Author: VKM

Support Systems in Recovery

Post author By VKM
Post date March 11, 2025
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What is a support network?

The Yoruba proverb “It takes a village to raise a child” can be applied to recovery and childrearing. It takes a whole community of people to help each of us get and stay sober!

The good news is that growing a living, breathing forest of healthy relationships is one of healing connection, relational repairs, and restoration of our sense of belonging.

One of the most powerful remedies to the deep alienation and loneliness of addiction, a support network brings resilience, capacity, and joy into our embodied sense of the world we inhabit.

What is a healthy recovery support system?

A healthy recovery support system is abundant, flexible, and strong. There are different types of relationships inside a support system, ranging from close family members like spouses or siblings to addiction professionals who are part of your treatment team. The largest portion of a healthy recovery support network will be made up of sober peers, mentors, sponsors, and friends – others who are walking the recovery path, too.

You can think of your support system as radiating out from you like the strands of a spider web or a bird’s nest built to hold you safe and cushioned. The threads and fibers of the web or nest are the relationships you form and secure with people. Some people will be bonded to you in a close relationship – these people are close to the center where you are. Others will be a bit further away from you, less intimate, but still part of how you are held safe. A good support system has many secure, flexible fibers, creating an overall bouncy resilience that can withstand some wear and tear.

What is the importance of social support in recovery?

Social support is the most protective factor in recovery. Individuals who complete treatment and follow it up by continuously nurturing and leaning into their support system are significantly more likely to succeed as compared with people who complete treatment but return to living in relative isolation.

That’s why every good treatment program will insist upon the importance not only of using the tools learned in rehab or IOP but also in continuing to show up for the process of embedded relating with other positive people.

If you’re wondering why this is the case, consider that neuroscience confirms what addiction professionals and people who recover successfully have observed for many decades: It is vital for our emotional, mental, and even physiological well-being that we connect and co-regulate with other healthy humans every day.

Dr. Stephen Porges, the psychologist who studied and formulated the Polyvagal Theory, writes and speaks about the overwhelming evidence that we humans are animals made for social engagement. When trauma, addiction, or mental illness shuts off our access to basic communing with other human beings, we suffer and deteriorate dramatically.

Addiction inhibits our ability to form social bonds and to lovingly nourish and protect the ones we have. Once we get into recovery, we are given the gift of the chance to regrow our relatedness, recovering not only from addiction but also from isolation.

How recovery groups work?

Recovery groups are free, peer-led, self-organized communities that gather regularly for healing co-support meetings.

Recovery groups are where you can find other people who have “experience, strength, and hope” to share about what their addiction was like, how they got better, and how they live in the joy of the solution now.

Because it is part of the recovery process to help others, through sponsorship and service work, recovery groups include many people who are further along down the road than we are, who have been through the challenges we are facing now.

These more experienced people can offer guidance, listen to our truth without getting triggered into judgment or fear, and provide basic comfort and connection.

Most of all, recovery groups are a place to share emotions and struggles anonymously, in a nonjudgmental environment, among others who understand from their own experience what it’s like to struggle with addiction.

Recovery groups that are based on the original 12-step or AA model follow certain patterns and principles which might be called “best practices for healing together with others”, in which anonymity, safety, freedom, and inclusion are emphasized.

Other kinds of recovery groups are facilitated support groups and therapy groups (these usually require a fee, but not always).

What addiction support system services are available?

When you complete a treatment program, you will ideally be connected to what’s called an Aftercare Program, such as the one we offer at Villa Kali Ma for all of our program participants.

In Aftercare Programs, there are opportunities to touch base with your treatment team periodically, as well as chances to hang out with other sober peers.

Depending on the program you participated in, there may be ongoing individual therapy, relapse prevention groups, events, and celebrations, which you can attend as you bridge into your new life.

How is a healthy recovery support system built?

Building a healthy support web or nest is like weaving a basket – we do it twig by twig, strand by strand, slowly securing connections and braiding them in.

