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Lessons from the Ranch: Wisdom from 30 years of Work with Seriously Emotionally Disturbed Youth

Jess is a charming, winsome 17-year-old with clear blue eyes, an easy smile, and exciting plans for his future. But there's another side to Jess that's darker and not so winsome. This side comes out when Jess's feelings of anger and alienation cause him to lash out and push away those who try to befriend him. If you'd experienced what Jess has, you'd be angry too.

Jess was molested by a respected youth worker at his family's church when he was 12. Then his beloved grandfather died, leaving Jess feeling alone and adrift, questioning God.

Over the next few years he slipped into drug use, alcohol abuse, and abysmal grades. When he ran away from home, his parents finally realized how troubled he was and sent him here to the Yellowstone Boys and Girls Ranch for intensive care and treatment.

After long, hard years of struggling with feelings of hopelessness and victimization, Jess is now taking charge of his life and making plans for life after high school graduation.

As for his faith in God? "We're working on our relationship," says Jess, who leads youth group meetings and stands before a hundred other Ranch kids with a sense of confidence and calm that would've been completely unimaginable only a year ago.

Clarissa is one of the young women who live with us at the Ranch. Put up for adoption when she was six months old and raped by a companion of her mother's when she was only four, Clarissa rarely received nurturing and guidance from the adults in her life, unless you count the people who taught her how to smoke pot, take LSD, drown her sorrows in alcohol, and inhale glue and paint fumes.

The most dramatic of Clarissa's many desperate cries for help happened when she locked herself in her mom's pickup truck with a can of spray paint and a cigarette lighter. After filling the cabin with fumes, she set the fumes ablaze, causing an explosion that almost killed her.

"I didn't see any point in being here on earth," said Clarissa, who was brought to us after failing to respond in foster care and a group home. "Whether I was here or not, it didn't seem like anyone noticed." Now, Clarissa's growing faith in God is giving her a greater sense of self-acceptance. In a recent family counseling session, she even experienced a breakthrough with her mom. "It was the first time when my mom left that I didn't want her to go," says Clarissa.

We could tell you many more stories about seriously emotionally disturbed (SED) youth who've come for treatment at Yellowstone Boys and Girls Ranch, a pioneering residential treatment facility located near Billings, Montana that currently cares for more than 600 young people. But let's put some of these kids' stories into context by describing some of the key characteristics of at-risk kids and explaining some of the important principles we've found most helpful in ministering to them over the past 30 years.

Six Characteristics of At-Risk Kids

Kids come in all shapes and sizes, and so do their problems. Over the years, we've learned to group the problems of SED kids into the following six categories, which we'll illustrate with examples from kids' lives.

1) Sad, angry and irritable, easily upset

Samantha has a family history of depression, including a single mom who has been very depressed herself while raising three children on her own with limited finances and time. During middle school, Samantha grew increasingly angry, acting out by verbal and physical aggression, inappropriate relationships with older men, alcohol dependence, and running away.

2) Depression and weariness

Josh exhibited fatigue, restlessness, and an absence of interest in life. After he arrived at YBGR, he was often curled up in a fetal position. Brilliant but unable to focus, Josh was also paranoid about "skin head"-type kids and what they might do to him.

3) Feelings of worthlessness

Andrea's mother had often told her that she was a double mistake who should have never been conceived and would have been aborted had the procedure been legal. As a result, Andrea experienced extreme feelings of self-blame, helplessness, and a deep sense of loneliness and alienation.

4) Changes in behaviors, use of time, sleep, appetite, social group

Danielle's friendships began to change with the weather. New things sparked her interest, such as addictions and an intense concern about her weight. Once very interested in athletics and school, these areas of her life fell away, leaving her with nothing to hang on to.

5) Withdrawal from life, loss of interest in activities

The son of divorced parents who lived with his dad, Bob isolated himself from the world rather than dealing with its painful complications. With family dynamics so difficult, Bob focused most of his energy into hanging out with peers until he suddenly even lost interest in that.

6) An unhealthy preoccupation with heaven and death

This is a tricky one for youth workers who want their kids to focus not only on this life but also on eternity. But for Tyler (see sidebar on page 34), such preoccupations crossed over from the area of healthy spirituality to an unhealthy obsession that masked his suicidal tendencies.

In their simpler forms, many of the characteristics are a standard part of adolescence. But for SED kids, these characteristics should serve as warning signs that something much deeper may be wrong.

Eight Principles for Ministering to At-Risk Kids

There's no blueprint for dealing with hurting human beings, but over the past three decades, we've learned to rely on the following principles as we work with troubled kids.

1) Learn to listen

We live in a noisy age, and even our churches are full of talk, lectures, and other messages that make it hard for kids to express themselves. But we believe it's essential to give kids a chance to talk about and identify their feelings.

If you learn to listen, your kids will begin to open up and talk to you. Then, with your help and guidance, they can learn that they have to deal with the issues that trouble them rather than trying to stuff them inside or run away from them. When young people have a chance to talk about their pain, they can begin to own their feelings and acknowledge that they need help.

Listening isn't the ultimate goal of ministry with youth, but it's an absolutely essential first step that can be of immense help in assisting kids as they choose a healthy life in the midst of the competing voices.

