Christopher Hinds – ACSW, LCSW
Christopher Hinds is the Clinical Director of SUWS of the Carolinas. He joins SUWS with 30 years’ of leadership and development of child and adolescent treatment programs. Chris received his BSW at the Rochester Institute of Technology with additional study at the University of Oslo (Norway), an MSW from the Boston University School of Social Work in 1985, and advanced clinical and family therapy training at the Yale University School of Medicine’s Yale Psychiatric Institute from 1989-1992. Chris has been Director at three mental health/substance abuse treatment programs and also has a vast amount of clinical experience, having worked with adolescents and pre-adolescents as a psychiatric social worker, group therapist, family therapist and consultant in inpatient, outpatient, partial hospitalization, residential, private practice and high school settings.
Brandon Moffitt – MA, NCC, LPC – SUWS Approach Program Manager
Professional and Academic Background:
Brandon began working with adolescents in 1997 and has spent most of his professional career working with this type of student. In addition to a Bachelor’s degree in Education, Brandon holds a Master’s of Arts degree in Community Counseling from Denver Seminary. He has worked in a variety of settings with adolescents and outdoor wilderness programs including teaching 8th grade sci-ence in a public school, guiding whitewater and wilderness experiences, mentoring in a community service organization, and working as a therapist in a group home for boys. His final year in graduate school was spent doing a clini-cal internship with adjudicated boys in a residential treatment center. He was able to do both traditional talk therapy as well as Equine Assisted Psychother-apy, a means of treatment that includes working with horses. Once he received his Master’s degree in May of 2005, he went on to work three years in another residential setting, where individual, group and experiential therapies were the primary modes of treatment.
SUWS Background:
Brandon joined SUWS of the Carolinas in 2008 has worked as a therapist with Adolescent males with a heavy emphasis on spectrum issues. In the fall of 2011, he launched a new program called “Approach”, a wilderness therapy program for adolescents with social development disorders.
Clinical Specialties:
Asperger’s/NLD, ADHD, emotional expression and regulation, resistant adolescent males, leadership and empowerment, Depression and Anxiety, Self-esteem Issues, Identity Issues, Adoption Issues, Attachment Disorders and Family Systems Approach.
Interests:
Brandon is a Licensed Professional Counselor in North Carolina and a National Certified Counselor. He believes that an experiential approach, particularly in the wilderness, is a powerful way for a person to gain personal insight while experiencing change. He is confident that adolescents will be able to make needed change given the challenges and opportunities provided here at SUWS and is honored to be a part of that process. With his comprehensive view of treatment issues, Brandon is supportive and honest in his therapeutic approach. However, he believes that this is a journey that must include the family system alongside of their child so that the changes made at SUWS will be reinforced and fostered well into the future.
Personal Background
He is married with 2 children and loves fly fishing, fly tying, hiking, running, biking, camping and exploring in the woods with his wife, children and dog. He comes to work every day with his therapy dog, Miller.
Jesse Quam, MSW, LCSW – SUWS Seasons Program Manager
Professional and Academic Background:
Jesse Quam, MSW, LCSW is the Program Manager for the SUWS of the Caroli-nas/Seasons Program. Before earning his Masters of Clinical Social Work from Boston College (May, 2005), Jesse began his 16 year journey in wilderness in June 2006 at Aspen Achievement Academy, a therapeutic wilderness program in Utah. There, he worked as a Field Staff, Reunion Co-coordinator (facilitating the three day reunion with family for students graduating from the program), and Field Director. After a year hiatus, Jesse returned to wilderness therapy to work as a senior field staff at Passages to Recovery, a spiritually based 12 -step re-covery program in Southern Utah. While in graduate school, Jesse worked as a residential counselor and an individual therapist at The Walker Home and School, a residential home and school serving emotionally disturbed children and their families. He also provided group and individual therapy to homeless veterans with substance abuse issues at the Brockton Veterans’ Administration.
SUWS Experience:
Jesse began at SUWS of the Carolinas in May 2005 and has served in many capacities including a Wilderness Therapist, Program Manager, Clinical Director and currently the Seasons Program Manager, Visionary and Clinician. His goal with the Season Program is to provide treatment designed to identify the limit-ing beliefs and unhealthy behaviors that often can prevent the pursuit of con-structive goals and personal achievement.
Clinical Specialties:
His specialties are working with pre-adolescent boys and girls ages 10-14 living with challenges with a focus on social skills, anger, anxiety, depression, adop-tion, toxic divorces, and confidence issues.