The first circle of relationships will probably be made up of our treatment team, professionals upon whom we allowed ourselves to first rely as we began to rebuild a sober life. Hopefully, these relationships helped us feel, at the body and heart level, what it’s like to have someone in our corner. Our therapist, a facilitator we felt especially safe and connected to, or another person on staff at the therapy center might be an important twig in our nest. Other people in our inner circle might (but also might not!) include family members, old friends, or our spouse. We all have different family and relationship histories, so whatever is true for you, try not to judge it.

After leaving treatment, we will ideally lean into the recovery community where we live by attending frequent 12-step meetings, going out for coffee with new sober friends, and forming a close relationship with a sponsor.

Every time we sit in a circle of other recovering people, and every time we linger a few minutes afterwards to help put away the chairs or connect with someone whose share resonated with us, we will be adding twigs to our nest. The more twigs we can add, the more protection and guidance we have through our early recovery experiences.

As we expand our network of recovery relationships, we may extend into friendships with people who aren’t addicts themselves but who can be part of our support nest for other reasons. They might be work friends, someone we meet in a yoga class, or a positive family member with whom we find ourselves able to be safely close.

All in all, we can think of support network-building as an ongoing, living, and breathing process that will happen slowly but surely by continuing to take small steps of connection and relating.

What are the steps to building a solid support system during addiction recovery?

A support network is best grown with patience and understanding. Each tiny connection will lead to more connections, and each time we take the risk of connecting with another, we grow our capacity for it. Here are some thoughts for getting started.

Step 1: Go to Meetings Every Day

In the very beginning, just consistently showing up is key. Sooner or later, we’ll discover glimmers of closeness and familiarity, noticing people we like or resonate with. This will all lead us gradually into more socially engaging behavior. We will find ourselves looking around more, maybe even smiling, making our first forays into connection.

Step 2: Introduce Yourself in Meetings

It can be tempting, even when we’re going to meetings, to stay quiet. That’s fine for a short while, but it’s good to let people hear our voices and to learn our names, too. We might not be ready to share, but we can always introduce ourselves.

It’s good to say to the room that we’re new and that we’d like to get connected to the community. Whenever we speak a need out loud in a meeting, the chances are higher that someone comes to us with an offer to connect or an idea for what we could do to get integrated.

Step 3: Share Your Story

When you’re ready, share a piece of your recovery story in meetings. Connection is built through small disclosures of who we are on the inside, and there’s nothing more intimacy-building than honestly disclosing what we think, feel, and experience.

When we allow others to glimpse the tender, imperfect pain and beauty inside us, people can resonate with us. We might even inspire or comfort them. When people resonate with us, they often reach out to tell us so or to begin the relating process with us.

Step 4: Go to Sober Social Gatherings

People in recovery rooms often go out to dinner or for another meal together after meetings, and newcomers are always welcome. If you linger after a meeting, chances are that you will get invited.

There are also often sober barbecues and other seasonal events, which are chances to socialize and connect. Socializing in recovery is very different than any other kind of socializing because no one requires you to put on a false front. You can be very raw and real when you hang out with sober people, and no one will be ruffled by it.

We just need to be around people. This will stimulate and grow our ability to connect and relate, and even if we don’t fully realize the effect it has on us while it’s happening, just seeing other smiling faces and hearing people talk and engage socially is enormously regulating.

Step 5: Ask Someone Out on a Friend Date

It is very likely that if you ask someone sober for a while to get coffee, they will say an enthusiastic yes. People with a few years of recovery under their belt highly value any chance to be “of service”.

This means they will be more than happy to listen to you, help you get connected to other sober people, tell you about meetings you might like, and give you all kinds of tips for getting through challenging situations. Sitting with you, hearing you, and accepting you just as you are right now, without placing any coercion, will be a positive experience for them. Try it and see for yourself!

Step 6: Get Lots of Recovery Phone Numbers and Call One Every Day

Most meetings circulate a phone list or otherwise share contact information. Some members will put their phone number down as a way of indicating that they are available to take a recovery call or even be a sponsor or temporary sponsor.

These phone numbers are gold. A quick supportive call helps you get your head screwed on straight again. You don’t need to be feeling bad to do it – on the contrary, if you make a habit of calling one recovery person a day no matter how you feel that day, you will entrain and align to the life-protecting connectivity you need to stay sober and keep on the path to joy.

