From Adventure to Therapy:
Some Necessary Conditions to Enhance the
Therapeutic Outcomes of Adventure Programming
Luk Peeters
ABSTRACT
This paper examines the way and the conditions under which adventure activities can become
therapeutic, and determines change as a central concept in the therapeutic process. It begins to
consider an in-depth understanding of the nature of change, which leads to a model that emphasizes
'facilitating emotional change' (Greenberg, Rice & Elliott, 1993). From a Gestalt and Client-Centered
framework the notion of ‘change’ is explored through the notion of ‘emotional schemes’, that are
complex synthesizing structures that provide the framework for our responses to the world. Thus,
therapy is understood as the process of activating and facilitating the reorganization of existing
dysfunctional schemes, and the creation of new and functional ones. In particular, Gestalt Therapy is
described as a direction in psychotherapy that fits quite naturally the experiential educational theories
(see Gilsdorf, 1998; Peeters, 1990, 1997; Penner 1997). It is an approach that enables a more indepth understanding of the processes of change within individuals, and how they are being influenced
by new experiences. The focus of the discussion does not so much lie on the therapy process after the
activity, as this is the more familiar side of the professional field of the psychotherapist, but on the
process of presenting and conducting the adventure activity in the narrower sense of the word. In
conclusion, the article draws attention to some crucial points and pitfalls for the adventure therapist in
order to enhance the opportunities for therapeutic process to occur within the course of adventure
activities.
Introduction
All too often adventure activities are taken out of an educational, or even recreational framework, and
presented and counseled in an almost identical and standardized way within an adventure therapy
programme. By doing this it is my belief that a lot of the therapeutic richness and power that the
experiencing of these activities can generate, may easily be lost. Even worse, poorly led activities
include the risk that a participant repeats earlier trauma and consequently strengthens old-patterned,
unhealthy coping mechanisms. As we talk about therapy, we talk about recovery or re-adaptation or
more generally about change. In ensuring that the therapeutic richness is not lost during the adventure
activity, it is necessary to examine a key concept in the arena of therapy, that of ‘change’.
In Search of Change in Adventure Therapy
I have always been interested, even intrigued by what exactly the concept of ‘change’ in an adventure
context means. How does change occur? What triggers it to happen? What is the subject of change?
How do activities in an adventure context facilitate behavior changes in other life-settings? Initial
answers that were provided by literature available didn’t satisfy me. I believed that adventure situations
could be a metaphor for other life events and that a behavioral change in those actions would influence
so-called ‘real life’ behavior. However, I could not find anything, but superficial answers to the
question of how these metaphors developed, and what change really meant in terms of the relationship
between an individual and the surrounding world. I made some progress in my ‘quest’ for appropriate
answers when Bill Proudman (in Chapman et al., 1992) talked about experiential education as
“emotionally-engaged learning”. This phrase struck a chord with my own personal experience.
Whenever I saw major changes in the behavior, thinking and feeling of my participants there was
emotion involved. Being ‘deeply touched’ seemed to go along with discovering the ‘new’. Thus, it
looked like change was always an emotional change.
The next step in my ‘search’ for answers consisted of the writings of Leslie Greenberg, especially his
text: ‘Facilitating Emotional Change’ (Greenberg et al, 1993). Interestingly, Greenbergs’ background is
both Gestalt Therapy and Client-Centered Therapy. We can already find some links between adventure
therapy and Gestalt Therapy. For example: Penner (1997:61) argues that, “Gestalt Therapy and
Experiential Education strongly share the value of enacting actual experiment in order to create contact
and ‘ownership’ with our learning processes; Gilsdorf (1998) draws parallels between Gestalt Therapy
as one of the branches of humanistic psychology in experiential education; Schoel et a.l (1988) use
Gestalt techniques to frame and debrief experiences; and Peeters (1990, 1997) locates adventure
activities within in a gestalt perspective. From a client-centered perspective the underpinning
principles of this approach are often used to guide facilitators and are prominent in European Outdoor
Education Train-the-Trainers programs. For example, the core conditions of congruence, acceptance
and empathy are being incorporated as central guidelines in the way in which ropes course trainers’
develop relationships with participants (Exponent, 1998). Furthermore, Greenberg et al. (1993)
strongly advocate that the experiential client-centered and gestalt therapy approaches actually merge in
a new therapeutic strand, which they define as ‘experiential psychotherapy’.
