Author: Holly Mae Haddock

Categories
Luxury rehab

What Is Luxury Rehab and How Is It Different?

Luxury rehab refers to high-end inpatient substance abuse treatment, or residential addiction treatment, administered in a resort-like facility. Good luxury rehabs are not just about comfortable settings, but also provide exceptional quality, variety and customizability of treatment modalities and offerings.

At Villa Kali Ma, for example, we have taken care to bring the most cutting-edge and transformational healing therapies available in the field of mental health and addiction recovery to our treatment experience. We feel we represent the best of what is available in individual and group psychotherapy approaches, community recovery practices, trauma treatment, and alternative healing modalities.

True to our founding philosophy, we weave this array of recovery opportunities into a personalized treatment experience that powerfully and comprehensively addresses broader topics than symptoms alone.

Because we know a whole-woman approach leads to more total and lasting healing, we include yoga, acupuncture, functional medicine, reiki, breath work, expressive arts therapy, shamanic journeying, ayurveda, equine therapy, and more. Our treatment plans reflect who you are and what you want to change in your life at many levels of being.

How Are Luxury Rehabs Different From Traditional Rehabs?

Luxury rehabs and traditional rehabs differ in two basic ways – the value provided by the accommodations and the value provided by the treatment program itself.

The value of the environment is typically about niceness of the accommodations – what kind of a setting is it, how much privacy will you have, where in the country is this facility located? What kind of food will you have available to you – is it organic, healthy, clean food? What are your recreation and relaxation opportunities at this location? How nice are the rooms and shared spaces?

The value of the treatment itself is about how beneficial the available modalities are for healing your troubles, how personalized the approach to working with you will be, and how much personal attention you’ll get. This is measured in how many hours of treatment you receive, the experience levels of the clinicians and healing specialists working with you, and how helpful the treatment approach is for your personal case.

Luxury rehabs promise a softer and more private environment. At Villa Kali Ma, we believe that when it’s possible, making the body feel safe and comfortable through harmonious environment is a supportive background context for the inner work of self-transformation.

It is our general orientation that recovery is hard enough, and that organic food, sunshine, coastal breezes, nice linens, pleasant decor and sufficient privacy are not so much luxuries as basic assists to help create a foundation of safety and calm. These are good conditions for any kind of healing retreat, and if more people had this available to them, we’d recommend it to everyone.

The more important difference between luxury rehabs and the traditional model relates to how much customization and attention is possible in each. Traditional rehabs are more likely to service more clients at once, and to offer standardized protocols of care designed to meet more people’s needs at once.

Is this good or bad? This is largely a matter of healing philosophy. Proponents of more individualized care feel that addiction and mental health treatment can be less effective when delivered in a more en masse style, due to less attention and time for each woman.

In luxury rehabs clients have greater privacy, a smaller cohort of other participants, and receive more personalized attention through more customized treatment. Treatment options, including holistic therapies, are more varied and more specific. It is more common to treat a person as an individual, through a combination of approaches.

What Are the Benefits of Luxury Rehabs?

As we at Villa Kali Ma see it, the biggest benefit of a luxury rehab is access to quality of care. Luxury rehabs tend to have the resources to hire expert clinicians and to offer new treatments which can be hard to find elsewhere.

Given the smaller cohort and the personalization of the treatment program, luxury rehabs might be compared to private versus public school. For some people, being in a more private and personalized context makes all the difference for learning how to recover in the way that’s just right for them.

Personal attention for your unique case, from an experienced professional who has time to really get to know you during your stay, has enormously positive impacts on treatment outcomes. The therapeutic relationship is a huge factor in healing, independent of the modality itself. A strong-enough trust bond and personal connection to a healer is really only possible with time and presence.

Who Can Afford Luxury Rehab?

Addiction treatment at a luxury rehab is, by definition, more expensive. Treatment costs at any rehab vary by length of stay and services offered, so it stands to reason that if you’re staying in very comfortable accommodations with higher end treatment services, there is a different value exchange that has to be calculated.

However, more and more luxury rehabs – including Villa Kali Ma, we’re happy to be able to say – accept a broad spectrum of insurances, which means it’s likely you can cover some or all of the costs associated with your rehab, even if it’s a higher end one. Villa Kali Ma is an in-network provider for several major insurances, so it’s worth checking with yours or calling us to speak about your options.

Villa Kali Ma’s Luxury Rehab

If it were possible, we healers here at Villa Kali Ma would offer our high standard of treatment, including the level of customized attention and our comfortable, retreat-like setting, to all women who need it! When we can, we sometimes sponsor a woman’s rehab for that reason.

If you’re in a position to consider coming to a high-end healing facility, we do recommend our own offerings. In all of our facilities, we’ve created refined, supportive environments for learning how to heal at the deepest levels. Throughout your stay here, you’ll benefit from our transformational, revolutionary trauma-healing modalities, our traditional psychodynamic therapies, and the most ancient, tried-and-true practices of bodily and spiritual wellness from around the world.

Categories
Mental health goals

Goals for Mental Health in the New Year

Set Goals for Your Mental Health

Did you know that you can set goals for your mental health? It’s true. Would you care to join me, dear reader, in finding out how happy, peaceful, positive, healthy, and connected we could become in 2024?

Mental health skills can be learned, practiced, and eventually mastered, just like any other skill, through the repetition of small, strengthening tasks. Through many days of showing up in the zone of “just-right-challenge” – not too hard, not too easy – we will meet real-world milestones.

Gradually, as we collect milestones, and the covered ground behind us grows long, we get somewhere. Building on each success, we get stronger. We wake up one day and realize we are quite resilient, actually rather capable of facing what’s ours to dance with today.

The Power of Goals

Having change goals is part of feeling connected and engaged with life. Goals imply feelings of purpose and hope, bringing color and shape to our imagined future.

Before learning a new skill, even a mental health skill, we can only hope that we will be able to learn it. Once we’ve learned it, we are in a different situation. We know for certain we can do that skill. But also, we now know that we can learn new things.

But we can only have this learning, this change in understanding of ourselves when we try (which often involves a lot of falling down and then trying again). It is through experience (including failure) that we find out for ourselves that we do have the capacity within us to change, to direct our destinies.

If you’re someone struggling with addictions or other kinds of heartbreaking, self-defeating, demoralizing difficulties, I do mean you too. I promise.

Three Ingredients of Change: What, Why, and How

To change, we need three things. A clear definition of our desired outcome (what), a good personal reason that we can rely upon to powerfully motivate us to do the work of the change (why), and a good plan (how).

When we know where we’re going, why we’re going there, and have mapped out the road, we’ll have nothing left to stop us and naturally we’ll set out walking in the direction we intend to go.

7 Tips for Making Mental Health Changes

1: Less Is More, Rinse and Repeat

Even if you’re walking across the country, you can only take so many steps each day. Start at whatever level you can have success at, and know that when you’re stronger, you’ll be able to tackle more, but you have to build up your strength.

If you want to be physically fit (a very good mental health goal), but it is a challenge to even walk for 5 minutes, start with 5 minutes. Do 5 minutes a day for a predetermined amount of time that you know for sure you can commit to, even if it’s only 5 days in a row. Then when the 5 days are up, set a new little, achievable goal. You might be ready for 10 minutes a day.

If we size and frame things in a way that we feel a natural motivation and desire to engage, and we see the very real possibility of our success if we keep showing up, then we’re very likely to succeed. As they say in AA, easy does it.


2: Make a Decision (Again)

If we get blocked or start self-sabotaging, we may need to start over again and make a new decision. That’s always ok. Our own will and our commitment are necessary, we won’t get far without them.

Many of us are attached to our suffering and are scared of health and happiness. If we subconsciously connect our suffering with staying safe, and happiness with risk, then we will stay in our suffering.

