At Villa Kali Ma, it is our strong belief that women are precious. Every single one of us matters. This statement bears repeating, and often! Because for the many women we encounter in the course of our work healing addiction, mental illness, and trauma, the idea of being valuable just because we exist is often a foreign one.

Most of the women we encounter suffer from extreme self-hatred, self-neglect, and self-misunderstanding. Rather than seeing that we are extraordinary and unrepeatable expressions of the one life force of which we all partake, most of us have the habit of seeing only flaws, failures, and deficits.

We here at Villa Kali Ma insist, though. Not only are women exceedingly precious, that preciousness needs care and boundaries to be preserved and nourished. While women are exceptionally resilient – able to endure a range of abuses and neglects ranging from the material to the spiritual – we are not unscathed by all the forms of mistreatment of women and girls that the world has heaped on us. Instead, we exist in a state of severe woundedness, carrying on not because of, but in spite of the ways that society has taught us to regard ourselves.

In our daily work with women of all backgrounds here at Villa Kali Ma, we focus on the vital component of self-care for recovery, coaching skills of mental health maintenance and other forms of wellness practices that help women flourish and thrive. The vast majority of the women we get to know through this work need help learning to stop treating themselves the way they have been treated since birth – as something to be critiqued, told, rejected, abandoned, abused, ignored, or used.

Women in recovery must learn self-care. Self-care isn’t selfish. It is an essential practice for all women, especially those of us learning to live in a new way after decades of struggling with substance addiction, mental health, and trauma.

In this post, we’ll share thoughts about the most important aspects of self-care for women in recovery.

Building a Self-Care Foundation That Supports Lasting Recovery

All self-care must begin with the understanding that there are serious consequences to self-neglect and self-mistreatment for any of us who are seeking to recover from addiction, mental health struggles, and trauma. If we treat ourselves the way we have always treated ourselves in the past, we will again experience the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that drove us to need professional help. To stay healthy, we must gradually learn to think very different thoughts, feel different feelings, and take different actions. Only then will we be able to experience and sustain those different life results we deeply deserve and desire.

It is not a luxury to care for the self, but rather a necessity. Caring for the self includes meeting needs and honoring boundaries in many aspects of life. Not only must we learn to notice and care for the physical form we inhabit, by feeding ourselves healthy food, resting enough, exercising appropriately, and spending time outside in the great outdoors. We must also learn to notice and care for the emotional, mental, spiritual, relational, creative, and career (or purpose fulfillment) aspects of our lives. Because we are complex, multidimensional beings. Self-care is a living, breathing practice, a whole ecosystem of loving intentions. We learn to tune in, to get creative, to ask.

Building a self-care foundation that supports lasting recovery begins with taking stock of the facts: where do our current self-care practices need work? Where do we try to go without our needs being met, where do we violate our own boundaries? In each of those areas, what would we rather have?

Physical, Emotional, and Spiritual Self-Care Strategies

The body is the foundation of our entire experience in the world. It is the vessel inside of which we voyage on the seas of life, and the body must be strong, intact, and comfortable to inhabit. Therefore, by focusing on improving the physical body’s health, we accomplish a lot towards being able to care also for the other aspects of life, like emotions, thoughts, and love relationships. If the body isn’t well, then many other aspects of life suffer too, so it makes sense to always look to, and strengthen, the state of the body as a priority.

Here are the most important strategies for physical body self-care:

Improve Your Diet

Many women live with severe nutrient deficiencies, chemical imbalances, and toxic loads that have been delivered to the body from a variety of sources. Substance abuse leaves a chemical legacy in the body, but there are many other possible sources of toxins that interfere with nearly every aspect of the body’s ability to create states of health and happiness.

Environmental toxicity, the many impacts of industrialization, manufacturing, & large scale agriculture, GMOs, preservatives, dyes, dental work, other medical procedures, beauty products, cleansing agents and pharmaceuticals can all contribute to the body being out of balance and ill. Hormones and neurotransmitters often need support to be replenished, as do important minerals and vitamins.

Fortunately, all of these concerns can be assessed and addressed through the professional attention of a nutritionist or doctor of functional medicine. We here at Villa Kali Ma strongly believe in the power of healing the body with food and other lifestyle changes, and we help all the women we meet to consider this angle of their recovery.

Exercise

Some form of daily exercise is necessary. There are many different kinds of exercise, ranging from very high impact to low. Depending on your unique body, you may benefit from changing the amount or kind of physical activity you get every day. If at all possible, it is favorable to combine exercise with increasing the amount of outdoors time you are able to get each week. Gardening, walking in the park, and even a walk around the neighborhood can greatly improve the physical health of the body.