Interests:
Jesse is a licensed clinical social worker in North Carolina and is particularly interested in family systems, attachment theory and spirituality. From his first role as a field staff at Western Therapeutic Wilderness Program, he has amassed over 15 years of experience working with at risk youth in the wilderness, where he strives to give students the tools they will need to chart a course for future growth and success and begin making progress in their lives. Each year he con-tinues to elevate his expertise as a professional and therapist by participating in continuing education in areas of substance abuse, clinical supervision, Asper-ger’s, attachment and ADHD treatments. As a leader in his field, he has pre-sented at several conferences, including multiple times at NATSAP and IECA conferences and conducts clinical supervision for new therapists seeking LCSW and LPC certification. He is currently the Chair of the NATSAP Best Practices Committee for NATSAP and has served on the NATSAP Government Relations Committee. He is also an adjunct professor of Outdoor Education program at Montreat College in Black Mountain, NC, co-teaching a Survey of Adven-ture/Wilderness Therapy course in the Outdoor Education Department.
Personal Background
Originally from Minnesota, he lives in Black Mountain NC with his wife and 2 children. He is an avid reader and likes to play golf, hike, and grilling out and is a baseball and Minnesota Vikings football fan. He and his family tend a large vegetable garden, are adding fruit bushes and trees to their small property and have recently started a small flock of (hopefully) laying hens.
Lynn Wadsworth, LPC – Program Manager
Professional and Academic Background
Lynn is a North Carolina Licensed Professional Counselor who comes to the Family Program with almost 20 years of experience in the field of adolescent and adult treatment. She is currently in the process of completing her requirements for NC Clinical Addiction Specialist License. She earned her Master’s in Community Counseling from Western Carolina University in 1993 and has worked as a counselor ever since.
Lynn’s experience includes working with adjudicated youth in a correctional setting, school-based substance abuse prevention, psychiatric hospital assessment, outpatient private therapy, residential treatment and inpatient hospitalization. Lynn has served as an interim director of a hospital-based intensive outpatient program and as director of a long-term residential treatment center. Lynn’s work with adolescents and families is based on family systems theory. She uses a variety of methods including cognitive-behavioral therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy, 12 step methodology, meditation and mindfulness training, person centered therapy and internal family systems therapy. Lynn believes we heal most effectively in the context of relationship (with self, others and nature) and that wilderness therapy offers the opportunity for all types of relationships to flourish.
SUWS Experience
Lynn has clinical experience in wilderness therapy starting at SUWS of the Carolinas in 2007. She was the Program Manager of Phoenix Outdoor as well as a primary therapist for adolescent males and females. Today, as the SUWS NC Family Program Manager, her cumulative clinical expertise and experience has made her an invaluable resource and advocate for the parents of children enrolled in a SUWS Program.
Clinical specialties include; Family Systems Approach, substance use/abuse Issues, anger management, grief issues and motivational enhancement.
Personal Background:
On weekends, Lynn continues to work as a Psychiatric Clinician assessing mental health and substance abuse patients who present in the emergency room at the Psychiatric intake department of Mission Hospital.
She lives in Asheville, NC spends time collecting fabrics and engaging in fiber art projects. She enjoys spending time with her son, family and friends.
Dona Menz, MS – Field Supervisor, Therapist
Professional and Academic Background:
Dona graduated with a Master’s degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from Pittsburgh State University and is currently working towards her Professional Counseling License in the state of North Carolina. Prior to returning to graduate school, Dona spent over twenty years in the IT field including networking, web presence, and managing a small television station. Dona has experience working with addiction and mental health issues within an innovative model of Recovery Education Centers in Western NC, which provided integrative care including psychoeducational classes, counseling, case management and psychiatric services. She also co-administered a truancy diversion program at Pittsburg State University’s Family Counseling Clinic, working with at-risk children, adolescents, and teens and their families in individual, group, and family counseling.
Clinical Specialties
Dona specializes in anxiety, depression, ADHD, addiction, self-esteem issues, and addictions.
Personal Background
Dona knows the transformative power of wilderness through growing up on family-run campgrounds and owning her grandparents’ working cattle ranch in Kansas. Integrating the outdoors with spirituality, mindfulness and meditation has been the key to her own personal growth, and she is excited to share this powerful and holistic approach with her clients. Dona has a daughter studying wildlife biology at her alma mater, PSU. She also enjoys yoga, needlepoint, and gardening.
Erin Crowley, MS, CSC – Field Supervisor, Therapist
Professional and Academic Background:
While growing up in the Bay Area, CA, Erin fell in love with nature and the outdoors through her many trips to the Redwood forest. This led her to earn a BS in Ecology from the University of California. Once graduated, her professional career began in the outdoors with her leading experiential environment education programs and backpacking expeditions for teens, designing and delivering ecology education programs to families and children in California and driving community art and environmental education programs to at-risk children in Latin America. Her first two years in wilderness experience came in 2003 when she was a guide field instructor for two different therapeutic wilderness programs in Montana.