Facilitating Emotional Change: The Theory of Greenberg
The central concept in the therapeutic theory of Greenberg (1993; 1994) is that of ‘emotion’ and
‘emotional schemes’. Emotional schemes are complex synthesizing structures that provide the
framework for our responses to the world. They organize our experience and our responses to situations
we encounter. They are built upon during our life and occur as a result of the experiences we have
lived. Emotional schemes operate automatically by recognition of some key elements at a tacit level.
These key elements can consist of many things, including a specific smell, a movement, being in a
certain postural position, a bodily feeling, or a memory. If occurring in a certain combination, these
key elements can trigger the appearance of a certain emotional scheme. In a healthy situation these
schemes change by accommodation to new experiences. For example, fear for extravagantly dressed
people can be replaced to trust and interest in such people, given the appropriate challenges to previous
emotional schema.
In respect to the change of emotional schemes, Laevers (1989) refers to Piaget where he states that new
experiences that can not be assimilated, due to the big discrepancy between available schemes and
reality, will lead to accommodation, this being the restructuring or expanding of existing schemes. So
the experience of an extravagantly co-participant helping me out of a narrow and difficult caving
passage has to change my existing schemes in order to get incorporated into my being of how I now
experience this individual. Greenberg considers emotional schemes as synthesizing, situating them on a
higher-ranking order. In this respect he differs from Piaget (1969), who first used the notion of
‘scheme’. Piaget’s more cognitive concept refers to an intermediary structure between perception and
comprehension through which the individual contacts the external reality. For example, we see a chair
at first glance through the concept of ‘instrument to sit upon’ and not as it appears ‘as such’. Whereby,
Greenberg states that emotional schemes are made up of four components, of which cognition is one of
them. The others include motivation, affect and action (see Figure I).
Figure I
The Components Which Compose Emotional Schemes
EMOTIONAL
EMOTIONALSCHEMES
SCHEMES
complex
complexsynthesizing
synthesizingstructures
structures
COGNITION
COGNITION
appraisals
appraisals
expectations
expectations
beliefs
beliefs
MOTIVATION
MOTIVATION
needs
needs
concerns
concerns
intentions,
goals
intentions, goals
AFFECT
ACTION
AFFECT
ACTION
physiological
arousal
expressive-motor
responses
physiological
expressive-motor
responses
sensory
and bodilyarousal
feeling
action tendencies
sensory and bodily feeling
action tendencies
(Adopted from Greenberg, Rice & Elliot, 1993)
An example of how these schemes organize our responses to our environment can clarify Greenberg’s
theory. For example, if we see a snake during a hike (I consider this example from the standpoint of a
Western-European person) our reaction can be to withdraw from the animal as soon as possible. This
emotional scheme is fed with information from the four components. These components include the
following:
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Cognition:
Our (limited) knowledge of snakes tells us that they ought to be considered
dangerous.
Motivation:
Our goals, concerns and needs will co-construct our emotional scheme. If
we want to show our ‘no-fear tendency’, or if we are a biologist and
interested in everything that moves around, this will influence our responsemode.
Affect:
The sensory and bodily feeling that we experience within ourselves will also
help to shape our meaning of a situation. So we will define an emotion as
‘fear’ if we notice some bodily changes and sensory feelings that normally
come together with that feeling.
Action:
The above will be combined with the action tendencies that we experience
within ourselves (i.e. running away) and the mix of these four components
will provide our response to the situation. Thus, cognition in this theoretical
framework is just one of the components and does not operate on a higher
level as commonly believed/ accepted.
Emotional schemes are activated by the recognition of one or more key-elements that then act as a
‘trigger’. The following story helps to illustrate this process.