The only way to work with this factor is to be honest with ourselves. Everything is in place for a reason.

When we see our priorities, and once we accept them, we may be able to change them or find them changing naturally. We may realize, yes, I want to be safe, but actually, at this point, I want safe and happy. I will try for both.


3: Make a Time-Based Practice Plan of Right-Sized, Challenging Tasks

The way to change is to put ourselves in the place of gentle challenge, over and over again.

Here are some sample ideas for how you could work on the mental health goal “think more positive thoughts” – an example for inspiration.

The idea is to set up a short plan of very achievable challenges which you complete from start to finish before evaluating or changing anything.

Easy Peasy: for 14 days, every day for 5 minutes I write down all my negative thoughts and just let them be, practicing my observing skills.

Medium: for 21 days, every day for 15 minutes, I will take the time to write down several negative thoughts, and reframe each of them to better thoughts that still feel true to me.

Hard: for 30 days, every day for 7 minutes, I will look in the mirror, and I will speak positive things out loud about myself and my life.

At the end of your short practice plan, you would devise and commit to a new one, adjusting the level of challenge to keep you in the just-right challenge zone.


4: Use Time as a Tool

Every goal can be achieved through tiny time boxes.

Think about working out more, a fine mental health goal. Perhaps it sounds most doable and enjoyable to you to work out for 20 minutes on three separate days. You could also do 10 minutes a day 6 days a week instead. 60 minutes on one day is also a possibility.

Those all are ways of working out for 60 minutes total. Each one has different pros and cons, but all are a way of improving physical fitness. They will all strengthen you, more quickly or more slowly.

What you’re looking for in mapping any goal is a frame that’s doable and very repeatable, so that the large task of change moves through time in an easy, flowing way.


5: Decide How You Will Get Back in the Saddle

Slips happen. Decide in advance how you will handle it if you miss the mark for a day, if you slip out of the practice or if something comes up which makes it impossible to complete.

Perhaps you agree with yourself that you will make up the practice by doing a double time box the next day. Whatever it is, decide how you approach this in advance, so that you keep your promise with yourself.

This is a kind of contingency plan – I will do my best to follow this practice plan, but if I do slip, here is how I correct it and get back on track.


6: Evaluate Only at Pre-determined Moments

With all goals, it’s important to complete the task in the time frame you set out for yourself, before evaluating results or deciding to change the frame.

Resist the urge to reach big conclusions about yourself during the change process itself. Thinking we’re doing terribly and thinking we’re doing magnificently are both ego traps that throw us off the path.

Remember it takes a couple of weeks for a change to have benefits. Only change or adapt your practice at pre-determined points between cycles.

And again, make those cycles as small as they need to be. Completing even a very short plan builds confidence, and can always be repeated or extended if you want more. This is psychologically more strengthening than setting a big, vague, unsustainable, or unrealistic plan and failing.


7: Surrender

The paradox of change is, that the moment we start moving, the letting go begins. While remembering our what, our why, and our how, we must now find the grace to adapt to the reality of the journey, the difference between the plan and how it unfolds.

We stay flexible. We do not turn against ourselves when it turns out there was an unforeseen obstacle when the terrain is not exactly like the map portrayed it. We let go of control and defenses, to face the fires of change, knowing there is no change without suffering.

We lean into our humility. We are not, and we do not have to be, the best. It’s not a competition. It is a practice, a process, a cultivation of ourselves. All are allowed to grow, to find out what potential we have inside of ourselves. Growth is its joy, all living things grow.

We surrender to the journey. It’s ok to be unequal to the totality of the task because we only ever need to do the small little part right in front of us. Life will move heaven and earth to help us.

Villa Kali Ma Can Assist With Your Mental Health

Villa Kali Ma was founded because we care about mental health, our own, and everybody else’s. We know a lot about it – how things go wrong and how to set them right again. If you want to get some help for feeling good, strong, positive, and healthy in 2024, well drop by – that’s exactly what we’re here for!

Categories
Sobriety

10 Tips for Staying Sober This New Year

Are you aiming to have a sober 2024? Good for you, my friend. Yes yes yes! Go you.

Sobriety is so important. Your physical body can only be happy, strong, and resilient with sobriety. Your thoughts and your emotions can only heal and create positive vibrations for yourself and others with sobriety.

Your relationships can grow, change, and trend towards the positive only with sobriety. Your financials, your material life, your career, your family, your pets…everyone is better off when you’re sober.

Here are ten tips from Villa Kali Ma, ten reminders for all of us who are seeking to walk a positive path of change in our lives, whether we’ve been sober one day or one decade.

1. Revisit Your Why Frequently

In his very poignant work Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl writes, “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.“

Frankl was writing about the human being’s remarkable capacity to withstand adversity, and how helpful it is to have a good reason.

What are your reasons for staying sober this year?

The more compelling your why, the easier it will be for you. If you can’t remember, stop right now and journal for 7 minutes on this topic:

I commit to sobriety today because…

Here are some reasons we can think of.

We stay sober because life is better sober, in every single way.

We stay sober because we want to be in charge of our own lives.

We stay sober because of the love and gratitude for those who helped us get and stay sober.

We stay sober because we know our sobriety helps other people get and stay sober.

We stay sober because we choose to believe we matter. 

What are your reasons?

2. Connect With Your Higher Power

Cultivate your relationship with a positive, benevolent life force power that you believe can and will help you stay sober.

The definition of a higher power is very broad and permissive in AA. Famously, one early member prayed to a doorknob and found it effective.

In or outside of AA circles, truthfully you are allowed to choose your own higher power as long as you understand that sobriety requires some measure of humility and relinquishment of the ego.

The false self, the conditioned self, and the ego self cannot overcome addiction, but your true loving Self-nature, the part of you that is one with all of life, can.

We can approach sobriety in a million different ways, but if we live out of alignment with the nature of life, if we are overly selfish, egoic, and unloving towards ourselves or others, we’re heading for a relapse.

Prioritize living a positive, loving life that brings no harm to others, that does unto others as we would have them do unto us, and we are turned in the right direction (towards God, or whatever we want to call it).

3. Stay Connected With Your Recovery Community

It’s important to prioritize sobriety every day. One easy way to make this a strong habit is to make sure you stay connected with other positive recovering people. These people help you remember the sneaky dangers of addiction, to stay cautious and smart in the face of the very real dangers of relapse.

A suggestion for starting in 2024 is to complete a time-based recovery challenge, such as attending 30 meetings in 30 days. Alternatively, you can make goals related to recovery tasks, such as working through the 12 Steps with a sponsor this year (even if we’ve done them before).

4. Do Your Healing Work

Underlying traumatization are serious risk for relapse, so it’s important to make sure we get help. If you know you have struggles staying and being happy in your skin – as so many of us do, that’s why we were addicts in the first place, isn’t it? – make sure you’re actively involved in your healing.

This can take many forms. Perhaps you’re working on yourself in psychotherapy, in a therapy group, or receiving a series of treatments targeting your trauma. Maybe you’re taking a yoga teacher training or doing a healing art project. The important thing is to keep one foot in the waters of healing so that this stays alive and awake in you.

5. Socialize With Sober People

A lot of sobriety is just staying away from places and people who might offer us alcohol and drugs. The addict within will tell us this means we have to live a boring, isolated life, but that’s not true. Addiction leads us to that, not sobriety.

If you’re feeling a failure of imagination about this, see if you can come up with a list of 12 things that sound fun to try with others, that don’t involve any substances.

  1. take a gardening class
  2. go to a meet-up for hiking
  3. plan a board game night with my sober friends

Could you put something from your list on the calendar for early 2024?

6. Take Care of Your Physical Body and Health

Feeling good in the body is a large part of happiness.

