Imagine a family in crisis: The teenage son has become increasingly defiant since his parents’ divorce. Once a straight-A student, he’s started sneaking out at night to party with friends. When his mother confronts him about it, the son becomes irate and threatens her physically. At the end of her rope, the mother pleads with her estranged husband to help get their son into a counseling program.
Eventually, the mother gets her wish. The son goes into counseling, but the program is unlike anything he or his parents could ever have dreamed of.
Instead of sending their son away to be “fixed,” the parents—and siblings—are required to go into therapy with him. And instead of working through their issues in a plush psychiatrist’s office—fully equipped with air-conditioning and “I feel” statements—the family members are forced to deal with their emotional crap while shoveling literal crap on a horse ranch in the Los Angeles wilderness. All this is done under the watchful eye of a 6-foot-something cowboy-turned-therapist with a Montana twang and a master’s degree. Oh, and the entire process is broadcast into homes across the nation.
Sound like fun?
For Mike Linderman, it’s the opportunity of a lifetime.
Dubbed “The Teen Whisperer” by some of his counseling clients, Linderman recently signed with Triage Entertainment to start filming a new reality television series geared toward helping troubled teens and their families. The show, also called The Teen Whisperer, is expected to hit small screens sometime this summer.
“It’s going to combine my love of working with kids and families with my love of ranching,” said Linderman, a licensed therapist who owns and runs a cattle ranch in Trout Creek, Mont. “[The show] will give me the opportunity to reach as many families as possible.”
The basic format of the show will roughly follow the synopsis mentioned above—exposing families to a week of therapy, mixed with good, ol’ fashioned manual labor. Along with that, Linderman said he plans to use life lessons and counseling techniques chronicled in his book, The Teen Whisperer: How to Break Through the Silence and Secrecy of Teenage Life.
Published in 2007, the book explains teenage behavioral problems by listing what Linderman considers teenagers’ five primary needs—survival, fun, freedom, power, and belonging—and discusses what happens when those needs aren’t being met. It then offers a new approach to parenting, using a regimen of discipline, honesty, and effective communication.
“I find that, most of the time, kids learn better from life lessons,” he said. “It’s amazing what you can learn about a kid out building a fence with them, or even playing a game of baseball.”
Having families do chores while living on a ranch is the most effective way to get them to be honest with him and with each other, Linderman said.
“It allows you to see the roles in a family relatively quickly—who takes the leadership positions and who sits back and doesn’t take responsibility,” he said. “It gives you so much information to dig back into when you sit down and talk to them one-on-one.”
Linderman said the main message he wants to get across to people on his show is that they’re all responsible, in some way, for their family’s problems. Usually, the teen’s troubled behavior is a manifestation of issues experienced by the family as a whole. Linderman believes sending an unruly teen off to deal with his or her demons won’t solve anything if the parents aren’t willing to work on their demons as well.
“Parents need to pay attention to themselves and the messages they’ve learned growing up and are now passing on to their children,” he explained. “They need to check themselves first, and make sure they’re taking care of themselves first, and maybe sharing with their child to show, ‘Hey, you’re not alone.’”
The goal, Linderman said, is to create an emotional safety net in the family unit—an atmosphere in which each person feels comfortable enough to share and discuss his or her issues.
“That’s key. I feel very, very strongly about that,” he said, adding that he hopes his show will help families—clients or otherwise—achieve that goal.
“I think [the show] is going to have information that any parent can utilize, even if you’re a fantastic parent,” he said. “But anybody that thinks they have this whole parenting thing figured out needs to have another kid because they’ll teach them something new.”
Students and teachers
Of course, running a show like The Teen Whisperer isn’t a solo endeavor. To make sure everything runs smoothly, Linderman has brought in some colleagues and former clients who are equally devoted to helping families.
“I like to think of myself as a pretty simple guy … . [Doing a TV show] is a little out of my reality,” Linderman confessed.
Coming from a small town like Trout Creek, Linderman said he never thought he’d end up writing a book or having his own TV show. But after the book came out, the cowboy said he started getting “flooded with calls from producers and agents.”
