Admission Criteria

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Below, please find a broad-strokes description of the type of student we accept at Fulshear, including clinical profile and exclusionary criteria. Applications are reviewed by our admissions staff and multidisciplinary team to ensure that we accept students who will thrive at Fulshear.

Student Portrait

Fulshear works with young women ages 18-24 who are eager, but not quite ready for independence. Our students are smart, curious, and capable, but have struggled with complex emotional or behavioral issues that have kept them from reaching their potential. Many have experienced trauma, chemical dependency, or mental illness, but have benefitted from prior treatment and are ready to move toward self-sufficiency. Despite having issues that require healing and management, these young women possess the internal resources for success and independence.

Our clinical team has the sophistication to work with difficult therapeutic cases along with the compassion and vision to focus on potential over pathology. As a result, our program is strengths based, focusing on each young woman's unique-often buried-constellation of gifts, talents, and passions. By helping our students discover and trust their internal resources, we equip them for sustainable lives of self-management, personal growth, independence and the skills and wisdom to navigate life.

Clinical Profile

Fulshear students have the intellectual and emotional resources to live independently but are not ready for independence due to a history of emotional or behavioral issues. Most Fulshear students have struggled with one or more of the following issues:

Complex Trauma
Borderline or Other Personality Disorder
Depression
Anxiety
Oppositional or Defiant Behaviors
Drug and/or Alcohol Abuse or Addiction
Co-Morbidity or Dual Diagnosis
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Eating Disorders
Poor Body Image
Bipolar

Exclusionary Criteria

Fulshear does not work with students who struggle with issues that would prevent their success at Fulshear or create a hazard for themselves or others, such as:

Psychosis
Violence
Intellectually Low-Functioning
Autism
Conduct Disorder
Pregnancy
Medically Unstable

Therapists can help this neural "reprogramming" along by creating a safe, affirming, supportive context in which the young-adult trauma victim can explore past events but have a different emotional experience when they do this exploration. This helps the young woman re-experience previously traumatizing experiences without feeling overwhelmed emotionally.

It can be so difficult for a parent to process their child’s trauma that they may unwittingly minimize and deny the severity of the situation—it’s just too much to take in. When this is the case, parents may miss the forest for the trees, i.e. they may unintentionally ignore the underlying trauma in favor of a myopic, but perhaps less disturbing, focus on acting out behaviors that are merely symptomatic of the trauma. Their daughter's distance, anger, anxiety, and situational avoidance may distract the parent from the painful cause of these symptoms.

While many teens initially view community service as an unwelcome chore, it becomes a highlight for many students over the course of treatment.