Frank did a fantastic job today. Everybody silently agreed on that. He was very helpful during
the initiative activities and came with some really smart ideas to solve the group tasks. During
the rock-climbing session that followed people just enjoyed watching him. It was beautiful to
see his concentration and dedication to the task he was accomplishing. Yet, this 17-Year-Old
boy is quiet, shy and has a rather negative self-concept. He is obviously not aware of his own
qualities and capacities. The facilitator wants to bring this into his awareness. So, when
everybody is circled up at the end of the day and reviewing the days events the facilitator says:
“OK Frank, get up. Tell us, how did you do today?” Frank stumbles up and looks down to his
shoe tips. Other group members try to cheer him: “Yea Frank, come on, tell us!”. Frank looks
up and around, his face now suddenly showing anger and tears, and shouts: “Get lost, all of
you.” He then turns away and leaves the room.
So, what happened to Frank? Some elements of this situation triggered a formal emotional scheme to
become active: just like a snakelike silhouette on a dry and hot day in a stony and bushy environment
that activates the ‘snake-avoidance scheme’. In Frank’s story it was the standing up and feeling alone
in the presence of others (affect/bodily feeling), their cheering (sensory feeling), the request from an
authority figure and his belief that he had to evaluate himself (cognition and motivation) that triggered
the emotional scheme. This emotional scheme was built up when Frank, years ago, coming home from
school on Friday afternoons, was put on the counter in his father’s pub and had to declare the results he
obtained in school that week. Meanwhile, all the drinking customers where shouting and cheering at
him. His father, proud and drunk, never saw the shame, pain and anger that Frank experienced during
these incidents.
As Greenberg et al. (1993) identify, when a once healthy scheme (e.g., running away from the threat)
arises in a new situation that is fundamentally different, it can lead to dysfunctional behavior.
“Dysfunction then occurs when the meaning construction system fails to attend to the fullness of
information from the emotional scheme or when the schemes themselves are dysfunctional, which will
result in dysfunctional emotional meanings and inappropriate reactions” (ibid.: 89) Consequently,
therapy can be understood as the process of activating and facilitating the reorganization of existing
dysfunctional schemes and the creation of new and functional ones. Thus, Frank can begin to learn to
distinguish between potentially threatening and prizing situations, and begin to restructure his meaning
construction system to the arousal of more appropriate emotional schemes. It is crucial to point out here
that in Greenberg et al’s theory a scheme can only develop while it is active, only then is it accessible
for new input and change. This change in the meaning construction system has significant implications
for the role and functions of the therapist, and for the content of the therapeutic process. It is not
enough that Frank recognizes his reaction afterwards, and understands and trusts the positive intentions
of participants and facilitator. Nor is it enough that he is now able to see how he deprives himself from
positive feedback in order for change to occur. It is not the awareness of an inappropriate reaction alone
that will lead to a more suitable behavior; it is only during the time that the scheme is active that
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modifications can take place. This places importance, therefore, on the more action-oriented phase
within experiential programs, alongside the interventions of the facilitator during these moments.
Based on these therapeutic assumptions we can now focus on some tasks or ‘attention points’ for the
facilitator during the course of the adventure activity (see Table II). Some of these points are pointed
out by Greenberg (1994), others come from personal experience and theoretical influences from Zinker
(1974) and Ringer (2000)
Table II
Attention Points of the Facilitator or the Therapist During the Adventure Experience
1
Heighten the interpersonal safety of the relationship
2
Facilitate the here-and-now experiencing of the participants
3
Focus to actual features of the experience
4
Stimulate and evoke schematic emotional memory
5
Create and maintain a ‘reflective space’
6
Try to avoid descriptions or names that narrow or devaluate the proper experience of the
participant
7
Encourage participants to directly contact what is anxiety provoking and was previously
avoided.
8
Set up and personalize activities to generate new experiments.
(Adapted from Greenberg etal, 1994; Zinker, 1974; Ringer, 2000)
From Adventure to Therapy: Attention Points for the Facilitator or Therapist
Heighten the Interpersonal Safety of the Relationship (Greenberg, 1993)
The heightening of interpersonal safety will reduce the intrapersonal anxiety. A person will find more
trust and safety within him/herself when trusted and trusting, and feeling safe within his/her
environment. This will then result in the increase of the processing capacity of that person. For
example, when feeling safe, we can more easily open ourselves to new information and to new input
that can be threatening in its potential capacity to urge us to change.