Prioritize your physical health, by eating an abundance of healthy fresh, and ideally home-cooked foods in enough but still moderate amounts. Exercise, in a variety of ways, frequently. Stretch, go for long walks, do something for cardio, and something that builds your strength.

If it feels doable this year, stay away from screens, sugar, and caffeine. The body doesn’t like these things. The body likes moving, breathing fresh air, playing, and being in nature.

7. Get a Hobby

The human being loves to learn and loves to be creative. If you feel like you’re not sure what to do with yourself or you’re not too excited about anything these days, consider getting a hobby.

If there is something you’ve always wanted to try, or which you admire others for having the courage to learn how to do, give yourself a window of time, such as three months, just to explore, with no attachment to the outcome. You might not stick with it past the window of time, or you might.

Don’t do it for the results, per se, but for the experience itself, for the positive benefits of having a hobby. You might find that you get the bug for something, and surprise yourself. Allowing the human side of you to flourish, to be curious, exploratory, and experimental, does wonders for feeling meaning and connection in life. One exploration will lead to another, don’t decide everything in advance, but rather let yourself try it and see.

Here are some things we think sound fun to try out if you never have:

bellydancing

improv

cooking or baking class

learning a language, practicing it with a native speaker

crafting, such as sewing, quilting, flower arranging

ceramics, watercolors, life drawing

woodworking

learning an instrument

making up songs

8. Spend Time in Nature

Nature is a healer. If we can get out into nature, we will get all the benefits of our brains getting entrained to the flow state, which helps us learn, grow, regulate, move past our trauma, and become creative and peaceful.

If nature is a little scary to you, start with short visits, start small. But get to know nature. Outer nature reflects the vastness, beauty, and remarkable qualities we have inside ourselves too. We are nature, we come from nature, nature made us and is happy to have us back.

9. Celebrate Yourself

You are a lovely being, you deserve affirmation, recognition, support, and kindness. And celebration is one of the human needs we all have. If we celebrate ourselves in positive, smaller, life-affirming, generous ways in our ordinary lives, we won’t feel so much need to “celebrate” in the old way.

If you feel like you don’t have too much to celebrate at the moment, setting some small goals for yourself and then achieving them will help (see number 10 below!).

If you set a goal of completing a gardening class, and you do complete the gardening class, and come home knowing how to compost, celebrate the eff out of that, my friend. Celebrate it like it’s a really big thing. It is a big thing.

If it’s too big a thing, start with something little. I want to try a new recipe. I will do it tonight. Wow, I did it, I tried the new recipe! I am trying new things! Yay! I did something loving and positive, look at me! I love my cookies!

Does this feel childish? Good. We’re all children on the inside. When we care lovingly for the child inside, then we, paradoxically, finally behave like responsible adults. Responsible adults with twinkly, smiling eyes.

10. Get Some Goals

If you’re not yet familiar with how goals can help you feel good about being alive, try it out this year. Setting and meeting specific, doable goals is a confidence-builder and a bringer of joy to your life. It can completely change your sense of yourself.

If you need to prove it to yourself, start with something little and very achievable, and build up. If you’ve already got some goals, review, refresh, and reset them this year.

Villa Kali Ma Can Assist You With Staying Sober This Year!

If you think you might like some help this year, help is here to be had. We at Villa Kali Ma are devoted to sobriety through and through, along with healing trauma and mental health struggles. Check out our offerings for inpatient and outpatient, and consider coming over to get to know us.

Categories
Mental Health

Mental Health and New Year’s Resolutions Can Impact Mental Health

Happy New Year, Dear Villa Kali Ma Readers!

Goodbye, 2023, thank you for all you brought. Hello 2024, nice to meet you!

Dear readers, on behalf of Villa Kali Ma, I wish you all the best in this new cycle. May you find yourself face to face with a year of brightness, saturation, and depth, of feeling real in your own body and present in your story.

Like many people, I have mixed feelings about the time of year when we release the last year and welcome in the new.

I like that the year ends with a bang of celebration, a culmination of what came before. I like lights, mystery, and presents. I like laughing around the fireplace with the people who’ve known me longer than I’ve known myself, even if there’s a little pain mixed in.

But sometimes, releasing into the openness of time, I can feel a little lost. An old familiar stab of dread or uncertainty, facing the unassigned, undefined wilds of a new episode of life.

Today I’m wondering if you, like me, face the yearly bugaboo of resolutions – whether or not this year will be the year we finally make that change? Will we finally get it together, will we master ourselves, and overcome our gift for self-defeat?

The Statistics of Change

New Year’s Resolutions are a dazzling failure for the majority of people who make them. Statistics indicate a rather bleak outlook, with only 8% of people who make resolutions for the year following up on them, and a staggering 80% of people relinquishing their vows through an unceremonious giving up by February.

This makes me sad, as it implies something half-hearted or incomplete in us, a failure of will.

For those with addiction, failed willpower is no surprise – we know this one inside and out. How can we will ourselves to make positive changes, when we fear in our hearts that we belong to our self-destruction?

Can we be serious about serving the life force within us, even in as small a way as to meet a personal fitness goal – when we have known ourselves in the past to serve another, uncannier element? Something that pulled us down into the dark?

This changes with recovery, of course. Through the ordinary but still awe-inspiring miracles of recovery, we can develop and embody the vulnerable, brave commitment to thrive, after all.

We learn that it is possible to live in an upward spiral that grows towards the sun. This takes place verifiably, despite the feeling about ourselves that persists in the beginning, sometimes quiet, sometimes shouting, that somehow we and the world would be better if we weren’t even here.

Tut, it is a lie of course! (And even we know it somewhere deep down). But still, with such an omnipresence of the voices of the forces of the inner enemy, how do we know for sure we will prevail? (We don’t. We surrender to the life inside us again, who prevails for us. Through us, on our behalf, out of love for us, keeping us together, after all. We ask for a miracle, and we say thank you when it comes).

In recovery, we break the statistics of our past behavior, showing to ourselves and others that there is, in fact, an eye of calm at the center of the hurricane of every person who once belonged to addiction. We can live a life that keeps to the eye, stays in the center, and wreaks no havoc. We can be the center of a bell, bringing harmonies and beauties through our vibration.

What Are Some Reasons That Lead People to Quit Their New Year Resolutions?

Statistics say almost half of the people making resolutions already know while resolving that they will fail. What an idea! My heart goes out to the person, writing down, saying to themselves, declaring to others, “I will!”, already knowing that they will not.

Why is it that we fail in our resolutions? How is our resolve so weak? Here are some possibilities that could be affecting us.

1. Forced Timing

The timing of the New Year may or may not coincide with a personal cycle or readiness for change. Personal change has its season. We need to listen to ourselves and not always join in the collective for a once-a-year change, but ask ourselves – what do I want to change, when is a good time to make this change, how can I support this change?


2. Shoulds Versus Desires

Sometimes resolutions fail because they’re not desired changes, but rather a sense of “should”. Perhaps we feel that we should quit drinking because other people want us to, or because we judge ourselves. That is not the same thing as having decided to enter the transformational liberating fires of a new life.


3. Realistic Cost and Benefit Analysis

Some resolutions fail because they do not take into account the existing system and its homeostatic advantages. Whatever we do, we do because it works for us, one way or another.

We cannot decide to go all in on a change before we have answered these questions:

What are all the advantages of staying the same, of not making this particular change?

What, on the other hand, does it cost me to stay the same, not making this particular change?

What benefit will come to me from making this change?

What might be difficult for me about making this change?

Am I willing to undergo this difficulty for the sake of positive change? Does the potential benefit of making this change outweigh the potential cost?

How Can a Person Create Healthy Resolutions?

If we have lined up our will and we are committed to a change, the rest is relatively easy in comparison.

The key to how we can support ourselves to succeed lies in recasting resolutions as goals.

