First Light Wilderness Therapy, a New Vision program, is excited to announce its expansion of services to include an Adolescent Boys Program as of July 1, 2020. First Light Wilderness Therapy launched earlier this year in the stunning Blue Ridge Mountains of northern Georgia, and provides outdoor behavioral healthcare services with a trauma-informed, attachment model to adolescents and young adults. With First Light’s recent expansion of its Outdoor Child Caring Program license through the state of Georgia’s Department of Human Services, the program is ready to increase access to its services through inclusion of treatment to adolescent boys.

Led by a seasoned team of experts with a diverse range of skills, background, and experience, First Light Wilderness Therapy provides an integrative family treatment model that is rooted in the principles of neurobiology, developmental reintegration, generational empowerment, and relational immersion. The program espouses a keen attunement to practices that foster the healing of individuals and family systems.

Given that adolescence is a time to cultivate a greater understanding of identity and inner-direction, First Light Wilderness Therapy aims to create successive opportunities for young men to build self-awareness, self-efficacy, self-expression, and self-mastery through creative challenges and measured adversity. Towards this aim, there is a strong focus on aiding students’ capacity to intentionally connect to their individual passions, values, and interests through what is known as the Mastery Program. This aspect of First Light’s program helps students identify, learn, and ultimately teach an aspect or skill that is unique to them, and one which they may continue pursuing as a healthy means of recreation as well as service in the communities into which they transition. Students at First Light also take active roles in planning, organizing, and scheduling their expeditions in collaboration with their guide team. As they build their capacities for leadership, cooperation, interdependence, and accountability, they learn skills that are transferable and beneficial well outside of the context of wilderness.

As with all New Vision Wilderness Programs, First Light guides students to a more holistic and integrative understanding of their nervous systems, their socio-somatic functioning, and how they may express greater influence and impact over their long-term psychological and physiological health. Brainspotting and Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI) are evidence-based practices that are utilized to support increased self-awareness of the nervous system and to address pre-verbal trauma. The context of nature helps this process exponentially, as students’ biological systems are gradually reset through daily exercise, healthy diet, mindfulness practices, and, of course, the much-needed medicine of rest.

As Lead Therapist for the adolescent boys group, Dr. Elnur Gajiev notes, “We know—empirically and anecdotally—that truly meaningful and lasting change occurs within the context of secure, attuned relationships, and so, we strive to infuse the importance of that into every fiber of our culture, from the moments we share with our students, our families, our colleagues, and beyond.”

Lastly, and perhaps most critically, First Light Wilderness recognizes that truly sustainable therapeutic change with teens and adolescents requires addressing the needs of the entire family system. First Light’s treatment model is built around intensive and comprehensive family therapy, focusing on the need for healing across generations to empower each family and each student to grow healthier relationships together. This is achieved through providing three unique touchpoints per week for each family, as well as a 3-day First Light family intensive experience, which entails multi-family experiential workshops aimed at addressing pertinent family system issues, resolving intergenerational trauma, practicing more effective communication styles and skills, and re-establishing a healthy foundation for long-term connection and caregiving moving forward.

About First Light Wilderness Therapy
A New Vision Program First Light Wilderness Therapy provides the highest impact, evidence-based outdoor behavioral healthcare. New Vision prides itself on offering wilderness treatment with impeccable safety standards; trauma-focused, outcome-driven treatment models; highly experiential, mastery-focused adventure programming; and a program culture focused on empathy, healing, connection, and joy. For more information, inquiries be directed to 855-689-8326 or its website, www.nvwild.com/First-Light-Wilderness-Therapy.com.