2) Use peer support

We rely on the assistance of older kids who've made it out of the darkness. Because of what they've been through, they can help others recognize and address their issues, both cognitive and behavioral.

At Yellowstone, we use peer accountability small groups as a central part of our chaplaincy program. Peers can have a powerful impact on helping kids rethink and redirect their responses to situations using biblical principles. And peers themselves grow by learning to listen to and help others.

We invest heavily in our older kids who've advanced in their faith walk. We pour ourselves into them, making them our voices, our ears, and our peer leaders to younger troubled kids.

3) Explore vital biblical models

Many biblical stories fail to touch SED kids. But troubled biblical characters like Joseph, David, and Gideon have much to teach about dealing with life's ups and downs. We regularly use the stories of their broken lives as models for confronting challenging circumstances and depressive moods with faith-based solutions. For example, the story of Joseph's brothers selling him into slavery was a key turning point for Matt, whose parents had tried to drown him. He could identify with Joseph's sense of alienation and victimization.

The Bible is full of stories that probe humanity's dark and twisted sides. Though we don't often hear about these stories in Sunday sermons, they can be a rich source of truth for troubled kids.

4) Always emphasize the "So what" application to life circumstances

Instead of leaving kids to interpret the Bible for themselves, we help them see and grasp the life implications of various stories and teachings.

Life lessons are everywhere in Scripture. For example, during a recent Halloween Sunday message called "Day of the Walking Dead," we taught about all the people who griped about Lazarus' death by saying, "Lord, if you had just been there!" We tried to move them beyond anger and victimization to the question: "Okay, so what are we going to do?" We followed up on this lesson in group sessions all the following week.

Troubled kids sometimes need extra help in applying biblical lessons to their tangled-up lives. We make no apologies for focusing on stories that demand some kind of response and for making the need for such applications perfectly clear to our kids.

5) Dramatization

We always try to move beyond text and words to dramatization of life circumstances and a faith-based approach. Drama is a powerful tool to touch kids' lives and get to the heart of the matter.

For example, we cast kids in roles in biblical stories like the prodigal son, asking them to act out the parts and express the emotions involved. This helps the biblical stories reach deeper into their hearts. Plus it gives us concrete things to talk about together.

6) Experience

We also rely on experiential activities, such as having groups or individuals pound nails into a cross as a living symbol of their sins and of Christ's sacrificial suffering. This year we enhanced the experience with imagery from Mel Gibson's The Passion… We've also used our ropes course and the labyrinth as metaphors for the faith journey.

Because of their life experiences, SED kids' minds often play tricks on them, making it difficult for them to see the lessons in biblical passages that may seem obvious to you and me. By connecting these lessons to experiential activities, we drive home these lessons in ways that'll resonate with them and cause them to reflect on their implications.

7) Shema (Deut. 6:7)

Moses told the people of Israel that God's law should be written on their hearts. It was also to be impressed upon their children through talking about it at any available opportunity.

We take a similar approach. We seek out and exploit teachable moments from the time our kids get up in the morning to when they fall into bed at night.

One recent teaching moment was both simple and profound. As John was working with Annie, who was having problems focusing on her schoolwork and completing her assignments, John's cell phone rang. And rang. And rang.

"Aren't you going to answer it?" asked Annie.

"No," said John. "Because I'm focusing on you. And if I'm going to focus on you, I need to ignore everything else right now. Because if I answer my cell phone now, that might divide our attention and prevent us from completing the task at hand."

Such teachable moments present themselves regularly if we only seek them out. And they represent wonderful opportunities for for us to write God's law on our kids' hearts.

8) Focus on forgiveness

At Yellowstone we give much attention to preaching, teaching, and living forgiveness. We've become convinced that the only way some of the troubled kids we work with will ever be willing to make tentative steps out of their own emotional and spiritual darkness is when they can catch a glimmer of God's loving grace shining into their souls.

We stress that forgiveness isn't like a scab over a still-festering wound. True forgiveness requires a deep wrestling with the sources of pain and hurt. Our kids know all about pain and the fear to forgive. Only through life experiences demonstrating to these fragile and vulnerable kids the process of forgiving and being forgiven can we encourage them to trust God and open up to God's mercy.

Working with SED kids we have many opportunities to live out forgiveness on a daily basis. Those who have worked with kids at Yellowstone for any length of time have been on the receiving end of curses, kicks, and fists. And our response is to forgive such outbursts and focus on the teachable moment such outbursts afford.

Each young person is unique, and there's no sure-fire plan for working with SED kids. And thankfully, God graciously uses our errors and missteps as well as our plans and programs. But one way or another, many of the troubled kids we've had the pleasure of working with have grown closer to God during their time with us. And we pray that the principles we've developed over the years may help you in your work with the seriously emotionally disturbed kids in your group.

John and Carolyn Jamison have spent more than 30 years working with troubled kids at the Yellowstone Boys and Girls Ranch (www.ybgr.org), a pioneering residential treatment center near Billings, Montana that was founded in 1957. Together they work to help troubled young people be at peace with "Jesus, others, and themselves." They attend the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church in Billings.