The second phase of her professional career which incorporated counseling began in 2005, where she gained this experience by working as a Family Specialist in a strength-based wrap-around program, a playgroup leader at a Children’s Hospital, a Marriage and Family Therapist for a community counseling center and finally as a school counselor for both elementary and middle school aged students. She went back to school and earned her master’s degree in counseling from California State University and continued as a school counselor at Wissahickon Charter School in Philadelphia, PA.
Clinical Specialties
She brings to SUWS a wealth of knowledge and a unique approach in working with adolescents in both an outdoor and school setting. She is a License Eligible Marriage and Family Therapist, a Certified School Counselor, and Certified in Functional Behavioral Assessment.
Clinical specialties include; Group Therapy, Family Therapy, Latency Age Boys and Girls, Eco-therapy, Play Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Mindfulness Therapy, Narrative Therapy, Somatic Psychotherapy, Yoga Instruction, Educational Counseling, Experiential Wilderness Therapy.
Personal Background
Outside of work, she likes to explore nature, hike, backpack, swim, and dance. She is a Certified Yoga Instructor and loves to spend time with her 18 month old son and husband.
Kelly Moore, MS, LPC, NCC, ATR – Field Supervisor, Therapist
Professional and Academic Background:
Kelly has a Master’s of Science Degree in Art Therapy from Florida State University, with a specialization in Child and Adolescent Mental Health. While in graduate school, she worked with at-risk children and adolescents both in schools and in an intensive outpatient program. After graduate school, she worked at a hospice in Florida, leading both individual and group grief counseling sessions. She has practiced art therapy with local at-risk children in Thailand and the Galapagos Islands.
Kelly began her career in Wilderness Therapy as a Field Instructor at SUWS NC and now is a therapist at SUWS. That is when she realized the power of this approach. She believes that a combination of expressive and verbal therapies, utilized in a wilderness setting, can be very beneficial for children and adolescents.
Clinical Specialties
Her specialties include; Substance Abuse and Addictions, Art Therapy, Grief and Loss, Wilderness Experiential Therapy, Pre-Adolescents, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
Marie Davis, MA, NCC, LPC-A – Field Supervisor, Therapist
Professional and Academic Background:
Marie holds master’s degree from Appalachian State University in Community Counseling, a post-graduate certificate in Expressive Arts Therapy and is an LPC-A, pursuing full licensure in NC. She has over 10 years of counseling experience and began her career path as a nutritional counselor, establishing and running her own consulting business for 5+ years. During those years, she became intimately aware of the relationship between the body and the mind and the relationship between physical health and mental health. To better service her client’s emotional needs, Marie pursued her master’s degree in counseling. Prior to graduate school, Marie worked with children ages 8-16 counseling them using art therapy in hospitals and in schools. She has particular interest in trauma, mind/body medicine, holistic health, addiction recovery, authentic relationships, healthy human development, and expressive art therapy.
Clinical Specialties
Marie’s clinical specialties are Adolescent Girls, Pre-Adolescent Girls and Boys, Grief and Loss, Depression, Identity Issues, Low Self-Esteem, Solution-Focused Therapy, Expressive Art Therapy, Group Therapy, Multiple Family Therapy, Cognitive Behavior Therapy, Nutritional Counseling.
Taisir El-Souessi, MS, LPCA – Field Supervisor, Therapist
Professional and Academic Background:
Taisir moved from Jacksonville, Florida to Boone, North Carolina to get a post graduate certification in Expressive Arts Therapy from Appalachian State University. She brings to SUWS over 6 years of counseling experience and has many years of working with children. She received both her undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of North Florida and has a Master of Science in Mental Health Counseling.
Her work experience includes being a therapist for a behavioral health facility, an intensive in-home specialist for a community based treatment service, individual and group counseling for adolescent females at a private school, and a family counselor for Youth Villages, NC Critical Access Behavioral Health Agency (CABHA). She also has over 12 years of volunteer work for many agencies including Literacy for America, Hubbard House, DV Shelter, Community Hospice and elementary schools and women’s centers.
Her interest in wilderness therapy came about after 2 years working as a facilitator for the Florida State College Outdoor Education Center where she organized team building and outdoor education activities.
Clinical Specialties
Clinical specialties include grief work, family systems, ODD, ADHD, in-patient stabilization, substance abuse and therapy through experiential art.
Personal Background
In her spare time, Taisir is a dance instructor and a fitness coach. She loves theater, dance, arts, music and gardening. Her favorite thing is teaching dance to her 13 year old girl.
