Students at Red Mountain Colorado receive clinical support that extends beyond individual and group therapy. Each Monday students enrolled at the mindfulness-based residential treatment center for male and nonbinary adolescents participate in a variety of full-day, clinically-supported adventure activities throughout the vast Northern Colorado Front Range.

“Before enrolling with us, the majority of our students complete primary treatment in the wilderness,” Executive Director Kera Miller, MA, LPC, said. “They are accustomed to being outside and involved in adventures.”

Many students enroll at Red Mountain Colorado with histories that include anxiety, depression, trauma, and ADHD. These diagnoses have often led to academic struggles, substance use, and social isolation.

Adventure experiences provide students with fun and challenging opportunities to focus their attention on specific tasks, practice social skills, build confidence, and work through the self-defeating thought patterns that may be impacting them in other areas of their life.

“Having a therapist participate in all of our adventures allows for on-the-spot processing, either as a group or individually,” Miller said. “Our therapists can work in the moment with someone who is experiencing anxiety with a particular activity.” The spontaneous processing sessions on the trail, on the ski slope, in the canoe, or at the climbing gym, for example, help students work through resistance, avoidance, or opposition that is often based in fears of embarrassment, making a mistake, or not being good enough. These themes are often the very same obstacles that prevent students from being successful back home and in school. Red Mountain Colorado therapists help to normalize these feelings and offer students new ways of coping with these natural responses to new challenges. 

Red Mountain Colorado, located just north of Denver, provides an ideal location for adolescent males and nonbinary individuals, who would benefit from a mindfulness-based residential treatment program. Red Mountain helps teens with co-occurring disorders heal by working with the mind, body, and spirit using various forms of meditation, mindfulness, yoga, martial arts, life skills education, and evidence-based therapies including CBT, DBT, EMDR, and Brainspotting.