I spent the weekend learning a lot of new things about addiction treatment from the talented folks at Lakeview Health. I was fortunate to be part of their “Professional Weekend” and I went rock wall climbing with some members of the group, which is one of the offsite activities Lakeview offers their clients. If you have never tried rock wall clinging and dangling (which is more like what I did), it is an activity that requires hand chalk, upper body strength, rental shoes and step-in harnesses the cute boys at the front desk untangle and hold like pants, while you step in and yank the straps so they fit like Spanx – flattering the glutes…
I did ask our Lakeview guide to point me to the “bunny wall” and she said, “You see that line up of little kids over there? That’s the easiest wall.” There was a queue of thirty or so children wearing birthday party hats and looking badass…
…so I chose an intermediate climb, tethered myself to a carabineer, hooked to a rope attached in the nether regions of the rock face, and began to map out a path up the wall. There are colored tapes and numbers to guide, but I didn’t look at them once I started up – the rock hand and footholds are different shapes and at some point I was not afraid or even tired, but I just seemed to run out of handholds to grab… I must have taken a wrong turn at the pink 7.6 (that’s rock climbing lingo).
I did what you are supposed to do when you want to come down: let go with impunity and half rappelled, half plummeted to the padded floor, and not without bouncing a couple of times against the handholds which reappeared aplenty when I did not need them.
Only one of my group made it to the top, but all of us got off the ground. Afterwards, we discussed as a group with the Lakeview representative, the benefits to recovery the rock wall experience could bring.
Why Rock Climbing is Good Recovery Therapy
1. Focus. While you are climbing, you do not think of anything else, and for a time all stress and worry dissipates. You are just one of the many people wearing silly shoes and climbing nowhere fast (or in my case, slow)…
2. Breaking it Down. You must take one step at a time – too often those in recovery look at things catastrophically – look at this wall and all you think about is how hard it looks, how impossible. But when you break the task into small steps, small victories happen and before you know it you are going gangbusters..
I’m not going to lie – I’m only about 8 feet in the air in this photo… Sylvia is next to me.
3. Camaraderie – Weirdly, we all cheered for each other. And I ended up having a great après-climb conversation with an interventionist/therapist who had some thought provoking ideas about the “dangers” of non-licensed addiction counseling. Fodder for another blog post…
4. Trust building. Padded floor or not, it would hurt to fall 60 feet off a wall. There are safety instructions and various people and apparatuses that must be trusted. It feels good to have faith in the process.
5. Success. I felt a sense of accomplishment. The woman who made it to the top said she felt “great”, and we all felt tired and on some small level, like winners.
Although I am sore everywhere this morning, so rock climbing must be good exercise: an added benefit. And I want to do it again…