Goals are smaller, more targeted, and more time-based. As the SMART acronym reminds us, helpful goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant (to your values and what you want to achieve), and time-based.

Try this format for setting a new kind of resolution:

WHAT – Desired Outcome – written in the present tense, as if already fulfilled: eg, I speak Spanish fluently.

WHY – Reason for Outcome – written in terms of your values, again as if already fulfilled: eg, I speak Spanish fluently because I value foreign languages, learning, other cultures, reading Pablo Neruda in the original, etc.

SMART GOAL:

For January, I will spend 15 minutes a day on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, on my Spanish language learning app. I will reevaluate and set a new frame for continuing at the end of January. If I miss a day, that’s okay, but then I need to make it up to myself on one of the other days.

Then ask yourself – is this a SMART goal? Is it:

Specific enough?

Measurable enough?

Attainable enough?

Relevant enough to my WHAT and my WHY?

Time-based enough?

Villa Kali Ma Can Help You With Your Goals

A mile is walked one step at a time. What if you want to walk very many miles?

Goals can be laid out like a map of a walk across the country. Perhaps there is a very long way to go. But if we are realistic with ourselves, about how much can reasonably, sustainably be walked in each walking session, how many breaks we need, and when and where to rest, we could quite believably achieve it. As they say, where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Goals build on themselves. Those who set reasonable, realistic goals for themselves are more likely to achieve success. To achieve success at smaller goals, we build confidence in ourselves. Our confidence then comes from our own experience.  Of course I can do this challenging thing. I have done challenging things before.

If you have trauma, addiction, or mental illness of any kind, the chance that you are dealing with inner ambivalence about making a positive change is pretty high. This is because everything inside of our psyches is balanced carefully to cope with the symptoms of our pain.

The traumatized among us are scared to change because we haven’t yet learned how to cope with our overwhelming inner worlds. We know, consciously or unconsciously, that any behavior change, even deciding to meditate for 15 minutes a day, could bring up difficult material which we will then need to figure out a way to deal with. Dread and agitation have us captive.

If this is you – have compassion for yourself. Traumatization is very, very challenging in ways the average person does not recognize. You deserve all the gentleness in the world for recovering your simple right, ability, and confidence to change and grow.

Take it slow, get help if you can. Make just feeling okay inside your skin without substances and other self-destructive behaviors your primary goal, perhaps your only resolution. Everything else will come with time.

As always, we at Villa Kali Ma are here to help, sister.

Categories
Mental Health

Tips to Manage Post-Holiday Blues

Holiday Feelings

For many of us, the holidays are a time of mixed feelings. Whatever our family situation looks like – whether we’re surrounded by loved ones, celebrating with friends, or in solitude – most of us tend to revisit our feelings about ourselves and our families of origin this time of year.

If we live in the northern hemisphere, nature supports us to spend time indoors, as well, through colder weather and shortened daylight hours. As we know, time spent indoors and in darkness tends to bring out the blue notes.

Paused in our normal routines, we might be eating more, exercising less, suddenly more or less social than we’re accustomed to, as well.

The activity of the holidays leads inevitably towards an afterward time of interiority and pause. Reflection on what has come before, and preparation for what we imagine or hope will come next.

Whether our feelings during the end of the year are positive or painful, it’s a good idea to remember and validate for ourselves that the holidays are a big deal. Even joy, togetherness, connection, and celebration can be a lot to hold. When they’re over, we end up with a lot to process.

What Are Post-Holiday Blues?

There’s a phenomenon called the “post-holiday blues”. Post-holiday blues are temporary feelings that set in after the holidays are over, triggered by returning to normal life and starting a new year after a period of holiday intensity.

Post-holiday blues can include loneliness, sadness, flare-ups of low self-esteem, and a desire to check out of reality. Self-destructive, distracting patterns of behavior can show up. We may realize we’re avoiding our feelings.

These January blues can easily spread to one’s thoughts about the upcoming year, giving us a false expectation of what’s to come based on feeling depleted, let down, or moody now.

If you find yourself with a case of post-holiday “meh” this January, don’t worry. You’re not alone – it’s just the blues. Like all symptoms and struggles, your feelings are knocking at your door, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

Times of melancholy are always an invitation to greater self-intimacy – some valuable get-to-know-you time spent with yourself.

What Triggers Post-Holiday Blues?

For some people, post-holiday blues kick in when we start missing the positive feelings associated with the holidays. If you tend to look forward to and enjoy the energy of the holidays, you might simply be feeling disappointed and let down that they’re over.

The inner child, the one inside us who gets excited about celebrations, presents, sweets, magic, and fun, can easily be a source of sadness once the holidays have concluded.

If this is you, the cure lies in connecting with your inner child nature, helping her understand how life works, and that there will be other positive experiences coming soon in the future. Reassurance that it’s perfectly natural and okay with you (speaking to the inner child from the point of view of the inner parent inside you) to feel like this now is sometimes all that’s needed.

On the positive side, the inner child is easily cheered by small pleasures of human life – going for a sloshy walk in rain boots, collecting leaves and pebbles, and getting out into the momentum of life is often enough. Knowing that it’s your inner child who’s sad about the end of a bright time and that all she needs is some cheering up, may be enough to turn the tide.

Love, Guilt, and Frustration: Those Family Feelings

For many of us, the holidays bring up very complicated feelings that we aren’t able to fully process until we’re back in our lives again. Once we have space, time, and enough privacy, the feelings we couldn’t afford to feel in the moment come to us to be felt.

Things like seeing family members who for whatever reason have the effect of making us feel bad about ourselves, re-exposure to triggering family dynamics and old roles, being around alcohol or other drugs, and the pressure and stress to join together as a family unit again without too much friction can create a lot of tension in the body.

Pent-up, suppressed frustrations about even little petty family squabbles can easily turn inward into depression. We start telling ourselves there’s something wrong with us, rather than listening to the small but important voices within who are still feeling angry, hurt, or upset about all the “little things” that happened during the holidays.

If this is you, validate that you have every right to feel anger. As long as you don’t lash out at people, anger is just information and boundaries, it’s not anything bad about you. Women especially often need help knowing anger is normal, and that we are not alone in feeling irritation or even anger when having contact with family members.

If we don’t understand anger, we feel guilty. Anger isn’t the opposite of love, and doesn’t mean we’re bad people. Anger is just information about the edges of ourselves, where we need help having healthy separateness.

We’re all in the same boat ultimately. Everyone feels anger and frustration when needs aren’t met, and when boundaries are crossed, intentionally or unintentionally. Most of us also feel bad about it because we don’t want to hurt our loved ones or make them feel bad either.

If you’re experiencing that guilt-anger-love hangover this season, see if you can be kind to yourself about the fact that you’re angry, and don’t make a negative self-image out of it. Instead, try a “just like me” statement to soothe yourself.

Just like me, people all over the world struggle with loving their families and also needing to have a separate self

Just like me, people all over the world feel angry and guilty around their families sometimes

What Are Some Facts About Individuals Experiencing Post-Holiday Blues?

As a seasonal, time-specific kind of depression, post-holiday blues haven’t been extensively studied, but some studies on the effects of the holidays do exist. One review of holiday-related studies concludes that while the holidays themselves aren’t associated with a change in mental health status for most, the season is followed by a noticeable rise in people experiencing dysphoria, or low moods.

It is also very likely that seasonal affective disorder is at play in the phenomenon as well, at least in the northern hemisphere, as the holidays mark the start of the winter season.

Those who experience post-holiday blues may be able to link them to the after-effects of stress, related to weeks of seasonal shopping, preparation and managing of group gatherings, increased eating and drinking, disruption of normal routines, the impacts of air travel and driving, being a guest or hosting guests, and in general, revisiting family dynamics.

When Are Post-Holiday Blues Considered Serious?

