Published: December 26, 2007 05:18 pm

James Coburn
The Edmond Sun

EDMOND — Most of the girls being treated for chemical addiction at Four Winds Ranch come from typical families. Their parents have moved to a neighborhood where their children can grow up in a healthy environment.

“What happens is chemicals get in the way,” said Mike Boss, co-owner of Four Winds Ranch in Guthrie. “And it basically begins to sabotage everything you’ve tried to do to enhance your child’s life.”

Four Winds is a substance abuse treatment center designed for teenage girls in a residential setting. He also owns a 24-bed-drug recovery center for boys in Texas.

Boss has been a mental health and chemical dependency counselor for 24 years.

“My initial inspiration was I was one of the kids — a wild, crazy maniac that needed to learn how to stay clean and do the next right thing,” Boss said. “And out of that through my own recovery came working as a counselor at different hospitals. But my goal was always to have my own center.”

Girls from as far away as Canada are sent to Four Winds by their parents for a 90-120 day stay before they graduate to an outpatient program in their communities.

A consistent structure is provided to the girls so they can learn to live within boundaries, Boss said. An educational process involves self-worth and family dynamics. Girls succeed by working with their therapists and therapy groups to “rediscover or discover who they really are inside,” Boss said.

“They make a commitment to stay clean, and then they make a commitment to work on themselves. Then hopefully they make a commitment to go home and continue the process,” he said. “It’s really a spiritual path, not a religious path but a spiritual path.”

Parents can look for warning signs to alert them of a child’s substance abuse, said Donna Silvermane, a registered nurse and facility coordinator overseeing the daily operations at Four Winds.

“They may see changes in their mood, being withdrawn,” Silvermane said.

Symptoms may mirror other disorders. Oppositional behavior of defiance and changes in appearance may be mistaken by parents as a normal adjustment period of adolescence, Boss said.

So a lot of parents get hooked up in, ‘What did we do wrong? What could we have done? What should we be doing?’” Boss said. “And they try to identify where they are involved with the problem and they tend not to look at the chemical use.”

Parents can learn not to enable their children’s chemical dependency problems by setting appropriate boundaries, Boss said. “Parents need to learn to provide opportunities for their children, but they can’t be responsible for the outcome because they have no control over that,” he continued.

He said most parents have used some level of mood-altering chemical themselves during their own high school years. And Boss said about 80 percent of high school students use some level of mood altering drugs from once a day to once a month. Twenty percent of those children have a chemical addiction problem, Boss said.

One 17-year-old at the recovery center told The Sun it took her 45 days before the reality of her chemical dependency became self-evident. “... That base core of a higher power — it took me a long time to get it,” she said. “And I had to really see the consequences of what I was doing.”

She was angry when her parents sent her to Four Winds and was angry at Silvermane from stopping her from running away, she said. Four Winds saved her life, she added. She said she’s learned she has a choice in not taking her first drink. Her first sip of alcohol was at age 13, which is the average onset age for alcohol and other chemical dependency, Boss said.

People need to realize that chemical dependency is a disease, she said. “And ultimately it can kill you.”

jcoburn@edmondsun.com

341-2121, ext. 114

http://www.edmondsun.com/local/local_story_360171830.html

Emphasis added by H4K Editor