Facilitate the ‘Here and Now’ Experiencing of the Participants
Often we see that participants are involved in the activity in a ‘result-oriented’ way. That is they tend
to only look at the top of the climb, the end of the passage, the other side of the bridge and then move
as fast as possible, with ‘their eyes on infinity and their mind on zero’. Another way in which
participants tend to keep away from the actual experience is by deflecting their attention to other
features. For example, by starting to talk to the belayers while climbing the pole at a ropes course
activity or by whistling or singing (like the seven dwarfs!) when entering the cave in a caving activity.
This focus needs to be shifted to the experiencing of the actual situation. This stimulation of the hereand-now experiencing can be facilitated in different ways. These include: when introducing an activity
pointing out the mechanisms of distraction and inviting individuals not to engage in them; bringing into
individuals awareness these behaviours if they happen during the action; and by looking for ways to
encourage individuals to slow down if they hurry through the action. A good example of this is
participation in the pamper pole, where after climbing the pole participants first have to turn around on
top before jumping off. This action reduces the possibility of stumbling on and jumping off in almost
the same moment, reducing the attempt to just ‘conquer’ the pole without being fully present. Similar
to this, Hovelynck (1999) argues that facilitators should support their participants to make a shift from
task success orientation to a frame orientation. Thus, it is not necessarily the task success that provides
the learning; it can sometimes even be the opposite, whereby not completing the perceived task
outcome is an important vehicle for change.
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Another example, of a high ropes course activity called the ‘team beam’ illustrates further this
alternative opportunity for change. Two people, each standing on an unstable log, suspended by
cables, depend on each other to make it to the other side. Two participants, Anna and Laura, choose to
do this activity together, however, their motivation is different. Anna wants to try to clearly verbalize
and respect her own boundaries in relation with someone else. Laura wants to experience trust in the
activity, through the commitment she and her partner they have made to complete the task together. As
the moment of action comes closer, Anna gets scared and wants to withdraw. She asks Laura to not do
the activity. At first, Laura reacts furious. She feels, once again, betrayed by the lack of commitment of
someone else. She tries to persuade Anna to keep her engagement. Anna is crying. She says she can not
do it without going out of touch with herself. That is not what she wants to experience anymore, so she
decides not to continue with the activity. After fifteen minutes of personal reflection time they come
back together. As Laura verbalizes that she is not angry anymore and respects Anna’s decision, Anna
is profoundly relieved and comments how this is almost impossible for her to accept she says, “I break
my promise in choosing for myself and I do not loose your love for me”. This activity could not have
been a greater success in any other way, as Anna has now experienced acceptance and love irrelevant
of her behavior. A task success orientation to completing the adventure activity would not have gained
the same quality of learning outcome and personal change.
Direct the Attentional Focus to Actual Features of the Experience (Greenberg, 1993)
In directing the participant to the actual and appropriate dimensions of the experience it is necessary to
confront the participant with what is happening at that moment. By, for instance, sharing your
observations, ‘I can hear you breathing slowly and fully’, ‘hey, I don’t see you looking around and yet
you say you are in search of a handhold’, or even by imitating movements (making a fist while saying I
am not angry) or sounds (sighing). The way in which the participant will respond to these interactions
will of course be determined by the relationship you already have established with them. Part of this
relationship is the permission that as a therapist you have obtained to intervene on a therapeutic level.
Which is of course not a simple answer to a request, but is the unspoken result of the respectful
development of the therapeutic relationship.
Stimulate and Evoke Schematic Emotional Memory
In order to evoke schematic emotional memory we should not try to avoid the behaviors that are
subject to change, nor should we try to enforce an artificial positive attitude towards the activity,
oneself and each other, where participants do not encounter their problematic behavior. Indeed, we
want to welcome the dysfunctionality, because when visible and alive it can become subject to change
(Greenberg, 1994). In order to change dysfunctional behavior the according scheme must be ‘up and
running’, that is the behavioral pattern must be fully present and enacted by the participant.