Trysh Huntington, MA, LMFT – SUWS Adolescent Female Program Therapist
Professional and Academic Background:
Trysh Huntington, a Licensed Therapist with a Master’s Degree in Marriage and Family Therapy and a post Graduate Degree from Appalachian State University in Expressive Arts Therapy, has had the opportunity to work with several differ-ent groups of students at SUWS of the Carolinas, however specializes and is the lead therapist for the SUWS Female Adolescent Group. She is enthusiastic about her work at SUWS and views her position as an opportunity to combine her two life passions: 1. working with youth in the wilderness and 2. working with fami-lies in a therapeutic capacity in order to assist them in gaining a better working knowledge of their strengths.
She brings extensive outdoor background with 13 years of experience years as an experiential educator and administrator with both the North Carolina and Hurricane Island Outward Bound Schools. She embraced this work and for five years was the Associate Program Director and then Program Director of Hurri-cane Island Outward Bound School’s STEP program for adjudicated youth. She has worked with other wilderness programs as a graduation assistant, course director and field instructor. Just prior to coming to SUWS in 2010, Trysh worked in community mental health as an Intensive In-home Therapist serving families in Buncombe County, North Carolina.
Clinical Specialties:
Her clinical specialties include depression and anxiety, social difficulties, grief issues, NLD/Asperger’s and family systems.
Trysh believes that it is imperative for students to be authentic, hard-working and genuine, in order to truly benefit from her therapeutic work. Her approach to treatment includes systemic, experiential and expressive arts therapy modal-ities.
Personal Background
In her free time, Trysh can be found riding her mountain bike on the trails of Western North Carolina and beyond. She is an avid knitter and loves to paint, cook, garden and spend time with her dog, Fern.
Sally Jenkins, MS, LCAS, CCS – Therapist
Professional and Academic Background:
Sally has devoted most of her career providing therapeutic services for adolescents and their parents. Sally received her undergraduate degree in Social Work and a Master’s degree as a prepared clinician from Western Carolina University. She is a Licensed Clinical Addiction Specialist (LCAS), a Certified Clinical Supervisor (CCS) and is trained trainer in QPRT (suicide assessment tool).
With over 20 years of experience, she has worked with families in many settings; psychiatric inpatient, outpatient, Intensive outpatient, therapeutic wilderness and therapeutic boarding school. She began her career at Neil Dobbins Detox Center in Asheville before graduate school. After receiving her master’s, she worked for five years as a primary clinician at the state funded Swain Recovery Center in Black Mountain. She began her focus on adolescents at Mission Hospital Adolescent Psychiatric Unit where she spent 4 years in the intensive outpatient program.
Wilderness Experience
Realizing her talents and desire to work with the adolescent population, she approached Aspen Education Group and found a good match for her experience and expertise. In her eight years tenure so far with Aspen, she has worked in many outdoor programs and has taken on many roles, including SUWS ‘trail’s end’ Program Manager and adolescent female clinician, Phoenix Outdoor Program Director and Clinical Director, Stone Mountain School adolescent boy’s (ADHD, NLD and Spectrum) clinician, and at Four-Circles as a substance abuse/addiction therapist. Today she has come full circle and is back at SUWS of the Carolinas as a clinician with the Approach Program.
She utilizes several modalities and theories to provide counseling. Sally has written, developed, and implemented family programs and is dedicated to treating the entire system to provide to greatest opportunity for change in the family.
Her specialties include; substance abuse, socially awkward, NLD, learning differences and female adolescents.
Personal Background
“I love the energy of adolescents; their passion and honesty bring momentum to the therapeutic process.” Sally lives in the Asheville area with her 7 year old son Penn and their dog Lilly. She loves working outside in her yard and knitting.
Kyle Stout, P-LCSW – Therapist
Professional and Academic Background:
Kyle Stout is a Provisionally Licensed Clinical Social Worker. She graduated with her Master’s in Social Work from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. For her undergraduate degree, she attended Appalachian State University and double majored in Sociology and Recreation Management with a concentration in Outdoor Experiential Education. It was there that Kyle was first exposed to wilderness therapy and saw how powerful the wilderness can be for a young person. She worked as a field staff at both, Aspen Achievement Academy, Loa Utah, and SUWS. She has also worked extensively with adolescent females at Eliada Homes, PRTF, and as a therapist for boys and girls in Eliada’s day treatment school. Kyle is dedicated to meet each student where they are, utilizing individualized therapeutic interventions for each student. Kyle practices DBT, CBT, and expressive therapy techniques.
Clinical Specialties
Kyle’s clinical interests are: PTSD, borderline traits, defiant behaviors, depression, anxiety, and anger.
Personal Background
In her free time, she can be found playing soccer, hiking, or dabbling in the arts.