To help him navigate the dicey waters of Hollywood, Linderman recruited an industry pro he could trust—actress and former client Nia Peeples (Fame, Walker, Texas Ranger).
“Nia helped me shop it around and get it off the ground,” he said.
And eventually, she signed on as a producer, using her experience and connections to aid in the filming process.
Through Peeples, Linderman also found his two counseling assistants: Chris Hayzel and Annie Garrett.
Peeple’s son Hayzel received counseling from Linderman as a teenager. Garrett, a special education teacher at Santa Maria High School, met Peeples while attending seminars for parents of teens in behavioral programs.
“We’re basically going to be helping Mike spread his authority and knowledge. He can’t be with everyone all the time, so we’re going to be his eyes and ears,” Hayzel explained. “He thought it would be a good idea to have an adult and a kid helping him so there’d be someone to relate to all the family members.”
Hayzel has plenty of experience with Linderman’s methods. When he was 16 years old, he got sent to Spring Creek Lodge Academy, a facility for troubled youth in Montana where Linderman served as a therapist.
“I had issues with my mom about family stuff and her marriages, and I was angry at my dad for the way he treated me,” Hayzel said. “I was extremely defiant. And at one point I took my mom’s car for a joyride.”
But when he came to Spring Creek Lodge Academy and met “Mr. Mike,” Hayzel said, his attitude—and his behavior—started to change.
“I had a lot of therapists when I was younger. But Mike was the first one that I trusted and looked up to and liked,” Hayzel said. “He didn’t sit there and tell me what was wrong with me. He talked to me like a real person and helped me identify the way I perceived my family and myself.”
Garrett, on the other hand, didn’t meet Linderman until after she sent her oldest daughter, Adrianna Montellano, to Skyview Christian Academy, another youth facility in Nevada. But Garrett said she shares Linderman’s view that the entire family needs to take responsibility for its problems.
“At first, I expected to send [Adrianna] away and they’d fix her and send her home,” Garrett said. “But luckily, the people running the program didn’t believe in that.”
Instead, Garrett started attending seminars in the Los Angeles area that mirrored the process her daughter was going through a state away.
“At my first seminar the facilitator said: This is about you—forget your little Hellion—this is about you,” Garrett recalled.
The seminars, she said, changed the way she thought about herself and the impact she had on her family.
“It really gave me the tools I needed to keep my family together,” Garrett said.
The experience also inspired Garrett to take more of a leadership role in the seminars, and eventually become a certified life coach. A life coach, Garrett said, essentially counsels her clients to achieve various goals they’ve set for themselves.
Still, despite the life-changing affect of the seminars, Garrett said she would have jumped at the chance to go on a show like The Teen Whisperer.
“These families get to go on the show and then they get six months of follow-up therapy with Mike for free,” Garrett said, adding that it cost her upward of $150,000 to get treatment for her family.
“I lost my house,” she said. “But it’s totally been worth it, and I wouldn’t change a thing. I’d live in a tenement to save my kids.”
Garrett’s daughter Montellano has equally high hopes for the show. At 16 years old, she was sent away to Skyview after her mom discovered she’d been living a secret life revolving around sex, boys, and lying.
“I have mixed feelings about the program I went through,” said Montellano, now a junior at Cornell College in Iowa. “It did serve as an intervention and a means for keeping my family together.
“But I think the TV show will work without creating hostility between the family members because I still harbor some feelings toward my mom for being sent away,” she said. “I think seeing your family go through it together would have been more beneficial and would have made the healing process go faster.”
At the facility, “it was all about breaking you down,” Montellano said, recalling one exercise during which they made her dig her own grave.
“But with Mike, I don’t think that’s his intention,” she said.
While Linderman uses many of the same techniques, Montellano said, “He acknowledges that it’s the entire family’s problem. … And when the problems are as deep as they were in my family, one person going to therapy isn’t going to fix everything, and just talking about it isn’t going to do anything.”
Contact News Editor Amy Asman at aasman@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 11-18, 2010.