When the course experience is nothing but a series of success stories and a chain of positive feelings
towards one another it may be hard to link them with other life events. It will be more like a dreamlike
holiday. This is a strong plea against some types of full value contracts where all of the negative
labeled conducts are beforehand forbidden. Participants agree not to put someone down, try with the
best of their capacities, not to use discouraging language etc. Whereas, the aim of such a contract
should be to create and maintain a safe working atmosphere it sometimes seems to become a set of
imposed behavior rules to serve the facilitator’s well being, and to avoid a sense of the situation being
out of their control. Furthermore, it must be difficult for a participant to judge the sincerity of their
other group-members in such a situation. So if I, for example, succeed in getting through a hole in the
Spiders Web and my fellow group members applaud, I will never be sure if they applaud because it is
part of the contract, or because I behaved in a way that spontaneously urges them to applaud. On the
contrary, away from a safe bottom line of necessary ‘ground rules’, participants should be able to
encounter those aspects of themselves and others that are dysfunctional and perhaps even harmful and,
in a dialogue amongst each other, formulate and develop their proper values and judgments.
Create and Maintain a ‘Reflective Space’
Ringer (see this volume) uses the term ‘reflective space’ to describe how a positive environment for
reflections can be organized. A similar process is required during the actions in adventure therapy
programs, with the need to create and maintain an atmosphere where participants will be facilitated to
explore their experiences. This is not achieved by imposing a number of rules or a so-called contract.
For example, when group members are silent, they are respectful, not because what a participant does,
but because they are told not to talk when an individual is trying to complete an activity. A reflective
space can be built by the therapist or facilitator role modeling appropriate behaviour, by sharing the
effect of the behaviors of others upon themselves. For example, telling your group fellows that their
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‘shouts of encouragement’ made you loose your concentration and had the opposite effect of what they
meant.
Do not use Descriptions or Names that Narrow or Devaluate the Proper Experience of the
Participant
Calling a trust-fall a ‘trust-fall’ is useful amongst colleagues, because we then have a common
language. However, in interaction with participants it suggests that the activity is a matter of trust.
This label hinders other possible perceptions and experiences or the evocation of emotional schemes.
Hovelynck (1999:17) supports this when he argues “a first principle of facilitation then becomes
providing participants with space to enact their metaphors”. In his example, of a high horizontal beam
on a ropes-course, he calls it, “being careful not to introduce the beam as a ‘balance’ beam too
lightly”(ibid.:17). By this he means that we might narrow the participants’ space too much when using
the word ‘balance’. The same devaluation of a clients’ experience may happen when facilitators point
out the most difficult part within an activity or action. This can be illustrated by a specific event on the
pamper-pole (note that the name seems to imply that the activity is so fear provoking that one needs
diapers!). When a participant manages to stand up the facilitator says (from his or her own experience),
“very good, standing up was the most difficult part”. This statement was incongruent with the
participant’s experience. As it turns out in the reviewing session after the activity looking back on her
experience this participant actually describes how standing up was easy, “I trusted myself and the
moves I made, I felt very confident in doing this. It was being dependent on others that felt scary and
even horrible. Jumping off that pole, belayed by the other group-members and being totally dependent
of their actions was a nightmare for me”.
Encourage Participants to Directly Contact What is Anxiety Provoking and was Previously
Avoided
In order to allow participants to engage in the meaning of the anxiety experience invite them to interact
with that which provokes the fear and see what happens next. For example, do not tell participants who
are afraid of heights not to look down during the abseil or rappel, but rather the opposite. Invite the
participant who is afraid to fall in a hole along the route in a cave to explore that hole, to actually try to
move in the hole.
Set up and Personalize Activities to Generate New Experiments
In personalizing the activities, ‘grade’ the challenge in order to meet the participants ‘level of
readiness’ to engage him / herself more fully in the activity. Zinker (1977; 1994) uses the term
‘grading’ within the use of Gestalt experiments. This helps the client to execute an experiment at the
level at which he/she is ready to do so in a given therapy hour (ibid.:132). Note that the use of
‘experiment’ in a Gestalt context does not have the same meaning as in the classical scientific setting.
