Healing Quest
Boulder, CO

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Ski Therapy Family Integration Program

Ski Therapy offers a brief, intensive family therapy experiential in a resort environament.

The Ski Therapy brief family integration intensive offers experiential family therapy in conjunction with facilitated somatic (skiing or other outdoor activity) individual work. Our commitment is to integrate our program with referring programs and professionals to insure a continuum of care for the family.

Families working together to improve communication, understanding, boundaries, and affirmation are often confounded by "triggers" that activate individuals and reduce effective participation. Students completing wilderness or residential programs have learned new communication skills that other family members have not practiced. Expectations going into a time of family re-integration may not be shared.

In the supported resort milieu, the family is held by the Ski Therapy team so that stress is managed at productive levels. By facilitating and observing family interactions in structured and non-structured times, the team can quickly learn concerns to address in individual skiing sessions. The effect of these sessions is to desensitize individuals to their triggers for more effective family work over the course of the program.

Ski Therapy has chosen the emWave handheld unit from HeartMath™ as an integral component in family and individual therapies with a simple to understand, non-intrusive feedback device that offers clients a view into their nervous system's state. A red light means "triggered" and a green light indicates an emotionally coherent state.
Clients with little body awareness experience that their body can clue them to their emotional state. This awareness is leveraged in individual and family sessions. Multiple units are used when families meet together and families receive objective information about how interactions and topics elicit emotional reactions.

For more information and description of the 2009/2010 season Ski Therapy Family Integration program, please contact Andy Rose.