Treatment

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Our Approach

Fulshear initially delivers an intensive, highly structured program of therapeutic care that shifts—as each young woman is ready— to an increasingly experiential program oriented toward personal insight and wellness. This experiential transition-oriented treatment approach creates a manageable path to resilience, self-efficacy, emotional regulation and independence—all critical factors for long-term self-sufficiency. When students eventually move to the Fulshear Apartments, they still have individual therapy sessions and access to therapy groups, but they take a more independent approach to managing their own wellness.

This graduated approach to residential treatment honors our vision for every Fulshear student: a life of healthy independence and self sufficiency. We employ a number of evidence-based treatment modalities that, together, promote accelerated and sustainable healing.

Though many of our students have suffered from trauma, addiction, and/or mental illness, our approach to therapy is strengths based and resiliency focused, emphasizing potential over pathology. Our clinical approach is based on the philosophy that in order to move from crisis to wellness, a young woman must first engage her innate cognitive, emotional, and social strengths. It is especially important for young women who have experienced trauma, addictions, and mental illness to discover or rediscover these strengths. This approach to treatment gives our students the positive emotional milieu they need to overcome defeating labels and develop a strong sense of their own potential.

Our team has carefully selected several primary treatment approaches which, together, make up a powerful residential treatment program specifically designed for young women emerging into adulthood. Primary approaches include:

Treatment Team

Fulshear Ranch Academy's multidisciplinary treatment is comprised of psychiatrists, psychologists, licensed therapists and substance-abuse counselors, registered nurses, mentors, and certified equine specialists. Our membership in the InnerChange family of treatment programs means that our clinicians benefit from ongoing professional dialogue with an extended community of treatment professionals, all of whom specialize in women’s issues.

Psychiatric Services

Fulshear’s psychiatric team, led by Norma Clarke, M.D., provides psychiatric intervention, support, and medication management tailored to the unique and evolving needs of each Fulshear student. As emerging adults, our young women are treated as key drivers of their own psychiatric treatment and are taught self-advocacy and personal management skills for lifelong medical and psychiatric wellness.

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.