Within this context it is the acceptance of a challenge, the willingness to try something new and being
curious about the outcome. Thus, grading should be done, not only at the level of readiness of the
participant, but also taking into account surrounding circumstances, such as the length of the program
or group dynamic mechanisms. In this way standard adventure activities can be engaged in at a
personalized level for each participant. See Figure I for an illustration of some different grades that
could be applied to the ‘backward fall’ of the trust fall activity.
Figure I
Up and Downgrading of a ‘Trust Fall’ Activity to
Meet the Individual Level of Challenge
Fall down from a platform
group members will stand in two rows to catch you
fall down backwards
a group member will catch you
fall down backwards
a group member already holding you will support you
stand straight and imagine falling backwards
while a group member will catch you
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Figure II identifies how a classical trust fall activity can be put in an order that either upgrades or
downgrades the level of challenge that it provides. Top of the ranking is the backward fall of a platform
of 1.7 meters high. Downgrading means that we try to lower the physical and psychological difficulty
of that activity so that it becomes obtainable for that individual participant. This could physically be
done by lowering the height of the platform, or by a fall backwards standing on the ground with a
fellow participant standing behind your back to catch you. If that participant holds you gently from the
start this might also further downgrade the experiment. On the other hand, an experiment might as well
be too easy for someone and as such not present a challenge or a learning opportunity. In that case we
must try to upgrade the experiment to a desirable level of suspense. However, it is important to
remember, even in this attempt to grade the activity this has to be verified with the participants’
individual perception of the scaling of the level of difficulty depending on the emotional schemes that
are activated by this set-up of the activity. Perhaps being supported by one designated person is more
fear evoking than a ‘anonymous’ circle of fellow group members.
Conclusions
The aim of this article has been to point out some of the major attention points for facilitators,
counselors or therapists during the more ‘action-oriented’ phase of an adventure therapy program. All
too often the role of the facilitator during this phase (apart from some technical and safety issues) is
restricted to the gathering of interesting ‘processing material’, that can then be reflected upon in the
reviewing session that follows the activity. In such a set-up the most important task for the facilitator
during the activity would be to maintain a ‘sphinx-like’ attitude, not showing any form of
encouragement or disagreement whilst collecting as many relevant data as possible. These observations
would then be used afterwards to facilitate the reflection following the action. On the contrary, it is
necessary to promote an active and intervening attitude from the facilitator, not only in the reviewing
part, but equally important during the more action-oriented phase during the actual adventure activity.
To value the strength of our working tool of adventure activities we need to: actively intervene during
the activity; facilitate the here-and-now experiencing of the participants; direct the focus of the
participants to actual features of the experience; and stimulate the evocation of dysfunctional behavior.
At the same time, the facilitator must be careful not to narrow or devaluate the real experience of
participants, or help them to avoid the contact with that what is fear provoking. This article stresses,
therefore, the importance of the processing-in-action, in order to obtain long lasting changes within the
dysfunctional behaviors of clients. Alongside this, the processing-in-action model advocates the
importance of tailor-made programs, activities and interventions for individual therapeutic needs. Thus,
the ‘therapy within adventure’ cannot be assumed to be a naturally occurring process. The therapeutic
process of change needs to be carefully and skillfully managed throughout all phases of the adventure
experience.
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Author’s Biography
Luk Peeters holds a masters degree in Educational Sciences and is a licensed Psychotherapist. He
worked for Outward Bound Belgium for 12 years where he trained various target groups, ranging from
youth-at-risk to management programs, and held the position of Program Director. At present he comanages Exponent, which is a Ropes Courses Construction and Training Company, where he manages
the train-the-trainer programs. Apart from that, he works as an independent trainer for several
organizations, including a Gestalt Therapy Training Institute and an Experiential Education Training
Center. He is a member of AEE and of the European Association of Gestalt Therapy.
8