Sleep

Sleep is nature’s cure for many conditions. The body restores itself through sleep, but many of us struggle to get the right amount and quality of sleep that we actually need. To prioritize sleep, we may need to develop habits of reducing screen time, going to bed earlier, cutting out caffeine entirely, or make other such changes to encourage the body to rest. Sleep is a complex topic; note that sleep is also greatly improved by dietary changes and exercise.

Second to physical self-care, we at Villa Kali Ma prioritize emotional self-care. Emotional self-care means attending to how we feel, and what we may be thinking about ourselves throughout the day. Here are our top recommendations for emotional self-care.

Reflection

It’s important to have time and space to reflect on what we feel. Villa Kali Ma recommends that each woman cultivate the habit of taking time every day for checking in with herself.

A practice that many women find relatively easy to install is journaling. Set a timer for 15 minutes and free-write all of your thoughts and feelings first thing in the morning or right before bed, and you will gradually build a relationship with yourself in which you are able to vent your emotions to yourself. Recording gratitudes and setting intentions may optionally be part of your reflection time, but it’s important to make room for negative feelings too. By writing negative feelings down, we often don’t have to speak them out loud to people or let them turn into negative actions.

Support Network

It’s a vital aspect of self-care to make sure that we have enough safe people in our lives, with whom we can be our authentic selves to a reasonable degree. Some of us are fortunate enough to have a pre-existing network of friends and family who help us face our burdens with less loneliness, but most of us experience isolation and chronic disconnection emotionally. If you’re in the latter situation, don’t worry, that is enormously common, and there are solutions.

The easiest fix for isolation is to join a supportive community, adding in extra meetings and activities on the daily. AA, NA, and other types of self-help community are ideal for adding a support network in quickly and effectively. Alternatively, we can receive support through a therapy group, or through an activities group that meets regularly. Joining a yoga community, spiritual group, or other kind of welcoming community can also help.

Individual Therapy

It is strongly recommended to be in individual therapy of some kind. There are many different kinds of therapy, ranging from body based, to creative, to relationship-oriented, to cognitive behavioral. It is important to have a dedicated, regular space with a professional for slowly working through the many healing pieces that arise for women who have addiction, mental health struggles, and trauma.

Finally, we recommend that each woman develop a strategy for spiritual self care. We do not endorse religion at Villa Kali Ma. We mean rather that it’s very helpful for a woman to develop her spiritual nature as a resource for recovery. Activating one’s spiritual capacity helps with a variety of daily challenges, providing guidance, solace, comfort, and inspiration. Every person alive has spirituality of their own, and no one can tell you what that should be like. At Villa Kali Ma, we suggest only that you do work with your spirituality, and use it to your advantage. Here are our tips for developing your spiritual powers further.

Prayer

Broadly speaking, prayer just means talking to spirit, putting your needs, thoughts, intentions, or worries into words. Speaking to a spiritual someone or something, even if it’s your own higher self, has enormous benefits. Most people find that over time, if they continue to “talk to God” or “talk to the universe”, a very practical helpline can be established. Eventually, a trusting relationship is built, in which we learn that if we ask, we do tend to receive.

Mindfulness

Meditation can come in the form of a sit down practice, but since many women with trauma find it hard to “just be still”, it’s important to note that mindfulness comes in many forms, including walking, art and movement. Even if we must start with short sessions of just five minutes, gradually developing our capacity for mindful awareness, whether sitting or doing a physical activity, brings spaciousness, peace, calm, and the capacity to tolerate our suffering with more loving detachment. We encourage every woman to develop her latent potential for peace and equanimity through finding a mindfulness practice that she enjoys enough to pursue.

Nature and Music

Nature and music, especially the great works of classical music or jazz, are two other categories that can be resources for developing spirituality. Both nature and music tend to stimulate spiritual feelings and teach us about what our own spiritual nature is like. Increasing the amount of time listening to music and observing the natural world are both valid ways to develop spiritual self-care.

Overcoming Guilt and Prioritizing Your Wellbeing

Many women need help working through the guilt they feel when they begin to put their own needs and boundaries first. It has been deeply ingrained in us to believe that if we do not attend to other people first, we are bad people, or there will be relational consequences for us. People will be angry or think ill of us.

It is possible that some people in our lives will in fact need some time adjusting to our new focus on caring for ourselves. However, anyone worth keeping close to us will like it that we are caring for ourselves more, for the simple reason that when we are happier, they are happier. We will have more energy, compassion, and love for them, if we are allowed to make sure we are ok first.

Although we have all been trained to believe that other people’s happiness requires that we put them first, this is a misunderstanding. Provided we are talking about two adults, we must care for ourselves first, and then if and only if we have a surplus, we may give away what we choose to share with others. The giving is always optional, and we can only be generous when what we give away isn’t something that we ourselves need. To give what we have away, in exchange for someone giving us what we need in return, is the core misunderstanding of codependency.