The post-holiday blues are most likely a passing, temporary mood disorder. You can expect that you will regulate and reset your normal mental health status within a few weeks. Your body, emotions, and mind just need some time to process everything that happened, feel the feelings, and make space for the next thing.

On the other hand, for people who already struggle with depression, the post-holiday blues can set off a bout of more serious blues. If you tend towards depression to begin with, it’s important to look out for the possibility of post-holiday blues turning into a more serious episode.

If you have a self-care program that normally helps you stay well in your heart and mind, such as an exercise regime, regular contact with loving friends, and so on, it would be wise to get that program back in place sooner rather than later after the holidays.

For women with a history of addiction, it’s important to take the post-holiday blues more seriously as well, for the simple reason that they can represent a relapse trigger. As women who didn’t feel good in our skins without substances to help us cope, we’re always a little more vulnerable than most to getting sucked back into negative patterning.

Proactively going to meetings, refreshing our commitment to sobriety, and making sure we connect with other people who will understand and accept us for exactly how we feel is key during this time.

Tips for Managing Post-Holiday Blues

1. This, Too, Shall Pass

The post-holiday blues too shall pass. Even if your wholehearted goal was to stay depressed, one day you would still wake up feeling different – a little more lively, awake, curious, and lighthearted. It’s just how we are.

Remember that the animal within you, the child within you, who loves life and wants to find out what happens next, will most likely get you through this phase once you’ve had a chance to feel the feelings and process everything you need to process. It’s a natural thing and you’ll get through it.


2. Stay Connected With People Who Get It

If you can think of anyone in your world who will get what you’re going through and be nice to you about it without encouraging you to stay stuck in victimization, call them and tell them how you’re feeling. Hear their holiday stories as well. If you speak it out (to the right people), you can send your suffering gently on its merry way.


3. Exercise

Exercise is nature’s antidepressant. You can’t stay depressed and have a good exercise routine at the same time. If you choose to exercise, the blues will have a hard time sticking around.


4. Go Outside

Go outside every day, no matter what the weather is, and whether you feel like it or not. Just 20 minutes a day walking outside will suffice. If it helps, set a short-term goal that’s easily achieved, like “Every day for 7 days straight, I will walk for 20 minutes in my neighborhood” rather than worrying about it forever. After the first 7 days, you may want to extend but don’t evaluate until you complete the 7 days.


5. Green Time Not Screen Time

If you can, get out in nature. If no nature is accessible, get to the greenest freshest zone you can find. The natural world lifts our spirits, reminds us of our belonging to all of our lives, and restores our liveliness. The beneficial impacts of nature have been documented by studies galore, but also you can just feel it for yourself. This is opposed to screen time, which has documented negative effects on mental health, which you can also feel for yourself.


6. Sleep It Off

Get enough sleep, and if you need it, let yourself sleep in when you can. Do less, and lower the expectations just for now, if you can do that without swinging into too much self-indulgence. Moderation is key, but don’t make war on the body for showing the symptoms of depression. If you need to be soft and slow, find ways to do that comfortably, cozily, and kindly. (This might seem like it runs counter to the exercise recommendation, but it doesn’t. Do both. Get tired through exercise and then rest fully).


7. Stay Away From Social Media

As everyone knows by now, social media makes people feel terrible. Stay off it. Consider something like a social media fast for 12 days straight. As a trade-off, allow other forms of (non-screen time) entertainment, like reading paper books.

May your New Year come with many gifts, dear reader. Sending you all our love for a bright and healthy 2024!

Categories
Co-Occurring Disorders

Co-occurring Disorders: PTSD and Alcoholism

What Is PTSD and Why Does It Develop?

Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a very serious, painful condition that can develop when we are exposed to something too intense for the human psyche.

As the name indicates, PTSD develops after going through an incident or series of extremely stressful incidents. PTSD is commonly diagnosed alongside alcoholism and other substance addictions as a co-occurring disorder.

PTSD is a risk for people who are exposed to war, sexual assault, child abuse, violence, poverty, and car accidents, among other things. It’s not uncommon for people involved in these kinds of events to come away with shattered nervous systems.

A shattered nervous system creates a life of acute personal misery, of constantly being stuck in a state of high stress. People with shattered nervous systems very often turn to alcohol, drugs, and other self-destructive behaviors out of desperation to modulate their inner experiences.

Trauma can also come from repeated, long-term exposure to less acute but still very damaging and still life-threatening conditions, such as what happens in childhood if we are not appropriately cared for at all levels of our being.

Many experiences that are considered part of a normal childhood are trauma risks for human beings. Attachment trauma – when we do not have enough of a psychologically healthy and secure bond with a parent – is very widespread. Certainly sexual, physical, and psychological harm and neglect of childhood emotional needs are demonstrably damaging to human development.

All in all, PTSD and chronic trauma are epidemic among women, operating side by side with addiction to cause severe suffering across America.

The Problem With Traumatic Stress

All the above-mentioned situations are damaging to women because they are extremely stressful. Stress is a natural biological response that gets activated in us at the pre-conscious bodily level when something potentially dangerous or harmful is taking place.

Stress operates more or less the same way in all mammals – heart rate increases to pump blood into our muscles, we’re flooded with adrenaline, cortisol, and other body chemicals, and we breathe rapidly to increase oxygen levels.

Stress is natural and life-protective, but it’s not healthy to be in a state of stress for longer than a few moments or it damages the body and nervous system. Many important bodily processes, like digestion, healing, learning, and psychological development, are disturbed and put on pause while we’re in a state of stress, and if we don’t exit the stress state quickly enough, it leaves lasting wounds in the body and nervous system.

Psychologically, stress disrupts our empathy, our higher mental functioning, and certainly our creativity, pleasure, and joy, replacing our humanity with emergency mode. No one is their real or best self while in a state of stress. So it’s very important that stress is a temporary state with a clear ending, and that after the stressful incident, we are allowed and able to float back down to more whole, embodied, relaxed states of being.

We need to relax again for our naturally loving, creative, and calm human nature to re-inhabit our bodies and continue with the process of growing up into the wonderful selves we’re here to be.

How Can Trauma and PTSD Lead to Problems With Alcohol?

For women who develop PTSD, a return to relaxation and feelings of safety never really happens. We stay stuck in the nightmarish, surreal, hyper-stressed condition of perceiving danger everywhere. This also means that our lives are on pause and our human development is arrested in some ways.

To be able to release the stress response, all women need time, space, and the opportunity for physical, and emotional release. We also need help making sense of the experience, and integrating it into our understanding of ourselves and the world.

Many of us do not get that time. Instead, the stress response gets trapped in the body, where it becomes a source of living hell of permanent physical and emotional distress.

People with trauma are at exceptionally high risk of addiction, including alcoholism. Why? Because we need something to help us cope.

PTSD is characterized by intrusive obsessive thoughts, disturbing memories and flashbacks, nightmares, and night terrors, and feelings of extreme dread, helplessness, anger, and shame. It is one of the worst experiences known to mankind.

How Can Alcohol Problems Lead To Trauma and Problematic Relationships?

Tragically, people who have alcohol addiction also are likely to expose themselves to more and more traumatizing situations.

Alcohol numbs our higher functioning, and leads women towards emotional and physical harm, as can happen when driving under the influence or entering into risky sexual situations because of lowered inhibitions and being in the wrong places at the wrong times.

There is a high correlation between domestic violence and alcohol, as well, on both sides of the equation. Many abused women use substances to deal with their victimization.

We will discover upon getting sober just how many terrible situations we have endured and survived. And while our conscious mind has been numbed into forgetting, our nervous system remembers forever what happened to us.

Our trauma is waiting for us to heal it. The return to warm, connected safety that never happened still needs to happen. The good news is, no matter how long ago the events that damaged us were, our return to safety can happen now, with some help through trauma-informed treatment.

