At first I really truly hated it here at Second Na...

At first I really truly hated it here at Second Nature Uintas. It was really cold during my stay (January to April) usually in the negatives at night. The food is repetitive, the hiking was difficult, I always hated camping, the Unita basin is ugly, I was detoxing from heroin, benzos, and all my antidepressants at the same time, BUT I WOULDN'T HAVE WANTED MY TREATMENT TO GO ANY OTHER WAY. Wilderness was of course super uncomfortable, because it's not supposed to be luxurious or even comfortable at all! I hated it and swore to myself that I would never speak to my parents again for sending me there up until 5 minutes before they pulled up to pick me up from my graduation ceremony. I used to write letters telling my parents I couldn't wait for when they picked me up and brought me to Salt Lake so I could run away and become a prostitute for drugs for a week before I killed myself! I went so far as to say that I would rather have been married to the man who sexually assaulted me for the duration of my stay in wilderness rather than be in wilderness, but the reason that I am saying all of this is not to get people to not send their kids here, I'm offering it as a potential reasoning why people have written terrible things about Second Nature Uintas in the other reviews, stories of abuse, etc, which I find very hard to believe to be true, but I do find it to be possible that someone hated Wilderness here enough to make those things up.

Going to Second Nature Wilderness program gave me a really solid foundation to move on and go to a Residential Treatment Center afterwards. If I hadn't gone to wilderness first, I would have most likely killed myself within the first few days of treatment. Wilderness, while it may seem not very safe to live in the high desert where it's cold for 10-12 weeks, is actually a very safe place to be and the only treatment intervention extreme enough to save my life. There aren't really any opportunities to hurt yourself, and by the time I found a cliff high enough that if I jumped off it would have killed me, I had been there for 10 weeks and realized I would give the whole "living" thing a try, and meditated at the top of the cliff instead.

After I realized that there were no other options extreme enough for my issues with drugs, alcohol, suicide, and PTSD, I was no longer upset that I went to wilderness, and it gave me a really strong foundation to change my life. I learned how to be tolerable of difficult situations, and living with the same 10 girls for 3 months of my life really helped me work on my communication skills, which helped me get out of my next phase of treatment at a residential treatment center 3-6 months earlier than most do. I also learned to be less lazy, and to do a lot of things for myself. Please don't let angry letters from your kids for the first few weeks make you want to bring them home, the letters will most likely turn neutral and even hopeful by the end of their stay.