Transcendentalism: 2015 Edition

Wilderness therapy. The first time I met my friend Sam, we were on the plane to the Tiputini Biodiversity Station. We were discussing simple introductory things. Colleges, ages, and majors. He told me that he was a clinical psychology major, and I asked him why he opted for a program that is heavily populated with biology and environmental science majors, and has a strong focus on the natural sciences. (For the record, he’s not alone. There are some other unrelated majors here too…film, policy, and communications just to name a few.) He told me that he was interested in Wilderness Therapy. Three months later, I’ve realized that this is the perfect career for him. And that I am intrigued by the psychology behind it all.

After getting a quick explanation from him, I became more interested in what wilderness therapy is. I finally looked it up this morning, and I’m fascinated by it. My Mom would call it “outward bound”, where participants are guided towards personal growth, self-respect, and leadership skills. I would have loved outward bound as a teenager, and would still probably learn from it today. However, I am interested in wilderness therapy for different reasons. Yes, there’s the whole “going out into the wilderness to find myself” aspect that basically covers the whole transcendentalist movement. Emerson, Thoreau, and all that jazz. Wilderness therapy does not focus on behavioral modification. It avoids psychological games and manipulation to cognitively restructure ways of thinking, as found in many psychotherapy programs. Instead, it places people in an environment where they are challenged by nature. Which allows the leaders/counselors to observe how they respond to such challenges, complemented by a reflection journal for self-evaluation.

What I find interesting is how this lack of technology would play out in today’s “do it for the instagram” society. What happens when teenagers and young adults are disconnected from the internet? Something that I find prevalent among young adults is "social media anxiety”. When I post a picture on facebook or instagram, I often find myself thinking, “man, I hope this gets a lot of likes”. It is not uncommon for me to get about 65 likes on a picture, and if I get something lower (in the 40 range); I wonder if I even should have posted this in the first place. If I get 100+ likes, I know I’ve done something right. A picture of me standing on Mitad del Mundo, or the Equator, with a quote from Dr. Seuss earned me 128. Doing a flip at Playa el Garrapatera got me 106. A shot of me and my wonderful father at a wedding yielded 107. However, a shot of a letter I wrote to the Tooth Fairy at age 5 only netted 36. And for the record, it was really cute. Why do I even care about this stuff?

Of course, with age, comes a bit of wisdom. When my then 16-year-old brother visited me at college last year, he thought an appropriate way to start conversations with my friends was, “What’s your max number of likes on Instagram?” I winced every time I heard it. My brother seemed to be collecting intangible "like" counts, and unlike coins, stamps, or Beanie Babies, those likes contain nothing of value or fun to pass onto generations to come.  

Being in Galápagos has pros and cons. Pros include beautiful beaches, amazing snorkeling, and my life looking like it is straight out of Pinterest. Cons include eating rice and beans for every meal, mosquitos and biting horse flies, and island fever. I can’t decide if limited access to the world wide web is a pro or a con. You could say that I am “living life to the fullest” because I am not worrying about posting snapchats or pictures, and how many likes I am getting. Or you could also look at the document I have on my computer, which has the names and passwords to 5 different places with wifi on the island. I am not alone in this. A friend from high school is studying abroad in Europe right now. Her album title on facebook is “Man’s Search for Wifi”, a play on Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning”, which we read in our 11th grade Morality class. Along with air-conditioning and pens, wifi is a hot commodity all over the world. I mean, if you didn't 'gram it, did it really happen?

Various people from my life have messaged me to say how incredible my pictures are, how jealous they are of me, and how hard it's going to be to come home. This calls to mind a tweet I saw about 6 months ago. “Don’t compare your behind-the-scenes life to other people’s highlight reels”. I know people who compare all aspects of their lives to people they have never met. These supermodels, television stars, and yoga gurus seem to have accomplished perfection- both physically and mentally- to the laypeople. Yes, my life does look like paradise in the picture of me in the Natarajasana, or Lord of the Dance pose that was taken on the apex of some rocks overlooking Puerto Chino, a beautiful white sand beach on San Cristóbal Island. But what isn’t portrayed in that picture is that minutes before, I was sprinting around the beach like a crazy person in order to avoid the biting horse flies that follow you when you’re wet. I’ve heard before that photographs can act as a “counter-memory” of sorts. In 10 years, we will forget what we’ve seen, but remember the picture and evoke some sort of feeling from that picture. Would my entire experience here have been drastically different if I didn’t have access to the internet or a camera?

In 2008, a response from my mother regarding “I need a Virtual Break. No, Really”, by Mark Bittman was published in the NY Times. She accurately said, "Our society's obsession with staying connected and current is not a recent one. In ''Walden,'' Henry David Thoreau asked a simple question, ''If the bell rings, why should we run?’'

Could he have known that we are capable of a nearly Pavlovian response every time we hear the phrase ''You've got mail’’?”

I find it amusing that 7 years later, I have the same thoughts floating through my head. Like mother, like daughter, I suppose. However, as I don’t know a single person who uses AOL anymore, I am going to modify her last sentence. Could he have known we are capable of nearly a Pavlovian response every time we see a new SnapChat story?

Sorry for the tangent. To return to my initial interest in Wilderness Therapy, I think that programs like this are great. They show people that you can have a good time without being validated by “likes" from "friends" on the internet. Teenagers and adults alike aren’t able to escape to their virtual realities where they have so carefully crafted their lives in a series of pictures. They are eventually forced to face their real problems, and learn how to cope- without the whole “lay down on a couch while Freud psychoanalyzes me in therapy” stigma. They’re in a setting where it just happens naturally. Being in the wilderness is a place conducive to exercise and health, and physical well-being definitely fosters mental well-being. Having control of yourself physically shows that you can take control of yourself mentally. Not everyone likes to open up, and if placing focus on naturally occurring challenges, such as finding food or shelter exposes what you're really struggling with, nature is the place to do it.

I think I’ve had my own sort of wilderness therapy here. I definitely have grown personally, and have fostered a greater sense of respect for both the world and myself. My last class on global climate change really opened my eyes to a lot of things that I had just ignored in the past because they didn’t affect me personally. It can be really difficult to live here. Almost everything has to be imported, and you better like rice and beans. It’s always hot and humid, and there aren’t as many opportunities for a quality education as there are on the mainland. Health care is not great, and many people live their entire lives in poverty, while I'm in la-la land 10 miles south of them wasting away the afternoon reading a novel on the beach complaining about how I don't want to study for a test later. My eyes have now been opened. Maybe in the past I would have just ignored it, but now I want to see a systemic change take place. Call me a high-minded idealist, but I think I just might be able to make that happen.

I’d like to tell my old self and all teenagers two things. One, is that you don't have to always listen to what society deems as "acceptable", and two is that life is more than the posed pictures that garner you a bunch of likes on social media. It’s about the moments where you’re present. You’ll find out what makes you happy and what doesn’t. It’s about the relationships you form. You’ll find whom you genuinely enjoy spending time with, and that you don’t have to be friends with everyone. But most of all, it’s about investing in experiences, not stuff.

My host dad took this picture of me when we went to El Junco (a volcano with a freshwater crater lake) at 4:30 in the morning to see the sunrise. As much as I would like to say I practiced yoga on top of El Junco, I did the Natarajasana pose for the picture. I'm such a hypocrite.