In the short term, some people probably will feel let down or angry when we take care of ourselves before we take care of them. In the longer term, they will be inspired to realize that they are also allowed to care for themselves, and that we want them to do that too.

If necessary, remind yourself of the consequences of you not putting yourself first. Our loved ones may wish, in their wounded child parts, that we would care for them before taking care of ourselves. They might rightfully have never gotten what they needed, and they had come to rely on us to be kind or to help them. Even so, they do not really want the consequences of us not caring for ourselves first. No one is benefited by us losing our sobriety, mental health, or shutting down or spiraling out in a trauma episode.

Learn Sustainable Self-Care at Villa Kali Ma

Villa Kali Ma is a licensed provider of trauma treatment, as well as mental health and addiction recovery services for women. Located in northern San Diego County, we are blessed to be able to offer a standalone trauma healing center, The Retreat. In all of our serene, comfortable locations, we help women learn the necessary art and practice of self-care.

Our all-female team of licensed clinicians and certified holistic practitioners provides quality trauma-informed treatment, giving a chance to discover deep bodily and spiritual recovery. Our comprehensive menu of complementary holistic sessions includes massage, Ayurveda, yoga, acupuncture, sound healing, Reiki, breath work, and more.

Women’s mental health needs to be approached differently than men’s. While women have some core human experiences in common with our male counterparts, women in particular benefit from gender-specific treatment. Trauma-informed care for women is often necessary to get to the root of our suffering. In this blog, we explore more about why women’s mental health requires specialized treatment approaches.

The Unique Mental Health Needs of Women in Recovery

At Villa Kali Ma, our team of clinicians, psychotherapists, practitioners, medical doctors and case workers are experienced in the field of women’s addiction recovery. As specialists in gender-specific treatment for women, we are intimately familiar with the unique mental health needs that women in recovery have.

Most women in recovery from substance addiction have co-occurring mental health concerns, as well as underlying traumatization that needs to be healed at physical, emotional and neurobiological levels. Without addressing these factors together, the chances that women are able to achieve and sustain long term recovery are diminished.

Here are some differences between men and women that impact the focus of the gender-specific treatment we offer for women at Villa Kali Ma.

Women are more likely to qualify for a dual diagnosis. Women who use substances daily to cope usually have serious co-occurring problems of thought, emotion and behavior that drive and interact with that substance use pattern. Women who use substances are often using substances to deal with severe depression, anxiety, or another serious mental health condition like borderline personality or bipolar. Women are more likely than men to present not only with complex post traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), but also frequently exhibit additional self-destructive behavioral disorders. Eating disorders, self-harm and suicidal tendencies are not uncommon amongst women who use substances.
Women use substances for different reasons than men. Everyone who uses substances to the point of self-destruction is doing so in a desperate attempt to correct inner conditions of suffering. For example, substances can help people relax, or provide “liquid courage”. Women are more likely to be using substances to cope with the impacts of trauma, especially sexual trauma from childhood abuse, sexual assault, and intimate partner violence. Additionally, women are socialized to have different ways of processing emotions, meeting needs, and managing thoughts and behaviors than men. Such differences add up to having quite distinct drivers for using. Women also have different motivations for wanting to get sober and for doing the hard work of recovery.
Women’s biology is affected differently by recovery. Although the majority of people who use substances are men, among those who do use, women are more likely to develop addiction. Tolerance and dependence to a substance develops more quickly in women’s bodies, after using a smaller amount of a substance, over a shorter period of time. Once addicted, likewise, women are subject to more intense cravings, withdrawals, and risk of relapse after achieving sobriety. This greater intensity of suffering means that women need different kinds of mental health support to succeed in recovery.
Women’s substance use, mental health, and trauma patterning are significantly impacted by female hormones. Factors like birth control, menstruation cycles, breastfeeding, pregnancy, parenting, menopause, and stress make substance use, recovery, mental health and trauma somewhat different for women for hormonal reasons alone. These complex biochemical interactions have huge impacts of mood, behavior, the effect of substances, and the mental-emotional challenges of recovery. Women’s mental health cannot be understood as well without taking hormonal influences into account.
Women have greater economic challenges. Women are more likely than men to be financially dependent on others, including people who have abused them in the past and even people who are abusing them now. Women are the economically more vulnerable sex, and the realities of financial survival difficulties can have huge repercussions on options for mental health treatment, ranging from work, stress, parenting, job flexibility, and more.
Women face gender-specific barriers to treatment. In addition to the greater likelihood of women having economic struggles, single parenting responsibilities, and eldercare, women face specific stigmas and challenges about needing and getting appropriate mental health treatment. In general, women’s suffering has been both over-pathologized (as with borderline personality) and at the same time minimized and dismissed (starting with concepts of hysteria), historically speaking. Many aspects of women’s genuine suffering are not seen or validated by the mainstream. One side effect is that many women fail to recognize that need or deserve help.

