An 11-year-old child with ADHD, previously a Zappelphillip (fidgety child) like no other, suddenly spends hours playing a challenging board game – highly concentrated, without being distracted in the slightest. This happened at an AUSWEGE/ WAYS OUT therapy camp, where his mother, who had accompanied him, saw him “transformed.” The secret to success? The AUSWEGE/WAYS OUT therapy camp.
Danny*, 11, has had a pronounced case of ADHD since birth, with severe concentration problems, an extremely short attention span, and significant motor issues, along with reduced muscle tone; his perception has also been impaired from the start. With a low frustration threshold, he reacts extremely impulsively.
The first healing treatment at an AUSWEGE/WAYS OUT therapy camp has to be stopped after a few minutes because Danny won’t stay on the couch; at the second appointment, he at least stays still for a quarter of an hour. Afterwards, his mother finds him “relaxed and in a good mood; he says that the healer from the AUSWEGE therapy team is doing him good. Since the treatment, he has been so relaxed.” Since the treatment, he has been so relaxed.”
On the third day of camp, Danny’s mother notices that he is “better at accepting rules. The skin on his face has become completely smooth; before, he had rough, reddish patches on his cheeks.” While his mother participates in a “family constellation” with other parents in the evening, Danny stays in a meditation room with other children, supervised by a member of the AUSWEGE team. At first, he runs around wildly and loudly. Suddenly, he notices the adult sitting at a table with another boy, playing a board game he doesn’t know yet. He approaches them: “What are you doing?”
“We’re playing Nine Men’s Morris,” replies the adult.
“I want to learn how to play that too!” says Danny.
“Would you like to watch us and have us explain it to you?”
Danny nods. For ten minutes, he watches the moves of the next
game with rapt attention, listening to the explanations.
Then he says, “Now I can do it too!”
He takes a seat at the game table—and for an hour and a half, he plays one game after another, highly concentrated, quiet, and without being distracted in the slightest by the younger children who are now screaming and romping around him. The ADHD boy, who is said to have fine-motor skills problems, precisely places the millstones at the corners and intersections of the playing field. When his mother comes into the playroom late in the evening, she can hardly believe his endurance.
In the days that follow, the mother repeatedly notices situations in which Danny “has his frustration unusually well under control.“ But time and again, there are ‘relapses’ in which Danny ”tests boundaries,” engages in petty power struggles with her, nagging her persistently, cheekily “driving her up the wall,” and being “dissatisfied with himself and the world.”
So things were by no means continuously “uphill” for the boy. “I had the feeling,” the mother writes in retrospect, “that Danny had almost gained too much power and needed to learn how to deal with it.”
In conclusion, the mother rates the overall progress achieved as +2 (on a scale from -5 to +5), and the
psychological changes in particular as +3, with the caveat that “individual symptoms have also worsened.”
She finds the significant improvement in attention and concentration most striking. The camp doctor gives exactly the same rating. He now sees Daniel as “more determined, clearer, more focused, and more concentrated,” with “improved comprehension and stamina.” He also notices that Danny’s “sense of balance has improved.”
The secret to success is simple
What worked better for Danny than all previous psychotherapies, better than Ritalin? The secret to success is simple, as it is for dozens of other ADHD children in “Auswege/Ways Out” camps:
Everyday life there offered the boy clearly structured routines with binding rules, demanded and rewarded self-control, deprived him of electronic media, provided him with ample opportunities
to live out his urge to move, and offered him educational role models. And here he experienced a
“new” mom who, under the influence of the impulses she received from the “Auswege” team, learned to avoid excessive indulgence and leniency, and became calmer, more balanced, and more consistent
internally.
(* : Pseudonym)
(Harald Wiesendanger)
Further case studies in which the AUSWEGE Foundation was able to help children diagnosed with AD(H)D can be found here»
https://secure.spendenbank.de/Form/3867?lang=2