then we'll process how we did and we'll keep good communication happening.

And it's through that regular connection and those structured check-ins that you're creating structure with less structure. And so, yeah, you just said, we're gonna go backpack up this mountain and then check in when we get there. You're gonna have a whole different trip for sure. And yeah, we do that with all of our activities on campus or off campus.

It's really about connecting with the kids, creating an expectation that they know what behaviors that they need to meet in order to be successful. Because nine times outta 10, 10 kids wanna win. Just like the adults want them to win. They just shoot themselves to the flip. And so you really talk about what does it look like?

What are some concerns? You process that ahead of time and then you give them the tools needed to be successful. And then at the end of the day, they have done something that left to their own. They probably wouldn't have had success, but they still get the self-worth benefits. From them achieving it themselves by saying, you know what?

I did it. I had good behavior. I interacted positively. I had great dynamics with friends. I accomplished something really hard because I didn't allow some of these negative traits to come in. And so that then you create some sort of this momentum for kids to be able to take that feeling and then be able to manage it with less support and then manage it when Sean is not there to check in every two hours, and they're gonna have a longer span because you have some positive momentum moving forward.

And so we talk about this, we create that with residential treatment attorney wins when they go home. We keep them continued to like have extra support until the point where they're running on their own before we start to back up more and they need less support in the long run.

If this conversation inspires you to believe that there may be hope for your family, I highly encourage you to call Turning Winds. The number is 800-845-1380. And don't forget to check out the other episodes of this podcast, including one with world renowned psychiatrist, Dr. Foster Klein, or the wealth of resources available to you@turningwinds.com.