Can Long-Distance Hiking Support Trauma Recovery? |
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Time on the hiking trail may offer meaningful therapeutic healing.
A long hike may help re-write the relationship someone has with suffering.
Sometimes, however, long-distance hiking can become a means of avoidance.
For many long-distance hikers, the trail provides more than just a hike. Often, the trail represents a transformative opportunity, acting as a liminal space between who someone was and who they hope to become. And for those who have experienced trauma, time on the trail may offer meaningful therapeutic healing, at least in part, for some of the ways that traumatic experiences have shaped them. Extended time in the wilderness offers space to process life experiences that might not otherwise have time to be fully digested, while also helping to reshape internal narratives about the self in therapeutic landscapes.
In 1948, World War II Veteran Earl Schaffer set out on the unmaintained Appalachian Trail in an attempt to “walk off the war." While the diagnostic label of post-traumatic stress disorder was not used at that time, Earl reported feeling “hopeless and broken-hearted” (Ross, 2021). He wrote about his experience on the rugged trail and processed the journey in a journal that he carried with him. He believed that the hike saved his life, re-igniting him with a sense of purpose and mending at least some of his ability to trust others again, through acts of kindness from strangers whom he called “trail angels” in small towns along the route (Ross, 2021). He is believed to have been the first to complete a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail, and his journey laid a foundation for others looking to take a similar path: healing trauma, at least in part, through long-distance hiking.
The thru-hiking culture often associates the pursuit of........