Tough Love Program - Substance Abuse Treatment
Tough Love programs offer assistance not only to acting out and otherwise unmanageable substance abusing teens but also to their parents and families. Recent years have seen a proliferation of these programs which involve Wilderness Training, boot camp and modified school settings structured or modeled along the philosophical principles of the Tough Love approach. These venues tend to separate the teen from the family and are usually at a considerable geographical distance from the adolescent's home community.
The treatment emphasis in Tough love settings is usually confrontative and unrelentingly focused on negative behaviors and their connection with the direct consequences that inevitably follow. The teenage substance abuser who has run afoul of the legal system is immediately confronted with direct consequences when negative or inappropriate behaviors are expressed in the treatment setting. The presumption is that the corrective experiences learned in the Tough Love setting will transfer out into the home community following discharge from the program.
Because of the intensity of the approach it has at times drawn severe criticism from those ideologically opposed to its methods.These programs address the needs of parents whose teens have become unmanageable at home but who are reluctant to send them to residential treatment programs or traditional "boot camp" experiences. Typically, they involve support groups for these parents who can share their fears and frustrations with others who are experiencing similar situations with their teenagers. . The goal of these group programs is to realign or redesign relationships within the family so as to healthily and firmly address the acting out teenager. They thus aim to restore the parents' lost status as authority figures in the home.
The guiding principle of Tough Love programs is that today's teens are facing incredible pressures in the world and that they are not held responsible for the consequences of unacceptable behavior. Thus the core emphasis in these programs is the teaching of the connection between behavior and consequences.
Perhaps the feature that best distinguishes the Tough Love programs is that it is international in scope and relatively free from the administrative and medical structures that characterize the approaches discussed earlier
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