Treatment for Alcohol and PTSD

If you have trauma, what your soul and body need is a chance to heal it. Alcohol is the opposite of that. For people who have PTSD, alcohol is a misleading solution, one that works in the short term and makes everything worse in the long term.

All trauma symptoms are worsened by alcohol – anxiety, dread, anger, panic, and the desperate urge to flee one’s own nightmarish experience are increased by the presence of alcohol.

The restoration of peace, goodness, and safety inside yourself is possible, but not as long as you’re drinking. That’s why it’s very important if you have alcohol addiction to receive help for it.

Alcoholism is notoriously tricky to beat and almost impossible to conquer alone. You don’t have to do it alone, because there are many resources and loving people who will help you recover. After all, it’s personally meaningful for them to help other women out of the nightmare that they also lived through.

Villa Kali Ma takes our mission of healing women very seriously. We know the misery inside and out, we know the path to healing and the joy that’s possible even after living in hell. If you’re seeking help for PTSD and alcoholism, think about whether you might want to come to start your trauma-healing journey with us. We’d love to have you.

Categories
Co-Occurring Disorders

Alcohol and Depression in Women

What Is Depression?

Depression is the clinical word for feeling very down, low, or blue. Depression can feel like our life force has been drained out of us: we have no energy, we feel sad and hopeless, with a dark outlook.

Temporary depression can be a perfectly normal response to difficult chapters of life, so it doesn’t necessarily mean something is wrong with you. Some people argue that depression is a natural reaction to a deeply unwell world.

Depression can be an important part of grieving, recovering from abuse, and waking up to who you are and want to be in this world. Depression is a messenger from the soul like all other symptoms and doesn’t have to be treated as a completely bad thing.

That said, depression is tricky and we can also get trapped in depression in a way that doesn’t serve us. Depression may be a signal from the soul, but we often need help from other people to figure out what it’s trying to tell us!

Depression Is Treatable

Perhaps unsurprisingly, depression is widespread in contemporary life. Many people meet the diagnostic criteria of the so-called spectrum of “depressive disorders.” Depressive disorders can become dangerous because of the link to suicidal feelings, so they are important to pay attention to.

The most important thing to understand about depression is that it is very responsive to help. Simple changes, for example in habits of thought, diet, and lifestyle can go a long way with depression.

Depression affects the body, mind, and emotions in equal measure, so you have many ways of changing your life to feel better: through exercise, training yourself to think better thoughts about yourself and the world, and prioritizing positive people and activities that fill you with joy, for example.

With time, you may even come to value your depression as a way of deepening your relationship with yourself, as it is known in the world of psychotherapy as a call to go inward to get to know the real you. In other words, when you’re living out of alignment with who you are in your deepest nature, that tell-tale depression will pop up to let you know it.

All of that said, depression is a formidable dragon to slay – it’s best to get help on the quest, in the form of kind, knowledgeable people who can help you because they understand the nature of the beast. You don’t have to do it alone.

Symptoms of Depression

People don’t always realize that they’re depressed while it’s happening, but there are a couple of clues that can help you catch it.

Depression is characterized by certain types of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. When you’re depressed your thoughts will be more negative, gloomy, and doom-oriented, usually with a kind of “what’s the point of trying, it will always be this way” vibration.

When you are thinking thoughts that make you feel demoralized, beaten down, and hopeless, those are depression thoughts. It’s important to understand depressed thoughts as distortions: they are interpretations of reality, not facts.

Depressed thoughts can feel logical and true to us, but they’re full of assumptions about a future we cannot possibly predict, including obvious fallacies like, I will always feel the same as I do right now. We also tend to interpret other people’s feelings and behaviors towards us with a negative slant, without even noticing that we’re doing that.

The emotional tones that go with depression are a mixture of sadness, being unable to face things, a feeling of “I don’t have what it takes to get through this”, low self-esteem, and hidden, often unrecognized anger.

We can feel tired, like our bodies are extra heavy, as though we have no vitality in us that could be used to move or get something positive going for us.

Behaviorally, we might decide to skip, cancel last minute, or even totally stop doing positive, self-loving, and self-caring behaviors. Staying connected with people, hobbies, eating well, exercising, and self-care activities that normally make us feel good are at risk when we are depressed (these are also the things that will help us feel better again if we start doing them again).

How Does Alcohol Affect a Woman’s Mood?

Alcohol creates depression. It is classed as a “depressant” substance for a reason. It also exacerbates pre-existing depression.

Although when depressed we may temporarily feel better through self-medicating with alcohol, the starting state of depression will be far worse after the effects of inebriation wear off. We often don’t see the connection between depression and our alcohol use, but the correlation is a strong and direct one.

Does Depression Drive You to Drink?

Even though alcohol makes depression worse, many women who start drinking to excess were depressed as a starting condition. It’s not rocket science – if you feel bad all the time, you may get roped into using substances as a way to cope.

So yes, depression may drive you to drink. If you have a disordered relationship with alcohol, you can be fairly sure that underneath the desire to drink lies a hurt self full of negative thoughts and feelings, who is actually in need of love and kind attention.

What Is the Relationship Between Depression and Binge Drinking?

Depression is a direct biological effect of binge drinking, part of the damage that alcohol does to the body. Since binge drinking is also connected to self-destructive behavior and making poor decisions, there is a secondary effect, which is that the life we wake up to after drinking too much is usually more depressing than it would be without the impacts of alcohol.

Drinking too much damages relationships, careers, and the things in life that give joy. Sooner or later alcohol erodes our native ability to feel happy in our skin.

What Should You Do if You’re Struggling With Alcohol and Depression?

If you’re struggling with alcohol and depression at the same time, first of all, our heart goes out to you. You’re truly not the only one, this is a widespread problem and there are solutions to get your natural life force and happiness back.

If this is you, it’s best to get some kind of help that will address the destructive behaviors associated with alcohol and will also help you meaningfully get at the emotional and mental pain you’re carrying, that is causing you to seek relief through substance addiction.

The twin burdens of trying to stop drinking and also trying to face down depression can be too much to handle for most women without someone to be in your corner and help you figure it all out.

And there’s no shame in that. The cure for pain lies within you, but it is in connection to other people that you can learn to activate that for yourself.

If you’re looking for treatment or a holistic approach that can address your alcohol use and your depression at the same time, and you like the idea of a positive, whole-woman approach, Villa Kali Ma could be the right place for you. We’d love to help you, sister.

Categories
Co-Occurring Disorders

Co-occurring Disorders: Trauma and Anxiety

What Is Trauma?

The word trauma is used a lot these days! Well, good.

Why is that good? Because trauma is the elephant in the room. Trauma is what underlies all the things that are truly hard about human life.

Trauma is why people treat each other badly. Trauma is why people become addicts, and why the ego defense mechanisms we all have, and through which we hurt each other every day, are necessary in the first place. Trauma creates psychopaths, victimizers, and victims.

Let’s face it, humanity, we are not ok. We’re mentally ill, socially isolated, self-destructive, violent, addicted, and disconnected. Whether I’m coping a little better or a little worse than the person next to me, the fact remains that I’m coping.

Coping with what? A wounded soul.

The Wound

In the mental health context, trauma means psychological wounding.

There are biological parts of trauma – the permanently keyed-up nervous system, the numbing and dissociating, the terrible, indescribable dread.

The body creates these sensations, the way that your screen creates a TV show. Through tiny chemical interactions and electromagnetic signals firing on and off, a message, an experience, a whole show is transmitted to you through the wiring of your nervous system and brain.

But what is the trauma show that your body is broadcasting? Is it a feel-good rom-com, a story of human triumph, a Hallmark channel movie?

Nope, it’s a horror show, a surreal nightmare. How do you feel when you watch a scary movie? That’s right, afraid.