How Gender-Specific Treatment Supports Deeper Healing

Gender-specific treatment settings are associated with better therapeutic outcomes for women. Women who attend gender-specific programs are more likely to succeed in recovery than women who attend mixed-gender counterpart programs of equal quality.

This is because, naturally enough, women-only settings place primary focus on the most important problems faced by women. Topics like body image and appearance, female sexuality, intimate relationships, codependency, the importance of emotions, safety, impacts of menstruation and hormones, parenting, caring for elders, sexism, navigating career and workplace as a woman, and healing from sexual trauma are front and center in the treatment conversation.

By contrast, mixed-gender treatment settings are more general, and don’t focus on the female experience of addiction specifically. Due to the historical bias to focus on men and men’s experiences of life as a default in medical settings, key pieces of the female perspective and needs can be de-emphasized, if not left out entirely, in mixed-gender treatment environments.

Also, it’s important to understand that most women find same-sex settings to feel generally safer. This fact should not be surprising, since the clear majority of women qualifying for substance abuse and mental health treatment also have significant complex trauma to cope with. Very often the worst trauma that women have is sexual trauma, originating from childhood sexual abuse, sexual assault, sexual harassment, and/or intimate partner violence. Sexual trauma topics are very hard to heal in the presence of men, for most women who have been harmed by men in the past. This may change later on in the treatment process, but in early stages it is better to be in same-sex settings for greater feelings of safety.

Finally, women are subject to social pressures in the presence of men which they do not have to face in female-only settings. Women usually require a same-sex setting to be able to fully focus internally, put themselves and their own needs first, and temporarily detach from who they are perceived to be in the eyes of men.

Creating Safe Spaces for Women to Process Trauma

It’s really important that women have access to safe spaces to address their traumatization. About half of women in America are exposed to one or more traumatic events at some point in their lifetime, according to the National Center for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Women’s traumatization is different than men’s and needs to be understood in context of women’s subjective experiences, their biology, and their socialization as the disadvantaged sex in society. Women generally experience different forms of trauma, from events taking place at different stages of life. Women are more likely undergo traumatization at a younger age, and are also more likely to experience sexual trauma.

Both sexual trauma and trauma that takes place at a young age have greater impact than other kinds of traumatic events. Complex trauma has the most negative developmental influence, affecting personality and neurobiology. While accidental injury and war-related violence are more likely to impact men, women more commonly develop a trauma diagnosis as a result of sexual assault and childhood sexual abuse. Women may be up to three times more likely than men to develop PSTD than men.

Complex trauma is linked with many mental health consequences, including but not limited to substance abuse. Panic disorders, suicidal depression, ADHD, obsessive compulsive disorder, borderline personality, eating disorders, self-harm, and several other conditions may be side effects of women’s trauma. There are also several physical health conditions that can be better healed when also addressing underlying trauma, such as auto-immune disorders, chronic pain, digestive problems, and inflammation.

Women need complete safety to be able to release long-held trauma out of their bodies. That safety can’t be faked. The true safety of a healing environment, both physically and psychologically, is perceived subconsciously.

At Villa Kali Ma, our daily structure, together with the design and stewardship of the space itself, creates a strong, safe container for healing. Our firm, compassionate program helps women feel safe to engage at every level with the treatment they need.

Experience Women-Only Treatment at Villa Kali Ma

Villa Kali Ma is an innovative, holistic treatment facility providing cutting-edge trauma treatment, mental health, and addiction recovery programs for women. Our compassionate, female-centric programs cover all the treatment needs that women have, addressing mind, body and spirit. We help women do the hard work of clearing their traumatic pasts for good, learning to be happy and healthy at last.

Villa Kali Ma offers residential inpatient, as well as outpatient treatment options. Experience several powerful evidence-based trauma therapies integrated with holistic wellness modalities. Breathwork, yoga, meditation, nutrition, massage, acupuncture, energy medicine, and shamanic journeying are examples of the offerings you can find alongside our core clinical program. EMDR, Brainspotting, Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy, Somatic Experiencing, and Internal Family Systems Therapy are examples of the trauma-specific treatments we offer. Equine Therapy, Expressive Arts Therapy, and Mindfulness and Self-Compassion are additional modalities that women who attend our programs enjoy.

Because trauma affects so many facets of a woman’s life, we at Villa Kali Ma are ready to support each woman with a variety of approaches and levels of sensitivity. Not every therapy works for every woman, and most women experience the most benefit from a combination of approaches. We invite you to discover how different life can be, after healing trauma.

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