Villa Kali Ma has a compassionate, holistic Partial Hospitalization Program for eligible women who are receiving treatment at our day program facility in Del Mar, the Office.

Like all of our programs, our PHP exists to help women recover from substance addiction, restore their mental health, and heal trauma. Through a powerful mixture of holistic and clinical therapies working together as one, we help women find their way back to lives of vibrant health and whole-heartedness.

Those of us working as staff here at Villa Kali Ma enjoy the daily privilege of witnessing women go through transformations of deep healing, repair, and self-reclamation. In this post, we’ll share a little more about the daily schedule at our PHP, to give a clearer picture of how trauma treatment for women with addiction goes here with us in beautiful Del Mar, California.

Partial Hospitalization Programs are highly structured, providing six hours of treatment, five days a week. PHPs are typically used in one of two scenarios.

• In Lieu of Residential. Women need to stabilize and experience basic bodily safety in order to be able to participate positively in recovery. Highly structured treatment environments exist to support this goal. For women who qualify for the highest level of care, residential treatment, who aren’t able to enter inpatient treatment at this time, PHPs are the next best thing. For most cases of addiction, mental illness and trauma, high levels of structured care are needed to have a fair chance. When residential is needed but not feasible, PHPs are the second best option for women who would benefit most from an intensive setting.
• As a Step Down Transitional Phase After Residential, before beginning Intensive Outpatient. Because PHPs have maximal levels of structure, while permitting participants to live independently, PHPs are ideal for gradually tapering down to a lower level of supervision and treatment intensity (compared to inpatient).

A Day in the Life at Villa Kali Ma’s Women’s PHP for Trauma Recovery 

The Partial Hospitalization Program at Villa Kali Ma is designed in particular for women who have additional needs alongside the need for substance abuse treatment.

Specifically, as a trauma recovery oriented program, we embrace the approaches discovered to be most effective when addressing the many expressions and variations of trauma. Several variants of trauma are shared by the psychiatrist Dr. Frank Anderson in Transcending Trauma. Anderson identifies the following forms of trauma as prevalent:

Acute trauma – trauma that comes from a single, relatively isolated shocking incident, which resolves within 30 days

Chronic PTSD – the classic trauma diagnosis, characterized by intrusive images, flashbacks, and intense nervous system arousal

Complex Trauma – also called Relational Trauma, Attachment Trauma, and/or Developmental Trauma, complex trauma originates in a set of childhood conditions and relationships

Cultural/Institutional Trauma – trauma inflicted by the collective, dominant cultural mentality, systems and structures

Family Legacy Trauma – trauma inherited from family or lineage

and Dissociative Trauma – trauma connected with a diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder

Our program at Villa Kali Ma is regularly updated with the latest innovations in the field of compassionate trauma treatment. Our program addresses somatic (body-oriented), emotional, cognitive, interpersonal, neurobiological and psycho-spiritual dimensions of healing trauma, mental illness, and substance addiction, through every conceivable path that helps women resolve their pain.

A typical day in Villa Kali Ma’s Partial Hospitalization Program provides six hours of healing therapeutic contact, through activities, individual sessions and groups. Each treatment hour is crafted with care, to combine gentle clinical and psychological approaches together with alternative, holistic interventions that bring ease, peace, and restoration to women’s hearts, spirits, and bodies.

The treatment day begins when participants arrive from home for the first therapy hour of the day. The first therapy hour is usually a group, that kicks off the treatment day and eases participants into the transformation process. Throughout the course of the day, participants will alternate between time together in community with other treatment peers on the one hand, in groups and in the milieu, and private sessions with therapists and practitioners, on the other.

The structure of the schedule at our Partial Hospitalization Program is predictable and repeated, so that women can rely on the basic rhythms and therapeutic containers to remain constant. Structure remains stable, but content, topics of discussion, and healing themes of groups vary, informed by which treatment needs are front and center for a particular woman.

Some modalities you may encounter in your treatment day include Mindfulness and Self-Compassion, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, yoga, massage, nature therapy, EMDR, nutrition, and Somatic Experiencing.

Because the Partial Hospitalization Program is a day treatment model, taking place at our Outpatient facility in Del Mar, participants go home at the end of each treatment day. Sometimes women may opt to attend further activities in the community together, such as a sound healing ceremony at a yoga studio or going to an evening or weekend 12 Step meeting with peers. Either way, Villa Kali Ma peers spend the night in their own environment, then reconvene the next treatment day.

Therapeutic Structure to Rebuild Safety and Trust

During the healing process it is generally better to be in a simplified environment that removes the burden of too many choices. Recovering women find relief in following a steady nourishing schedule of activities, peppered with breaks to support the body with downtime and rest.

Women recovering from addiction and traumatization need structure to rebuild safety and trust. In the past, women with addiction and trauma learned the hard way that if they didn’t pay close, anxious attention to all possible signs of danger, immeasurable harm could happen to them. Women with a background of serious hurt, who survived life-threatening conditions of neglect, abuse, or other kinds of danger, won’t be able to let their guards down without being therapeutically held in a safe, appropriate environment. For these reasons (and many more!) we at Villa Kali Ma take care to provide a peaceful, calm, predictable environment at our Partial Hospitalization Program.

Our program structure rebuilds safety and trust through predictability, freeing awareness to go inward and to attend to inner world needs. We know that in the absence of predictability, most women will be activated into hypervigilant, anxious, or other parts of them. These are the parts within that work hard to figure out what’s going on in the environment and whether or not we’re really safe. When the environment is predictable, calm, and repetitive, women are better able to relax these safety-oriented parts. Relaxing sufficiently allows women to begin the process of unfolding, forming bonds of trust with themselves, the treatment staff, and peers.

How Intensive Daytime Care Promotes Deep Healing

Intensive daytime care such as that provided in our Partial Hospitalization Program  promotes deep healing by helping withdraw attention and availability from non-beneficial behaviors, people, and settings. When positively engaged in a productive and transformational healing process, women have no space for old habits or attention and behavior.

Villa Kali Ma’s robust schedule of daytime therapeutic activities brings healing nutrients into women’s inner systems. Our intensive daytime care program brings about the following experiences:

-Self-recognition and self-validation, through learning more about addiction, trauma, and mental illness, including the positive intentions behind our extreme behavior

-Kind, self-liberating discoveries about ourselves and our true needs, wishes, goodness, and purpose in this world

-Profound healing experiences of self-compassion and self-forgiveness, restoring our sense of innocence and goodness in our own eyes

-The gradual recovery of hope, a sense of possibility, new dreams, and positive self-definitions

-Experiencing our interconnection with others, through the building up of community relationships, resources, and contacts

-Deep physiological experiences of safety, restoration, and repair

Begin Your Trauma Recovery Journey with Our PHP

Villa Kali Ma’s uniquely compassionate Partial Hospitalization Program for women is a place where women can start to heal themselves of the following burdens:

-Trauma symptoms (distress, panic, dissociation, numbing, emotional flooding, and disturbing memories)

-Psychological pain about who we are, whether we are good and valuable people, whether we deserve love

-The roller coaster of extreme emotions that can drag us up, down, and all over the place, as well as create chaos in our relationships

-Counterproductive thinking and behavior (using substances or engaging in other self-harming behaviors)

The path to healing these burdens is to get to know, with curiosity, courage, and compassion, the riches of who you actually are, who you are really here to be.

If you’re a woman struggling with addiction, trauma, and mental health problems, consider coming to one of our many holistic healing programs for women. We’d love to meet you!