What Is Anxiety?

The clinical word for fear is anxiety. Like all emotions, fear runs a spectrum from soul-annihilating terror to vague, floaty unease.

Anxiety can be so intense as to represent a serious interruption to a person’s ability to live their life and participate in the world. When that’s the case, doctors and psychologists say this person has an anxiety disorder.

The anxiety-disordered person may be given habit-forming anxiolytic medications or, if they’re lucky, steered towards the many holistic solutions for anxiety (yoga, meditation, diet, vigorous exercise, hypnotherapy, time in nature, and creative hobbies are just a few of the widely available options that help with anxiety).

The question might still be asked, though, why are we anxious in the first place? What are we so afraid of?

Why is the body acting as though this is a life-or-death situation when all it is is a phone call from someone I haven’t talked to in a while? Why does my heart pound like I’m in the deep end with the shark from Jaws when someone asks me a question in a work meeting that I wasn’t prepared for? Why can’t I stop thinking, why can’t I breathe deeply, why can’t I relax?

I’ll tell you why: trauma. That’s right – trauma and anxiety are very, very closely related.

How Do Trauma and Anxiety Interact?

Trauma and anxiety are so close as to almost be the same thing. Traumatization, when it shows up at clinical levels, is diagnosed as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which used to be classed as an anxiety disorder until it was decided that traumatization deserves its category.

The difference is really that anxiety is a key component of the trauma experience, but not the only aspect of trauma. Anxiety stands alone as a diagnostic category of its own, as a certain flavor of experience that may or may not be mixed with the other aspects of traumatization.

However the distinctions between diagnostic categories are blurry, and the phenomenon of “co-occurring disorders” – in which you qualify for more than one diagnosis – is widespread.

When you throw substance abuse into the mix, things become even more complicated, as substance use creates many problems in the human experience, such as depression, anxiety, brain damage, loss of empathy, and psychosis. In other words, substance abuse creates effects that would earn you a mental health diagnosis if it wasn’t coming from the substance abuse.

Trauma and anxiety are both about fear, and they’re reflections of a tragic aspect of human experience: our inability to feel safe after we were exposed to something damagingly scary that we never quite got over.

How Does Trauma Lead to Anxiety?

When people are exposed to life-threatening events, it shocks the human nervous system. A lot of the time, we can release the shock out of our systems, provided that the event is not too intense, and doesn’t keep happening over and over again.

We can get over a shock, even a big one if we have time, space, and support to feel the feelings, make sense of what happened, and if we come out of the experience knowing that even though that bad thing happened, we are still good, loved, worthy, capable, connected to our loved ones, and safe in this world.

Suppose instead you go through an event and you have no support, connection, love, and understanding to help you make sense of it. In that case, you will likely form one of the following conclusions: this is somehow my fault, I am bad, this happened because of something I did or didn’t do, and I have to figure out how to live differently so that this never happens again. And since I can’t quite figure out how I could have stopped it, it’s at risk of happening again, right now, right here, any time, any place. This is a threat forever. 

Whatever the origin, trauma leads to anxiety, because both trauma and anxiety are about having lost your ability to feel fully safe.

What Is Trauma-Induced Anxiety and How Can I Heal It?

Trauma-induced anxiety is anxiety sourcing from shocking experiences you went through at some point in your past. You most likely do not fully remember the events consciously, but the body remembers them and recreates the memories even when you’re in a different situation entirely, sometimes in baffling and exasperating ways.

The symptoms are the same as other forms of anxiety, effects as rapid heartbeat, shortness of breath, nervousness, tension, sleep problems, sweating, and trembling. You probably also have some kind of rapid, obsessive, or intrusive thoughts, and feel unsettled, uneasy, full of dread, or even panic.

Anxiety is a symptom of something serious that needs to be healed at the root cause level. The good news is, it can be healed. Yes, it takes some effort, but the difference between living life with a relaxed nervous system versus a keyed-up one is worth however long it takes to restore yourself to sanity.

Villa Kali Ma’s New Offering for Women With Trauma: The Retreat

More and more is learned every day about how to help the human body, mind and spirit recover from traumatization. Wonderful new healing therapies and approaches are offered at more and more facilities.

Villa Kali Ma’s own new residential trauma treatment program, The Retreat, is one option you have available to you if you’re thinking of getting some help for your trauma-induced struggles with life.

The Retreat is offered in service for women who want to retrieve their lives from the nightmare of traumatization, to instead discover how possible it is to create lives of peace, meaning, and human connection.

Categories
Co-Occurring Disorders

Co-occurring Disorders: Trauma and Depression

What Is Depression?

When we’re depressed, we have a low mood, coupled with negative thoughts about ourselves and the world. We may feel very heavy-hearted and sad, as the old word for depression, “melancholia”, captures.

Depression can feel like we’re over-grieving without even knowing what we’re so blue about, maybe even grieving our own lives or who we used to be. We can feel isolated, still, and broken.

It is not unusual if we’re depressed to start to think about our own death. Even if we don’t think we would ever act on it, if we have some degree of longing to exit our life experience because we have no hope of ever being happy, that’s depression.

When we’ve got it bad, depression interferes with our ability to live our lives. The presence of depression and its signature bad feelings and low energy can make it very hard to complete our necessary life tasks. Seemingly simple things like participation in work and family life can feel impossible! If ignored for too long, depression worsens to an active desire to harm and even kill ourselves.

Depression is a symptom of deep heartsickness, and it can come from many things. One starting point of depression is trauma.

How Are Depression and Trauma Related?

Trauma leaves a tragic legacy of unresolved fear, anger, and helplessness in the nervous systems of affected people.

What is recorded in the nervous system as biological information is experienced by us subjectively as our lives, who we are and what are our life stories. When trauma has shaped us, we feel and think about our lives through the lens of dysregulated, imbalanced states: deep disconnection, anxiety, shame, suppressed rage, unworthiness, loneliness, and a profound lack of safety.

The trauma response is biological – it feels like death to the mammal you are because trauma is related to your natural, instinctual gifts for survival and self-protection at the deepest levels of your body and being.

When something we lived through activates our survival instincts into high gear, and we never quite get the opportunity to fully complete and resolve that experience and return to true, total safety, we may struggle with trauma symptoms until we finally have the chance to do so.

One clue of the relationship between depression and trauma lies in the fact that depression carries a strong note of helplessness, which is the essence of the trauma experience.

Depression is anecdotally sometimes called “anger turned inwards”. In the case of trauma-generated depression that is literally true. The lingering feelings of life-protecting anger (think mama bear protecting cub) that were once a natural biological response to extreme boundary violation or life threat, turn toxically against the self.

The more trauma is researched and understood, the more it looks to be the case that most mental health problems originate in, or at the very least are inextricably interwoven with the phenomenon of traumatization.

How Is Depression Treated?

Depression can be treated in a lot of ways, so think about your values and what matters to you, as you will probably be able to find help that fits to your best and highest nature and beliefs if you look around a bit. From yoga to functional medicine, art therapy to somatic experiencing, logotherapy to plant medicine, many different avenues to healing from this particular kind of pain exist.

Quite commonly in the mainstream, people with depression are given prescriptions for anti-depressants. Many voices within the mental health field represent the point of view that anti-depressants are not a good solution for many reasons, so it is wise to inform yourself before necessarily taking that route. If you are curious to evaluate this for yourself, a good starting point resource may be the website Mad in America, which takes a critical look at whether or not psychotropic medications are delivering the benefits they are advertised as delivering.

Regardless of your decision about whether or not to medicate, depression is beneficially supported by many other paths as well. Cognitive-behavioral therapy teaches you to think better thoughts, Parts Work and other trauma modalities help you feel safe and valuable again, and the many tried and true forms of traditional psychotherapy have helped many women before you.

