The Truth About Wilderness Immersion Programs
My week as a faux-captive taught me more about trauma than survival
I wasn’t ready to share this episode in my book, but I want to speak out now about my difficult experience with a wilderness skills immersion and why I think some of these programs must become more trauma-informed.
About five years ago I participated in a week-long wilderness skills immersion program that I chronicle in chapter 4 of my book, Why We Need to Be Wild.
This program purported to instruct participants on making friction fire, finding food and water, building shelter, surviving with minimal supplies, and experiencing the forest in an ancient and meaningful way.
Their marketing copy promised precisely what I was looking for at that time in my life, it read: “Feel the freedom of surviving off the land and learn to trust the earth to provide for all of your needs.”
I was skeptical that this could be achieved in seven days and was curious about the warning that we would be uncomfortable and without food for long periods. Yet, I had heard wonderful feedback about this school and was excited to gain these ancestral skills. As a long-distance runner, I knew I could handle discomfort, and having suffered through the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur annually (which requires not eating for twenty-four hours), I figured I’d get through the extended fast (with some beating of my chest).
Fast forward to the last two days of the course. (If you want to know what went down during the rest of the week, you can read Chapter 4: Survivaling). Now, I knew that many of the course specifics wouldn’t be revealed to us ahead of time. What I didn’t know was how this lack of information would become a menacing manipulation for me.
At first, I found the uncertainty frustrating. I didn’t like that other people were in charge of my schedule and that I couldn’t anticipate what would happen next.
As an adult in my 40s, and someone who highly values autonomy, you could say that I was just a type A control freak who couldn’t relax and go with the flow.
Or, you could peek into my head and see how the experience of a Jewish person who has grown up with near-constant reminders of the horrors of the Holocaust would never want to put themselves in a situation of not-knowing-what-was-going-on, no matter how friendly and trustworthy the leaders appeared to be.
Maybe that sounds dramatic and victim-y, but it is also a real experience shared by targeted people all over the world who compensate for it by developing hypervigilance.
For me and my Jewish ancestors, hypervigilance IS a survival skill.
Though we were not allowed in their camp area, the instructors clearly had food and shelter that we didn’t, which made me feel like we were their captives. I started resenting the format of the course. The leaders counseled us to expect strong reactions to being underfed and underslept and dealing with the unknowns of the woods.
All that was fine, but it was the unspoken psychological mind game going on that irked me. I didn’t feel that it provided an accurate setup for a survival situation. While the circumstances were intended to replicate the feeling of being at the mercy of the wilderness, the effect was more to test how we dealt with being manipulated and deceived.
We were praised if we could relax and stay alert, and frowned upon if we asked too many questions or appeared anxious.
Lest this post become another chapter in a book, I’ll fast-forward again to the final night of the immersion, when we were loaded into a minivan and not told where we were going. It was dusk, and people in the van started speculating about where we might be headed. I bet they’re taking us to dinner! Some folks cheered. Maybe a hotel so we can wash up? Again, joyous hoots. And then, someone said, Yeah, they’re taking us to the showers.
To the showers!?
I admit I was primed to hear this wrong. I was pre-menstrual, underfed, underslept, and certainly stinky. But as I rode in a van with no knowledge of where we were going, with the recognition that Shabbat had just started, and someone tried to use Holocaust humor to poke fun at the situation, I lost it.
For them, it was a joke. To me, it was trauma. It was millions of people surrendering their autonomy to the Nazis, and ending up in mass graves. After an entire week of being at the mercy of our leaders, this was the last straw. Or I thought it was.
When we finally made it to our destination an hour later — a path in the woods that we were to navigate alone in the dark — I was holding back tears and fuming out my ears.
I rebelled against instructions and found the friend I had brought with me who was also Jewish, and proceeded to commiserate with him about all the ways I felt the program had discounted our identities and failed to recognize how their manipulations and secrecy betrayed the real point of the course.
We were so worked up by the end of what was supposed to be a celebratory night hike that we decided we had to leave. Right away. No one else was feeling the betrayal. They all appeared content, proud of themselves for making it through the challenge.
I didn’t have the energy to explain why I was so upset; it seemed like too much work to describe the geyser of generational trauma that erupted in my psyche because of this carefully engineered survival situation. So we said our goodbyes and celebrated our own liberation with some tequila and take-out in a seedy hotel. Next year in Jerusalem!
Zooming out, let’s address the broader question of why anyone today would want to acquire survival skills. It might seem absurd for most modern folks to learn how to live solely on what they encounter in nature. Yet, there is plenty of evidence that the original Homo sapiens way of life is the only sustainable way to live on this planet, and it is proven out over hundreds of thousands of years of stable human existence.
Consider that during previous civilizational collapses, anyone who survived the complete destruction of centralized food production systems would have had to revert to hunting and gathering for a time. These skills are possibly the most valuable ones we can acquire. And hey, read my book about it.
But the point is that we Jews know this from our long history in forced diaspora.
As Rebecca Frankel wrote in Into the Forest: A Holocaust Story of Survival, Triumph, and Love, when faced with social collapse and fatal persecution in the 1930s, 25,000 Eastern European Jews fled to the forest and survived with a primitive lifestyle until liberation. This anecdote is still relevant today for all persecuted people.
I expected to be taught our primal human skills in a supportive environment, as there was nothing mentioned in the program materials about how information would be withheld from us during the entire course. There was no fine print about the possible traumatic effects of not knowing what was going to happen. This is because these programs are not trauma-informed for various groups, since as far as I could tell, the people who designed the course were not from targeted groups.
I imagine that they would never offer a program about survival at sea where Black participants would be made to sleep on the floor of the boat and not told where they were going or why. That’s an obvious one.
But there are numerous situations where withholding situational knowledge can inadvertently re-traumatize someone. When your identity is not targeted, you don’t think about this. I like the terminology of targeted vs. non-targeted because it can account for both groups and individuals, and it doesn’t assume that someone’s skin color predetermines their psychology. Hat tip to Carter McBride, a Black inclusion educator, who spoke with me at length about these concepts at the Saskatoon Circle ancestral skills gathering.
I know of at least two prominent wilderness schools that use this simulation of captivity to introduce survival skills, and there are likely many more.
By openly discussing my experience, I hope that the leaders of these organizations will consider restructuring their immersions to account for the various psychological backgrounds and identities of the people they bring into the woods.
Learning happens best when students feel supported and recognized. Playing mind games in the wild is not the best way to empower any of us.
