Turning Winds is a residential treatment center for teenagers, with a full continuum of care for mental health issues. It combines elements of wilderness therapy and a relational treatment approach with a full medical and clinical team while also offering a full academic staff to provide the much-needed support for your child.
Peer mentoring and leadership training are strong elements of the treatment approach at Turning Winds. “As kids come in at a higher level of care, they’re learning basic ways to cope and regulate their emotions,” explains Turning Winds therapist Kimberly Sparks, LCPC. “They learn how to take on leadership skills, such as having more accountability to themselves, their peers, and their families.”
At Turning Winds, clients have the opportunity to practice leadership and accountability, take responsibility, hold others responsible, and have confidence in doing that.
“Our leadership program typically begins around the third or fourth month of a student’s journey,” says program director Enoch Stump.”We want them to be able to understand the work they need to be doing and focus on themselves. We want them to be able to understand what their core issues and challenges are, and be able to role-model working specifically on those challenges. Leadership at Turning Winds is a little different for every kid, and we want to tailor-fit their specific journey.”
THE BACKPACK
The leadership role at Turning Winds comes with certain fun privileges. “They get a backpack and some snacks,” explains Stump. “They get some additional activities, and we even have a leadership lounge for our kids to hang out in that’s separate from the rest of the group. So, I think there’s a draw for kids to be in the program, but I think the real draw is that there is the validity from their peers and staff that they’re doing the things they need to do, and I think they want that validation.”
Stump remembers a client who recently graduated from Turning Winds. Like many other kids at Turning Winds, he struggled with social challenges and interacting with his peers at the beginning of treatment.
“This kid came in and he struggled with social dynamics for many months, and through our leadership program, he developed mentoring skills and learned how to support other kids who come through the program,” says Stump. “He developed sort of his own voice and understanding of how to advocate for himself and speak up on his behalf. When he left, he had been in our leadership program for many months, and he was able to see himself in a way that he had never seen before because in social groups, he had always felt like he was at the bottom. But by the time he completed his leadership program, he was really at the top of the Turning Winds social hierarchy.”
Turning Winds’ leadership training is designed to improve the self-worth of participating students. The core purpose is validation. “It’s an opportunity for us to validate kids who are working hard on themselves but really helping them find their own voice and then use that peer support to mentor and help support kids that are coming up and going through the process,” says Stump.
TRUE LEADERS
At Turning Winds, leadership is also about considering the needs of others and looking past your own immediate interests.
“When they think of leadership, it is not just the next great step for all of us when we stop living for self and start understanding that life in this world is bigger than just us and outside of us there’s much more to be had,” says chief operations officer Carl Baisden. “So, when they enter our leadership program, it’s not an admission that they’re good at leadership. It’s the recognition that they’re not, and the leadership program is where they can come in and develop the actual tools and skills necessary to lead.”
Leadership is more than having a good presentation. “Leading is a skill,” says Baisden. “In our leadership program, we’re trying to give them genuine skills and tools, not develop their personality, but actual black and white skills and tools on how to lead and influence people.”
For Baisden, it’s about “understanding that life is so much better when I am aware of the people around me, versus just myself. There is something to be said for the fact that they believe in the process because they’re seeing other people go through it. And when you see other people develop, it says, maybe it’s possible for me.”
At Turning Winds, it’s the people who make the difference—staff and fellow patients. Over more than two decades, we’ve built a team of some of the world’s finest academic and therapeutic professionals, all of whom share the same goal: to help teens re-engage meaningfully with their lives, families, and futures.
Contact us online for more information, or call us at 800-845-1380. If your call isn’t answered personally, one of us will get back to you as soon as possible.