Finally, a healthy lifestyle, food choices, and exercise should not be underestimated or overlooked when treating depression, as these are nature’s most powerful allies for returning your body to the land of the living.

What Should I Do About Feelings of Depression?

If you’re struggling with depression, the first thing we urge you to do is stop blaming yourself for it. No one wants to be depressed or get depressed on purpose. This is a case for compassion, not criticism! That said, take it seriously. It is causing more harm than you probably are in a condition to fully see.

You are not alone if you have depression. Even though our very disconnected society makes it hard for us to have those conversations, the truth is that many, many other people also deal with the challenges of this particular soul sickness.

On the positive side, many people who know what depression is like have found viable, joyful paths out of it, and live happily enough on the other side. You can too.

It is a good idea to get help. It is very hard to cure depression from within the experience because having positive, kind attention is a human necessity to even see ourselves and understand what’s going on.

Once you’ve had enough help from another person, you will know how to handle it on your own most of the time, and you don’t have to worry about becoming dependent on therapy. In the beginning of figuring out how to get out from under a depression, kind, compassionate, smart help is key.

The nervous system learns what safety and balance are mainly through the mechanism of mirror neurons, that co-regulate us to the nervous system of someone who’s not in a state of trauma, so just being around other people is a big part of healing.

If you are struggling with depression and trauma, you may want to get support from us here at Villa Kali Ma, at our new treatment center, The Retreat! We have opened the doors of this very special trauma-focused treatment center so women can have a safe, beautiful space to reside while they turn over a new leaf. Consider it – we’d love to have you.

Categories
Alcohol Addiction

Alcohol and Domestic Violence in Women

What Is the Link Between Substance Use and Domestic Violence?

Domestic violence, also called Intimate Partner Violence, is closely linked to substance use. Where substance use disorders thrive, so does domestic violence.

Domestic violence includes any behavior or action that takes place in the context of an intimate relationship, which creates harm. This can mean physical harm and sexual violence, as well as emotional harm.

Forms of bodily assault like hitting, slapping, and throwing objects are obvious examples of domestic violence. Forced sexual intercourse, as well as emotionally violent behaviors like controlling another person through monitoring or isolating them from friends, family, and help also counts as partner abuse.

Studies on the topic are difficult to conduct due to the known underreporting of domestic abuse. Domestic violence is estimated to affect 1 in 10 women in America.

If you are experiencing domestic violence it’s important to understand that help is available and that it is possible to find support to remove yourself from that situation. If you’re reading this article for yourself, please consider consulting the domestic violence hotline for direct help with your situation.

Understanding Alcohol Addiction and Misuse

Not everyone who uses substances is also violent. Abusers sometimes explain away their behavior as owing to alcohol or substances but that is not a complete understanding of the nature of the problem. It is true, however, that tendencies towards violent expressions of anger are made worse by substances.

Drugs and alcohol distort people’s thinking and bring out tendencies in behavior that are already in place before substances make these tendencies more dangerous and out of control. Alcohol and drugs are disinhibiting, removing the ability to refrain from impulses that we normally wouldn’t yield to. Where there is a pre-existing pattern of violent tendencies and/or a history of having been abused, these patterns are severely aggravated by substance use.

Alcohol Use Disorder is a clinical umbrella term that covers a spectrum of alcohol-related problems. The range is from those who misuse alcohol (drink to excess, to the point of creating health or social consequences) periodically, to those who are chemically dependent on alcohol, to those who have the full disease of alcoholism, which includes serious degradation and damage to the body, mind, and life of the individual.

Generally, alcohol abuse leads towards dependence, and any alcohol use at all tends, in the main, to lead more quickly or more slowly toward the eventual condition of addiction.

Signs that you have an alcohol use disorder or may have one soon are:

  • you drink despite negative consequences to your life
  • you have cravings and strong urges to drink
  • you have withdrawal symptoms such as trembling hands after stopping drinking
  • you are losing control over your use, such that you drink more in amount or frequency than you mean to, can’t stop, or can’t stay stopped
  • you are “restless, irritable, and discontent” when not drinking, and need to drink to feel normal

What Is the Prevalence of Domestic Violence and Alcohol Addiction?

According to existing studies on the subject, substance abuse is correlated with bringing out dangerous traits, including incidents of intimate partner violence.

A large percentage of those who are violent to their partners also use substances, but not everyone who has a substance use disorder is violent to their partner. Women in the victim role are often also substance users, and women who are abused are more likely to have a substance use disorder than women who are not in an abusive partner relationship.

Men who are violent to their partners are more likely to cause the death of their partner when substance use is also a factor.

What Are the Risk Factors of Alcohol-Related Domestic Violence?

Some factors found to be correlated with alcohol-related domestic violence include:

  • Growing up in a violent household
  • Poverty, unemployment, financial stress
  • Regular use of alcohol to cope with life problems
  • Unplanned pregnancy and family problems
  • Depression and suicidal ideation
  • Anger and hostility
  • A previous history of having been physically abused and/or abusing another person
  • Lacking empathy, antisocial personality traits, aggression
  • Social isolation, disconnection from friends and family
  • Frequent conflict in the relationship
  • A need for excessive control, jealousy, and possessiveness

What Are the Effects of Domestic Violence on Women?

Domestic violence has immediate and long-term effects on women.

In the immediate term, domestic violence impacts women’s health and well-being. The following are the effects of domestic violence on women:

  • Injuries, cuts and bruises
  • Broken bones, damaged organs, and other body parts
  • Sexual trauma and damage to sexual organs
  • Psychological trauma

In the longer term, domestic violence has lasting physical and psychological effects, including:

  • Chronic pain
  • Migraines
  • Sleep disorders
  • Immune system problems
  • Stress
  • Traumatic brain injury
  • Memory problems, problems thinking clearly
  • Depression, anxiety, and PTSD

What Are the Signs of Domestic Violence?

Part of the problem with domestic violence is that women fear the repercussions of speaking up to authorities or even friends or family. Abused women have been taught to expect violence from their partners if they do not keep their secrets and have become used to complying to stay safe.

Women also frequently doubt their own experiences, gaslighting and blaming themselves rather than seeing abuse for what it is. This is what it is, and it’s important not to blame the victim, as becoming excessively insecure, dependent, and frightened is part of the pattern rather than something the woman is doing wrong.

Some signs of being in an abusive relationship include:

  • You feel controlled by your partner
  • Your partner demands that you are always available to them, requiring that you respond immediately to emails, calls, and texts
  • Your partner demands sex or pressures you to have sex, or insists that you get pregnant when you don’t want to
  • Your partner is physically violent with you, and/or uses threats of physical violence to get their way
  • Your partner interferes with, controls, or makes your decisions for you, things like where you spend your money, what you wear, who you see or talk to
  • Your partner is jealous even in innocent situations. Your partner frequently accuses you of cheating or flirting
  • Your partner has frequent and/or sudden outbursts of anger
  • Your partner blames you and makes you responsible for how they feel, especially if they feel jealous or threatened by your independence
  • Your partner threatens, intimidates, and blocks you from making a move to free yourself

Villa Kali Ma Can Assist Women With Alcoholism

If you use alcohol regularly and/or in excess, and you are in a situation where domestic violence is at play, your alcohol use is likely playing a role in keeping you trapped in the situation that is causing you harm.

It is important to know that you are not alone with these troubles and that help exists for you.

Many women who come through our doors needing help for their alcoholism or other substance problems are also fleeing unsafe situations and relationships that have been causing them deep harm at many levels of their being.

Villa Kali Ma is a safe place for women needing refuge and help recovering from destructive tendencies and struggles that are hurting them. We offer mental health, trauma healing, and addiction treatment programs that will help you find the strength to rescue yourself from danger.

References:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8729263/

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