Walking the Tightrope of Self-Discovery : Indoor Obstacle Course Can Lead Emotionally Troubled to Confidence, Trust

For 13 years Mona George went through life as a victim, overwhelmed by debilitating guilt. But all that changed on The Great Ropes--a physically and emotionally challenging indoor obstacle course.

A terrified George in a mountain climber’s harness and safety line stood 12 feet off the ground on a platform just wide enough to hold one person. Members of her small group gathered below to encourage her to jump out and catch a trapeze bar about six feet away.

“I can’t,” George said. “I killed somebody, and I can see his face out there.”

George says that when she was 21 she was viciously assaulted and raped by a man with whom she had just ended a relationship. Later he killed himself and she blamed herself for his suicide.

She had spoken to almost nobody about the incident until she blurted it out to virtual strangers at the ropes course that Saturday afternoon.

Why would George share an intimate secret in a semipublic setting, and why would it change her life?

The answer is in the course.

The Great Ropes, part of the Psychodynamics Success Institute of Lake Forest, is the only indoor ropes course in California.

Hundreds of corporations have had groups of their executives graduate, and more than 2,000 individuals--from emotionally troubled teens to people just looking for a challenge--have passed through the course since Ellie Ryan built it in a racquetball court more than three years ago.

The principle of putting people through physical challenges to help break down barriers to emotional and intellectual growth, and to build self-esteem, trust and teamwork is not new. Organizations such as the Boy Scouts and Outward Bound have been using such techniques since the 1940s.

“Twenty years ago corporations started to form softball leagues and have company picnics,” said Ryan, 45, founder of the Psychodynamic Success Institute Inc. and a certified neuro-linguistics programmer. Neuro-linguistics is the study of human communication and behavior with an emphasis on overcoming emotional obstacles.

“They understood that that type of activity, where people got out of their suits and ties, and out of their attitudes, led them to become friends and that that type of retraining in the corporate structure worked well.”

While other physical challenge courses send individuals on mountain climbing, white-water rafting or sky diving adventures, Ryan designed a course that eliminates high-risk situations. “All you have to do is kill one vice president climbing a mountain and you are in big trouble,” Ryan said.

After experiencing a rope course in Oklahoma, she built her own and tested its by having her two children, Rebekah, 22, and Philip, 20, don safety harnesses and jump off the garage. “It didn’t take much of a scrape of the knees before we figured out what worked and what didn’t,” Ryan said.

The Great Ropes course is sort of a Jungle Gym for self-esteem. There are challenges with exotic names such as the Parrot Perch, where George exorcised her guilt; the HeeBee-GeeBee, a steel cable tightrope 12 feet off the ground; and the Dangling Duo, a series of swinging logs connected by cables that one must scale.

The way people approach the course parallels the way they perform in the world, Ryan said. “Sometimes you meet yourself on the ropes course and you don’t like the person you meet. It gets brought to the surface and now (your behavior) is not just something you do, it’s a conscious choice and you can choose to change it.”

That is what happened to Mona George three years ago.

“I look at that day as the first day I really began to trust myself,” said George, who still has difficulty talking about the assault. “I could have jumped down off that cable at any time, but something in me said, ‘Maybe you can take care of yourself up here.’

“I think that guilt is a very powerful emotion and if it takes control it buries this other part that says, ‘Hey! I can take care of it.’ I had viewed myself as a slug. I had been that way for so long, I thought: ‘If somebody takes away all this guilt, there is going to be a lot of room left there.’

“I shouldn’t have worried about what was going to fill the guilt. Shoot! Happiness is going to be there. And that’s what I came to find.”

David Sofi, who owns a consulting firm and is president of the Health Research Institute in Oceanside, first saw the benefits of the course when he was director of marketing for the San Diego-based Boys and Girls Mental Health Center--a residential treatment program for 12- to 18-year-olds with emotional problems. The center studied two groups that it sent through the course.

“The course had significant positive effects,” Sofi said. “We saw much less depression in some children and much greater self-esteem, and also discovered that the course helped us make breakthroughs in some children who had been very hard to reach, very mistrusting of adults.

“They had been denying reality or the effects of sexual or drug abuse, for example, and after the ropes course they faced reality, which in their case was kind of sad for them,” Sofi said. “But this is the first step in recovery.”

The center’s clinical staff has raised about $85,000--half of the money that it will need to construct its own building and acquire a $50,000 setup kit from The Great Ropes.

“A problem that children who are troubled encounter is that they may not trust the rest of the world to take care of them,” said Kitt Briggs, the center’s director of development. “They have to learn you don’t go through life independently. What the ropes course experience does is it puts them in a situation where they have to rely on other people and have others rely on them in a team planning strategy.

“We think it would be tremendously exciting to have these children go through the ropes course with their parents and with their siblings.”

A six-hour training on a Saturday is $80 per individual. For executive groups the cost is $295 per person. But no family has ever been turned away, Ryan said. “Some people need it for the bonding process.”

There have been no serious injuries, aside from a few rope burns. Whenever participants are off the ground they are hooked up to belay lines--a safety line held and managed by another person.

Along the course walls are penned the transcendent writings of the course’s sweaty, flushed and enthralled certified graduates:

“Behold the turtle,” wrote Todd Jackson on Oct. 26, 1987. “It makes no progress without sticking its neck out.”

“Happiness is an inside job,” Deborah Lloyd, June 6, 1987.

“Life is our creation. We create by our thoughts. Change your thoughts. Create life anew,” Victor Preston, June 13, 1987.

“Eight and a half years sober. I go high here,” F.R.F.

And, “May the course be with you,” Anonymous.