What are the types of support networks in addiction recovery?

In addiction recovery, you can differentiate your support network into different categories.

Your treatment support network is made up of professionals, therapists, and facilitators. These are people to whom you can go for their expertise in the field of recovery, trauma recovery, and/or psychology. These supports are likely to be aware of many further resources that can help you. They are good people to ask for help or to consult about a specific problem you’re facing.

You may book treatment sessions with such people or just touch base from time to time regarding how your recovery is going. An Aftercare Program is designed to keep you feeling linked with this network.

Your recovery community support network is made up of sober peers, friends, sponsors, and acquaintances from your recovery community, such as people you befriend in AA. These are people who will take your call when you’re triggered and tempted to use, who will invite you over to a sober Christmas party (and it will be fun!), or who can help you remember the wisdom of the principles of recovery.

This will eventually be the most robust, supple, and extensive part of your recovery network, a place where you can experience joy, friendship, loyalty, playfulness, inclusion, and belonging at very deep levels.

Finally, your positive friends, family, and loved ones are also part of your personal support network. The people who love you, who have known you since you were a child, who were there for you when you were ill, and who are still with you now that you are well, are also a part of your support network.

These decades-old, thick-and-thin relationships can be challenging sometimes, but they also have special qualities that no other type of relationship can ever have. If this area feels hard for you, consider that the longer we are sober, the more likely it is that these relationships get the chance of healing and repair we have always longed for. But also, some relationships are too damaging to us to keep close, and that’s ok too.

What are tips for managing your personal support network?

Support networks need some tending. In the beginning, it is normal and natural that we are needy and that we lean on our support network, taking much more than we give. That might be the case for many years, and that is ok!

Over time, though, and on days when we feel that we are resourced and balanced, it is good to think about giving back to our support network.

Taking care of our support network isn’t as altruistic as it sounds – giving back also grows our web, making it even stronger, which means it can give us even more support! A healthy support network exchanges energy, sometimes giving, taking in, much like breathing.

To give back to your treatment support network, you can participate in Aftercare Groups actively. You can volunteer, for example, to come speak and share your story at your treatment center. This helps you realize how far you have come, as well as serve as inspiration for others!

To nourish your recovery support network, you can reach out to meeting newcomers, put your name on the phone list, or sit next to new people at sober events, just being a friendly face where one is needed. When you’re ready, you can sponsor. Speaking at a meeting is also a way to give back to your recovery community.

To nourish your personal support network, you can help friends and family know that their efforts, persistence, and loyalty mean something to you. Acknowledge them when you can. Practice patience with their lack of understanding, and try to see the ways that they are giving you their love.

Villa Kali Ma builds recovery support systems

At Villa Kali Ma, we know that community is the beating heart of a living, breathing recovery. All humans need connection, relatedness, and belonging – wounded women most of all!

Through our many programs that help women recover from addiction, trauma, and mental illness, we help women restore their capacity for authentic, deep relating. We do this by addressing what got hurt, shut down, and broken in them – in their bodies and nervous systems, and their hearts.

All of our programs lead towards this purpose: helping women feel good enough on the inside again, that they can reconnect back into the web of life – heart to heart, face to face, and spirit to spirit.

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Recovery

The Importance of Honesty in Recovery

Post author By VKM
Post date March 11, 2025
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The practice of honesty has a revered, important place in the journey of recovery from addiction.

To heal any illness, we must learn how to notice and name what is currently true for us without judgment and gloss. This is especially so for addiction, mental health, and trauma recovery.

Isn’t that interesting? In this post, we here at Villa Kali Ma take a closer look at the ways coming clean supports staying clean.

How We Learned to Lie: the Habit of Hiding?

We weren’t always such complicated people. Human beings come into the world in a state of honesty. A baby’s first mode is total transparency, openly radiating every passing feeling, sensation, and desire.

During the growing-up process, we learn that some truths get frowns and scowls, and others get smiles and hugs. Entraining to our caregivers for survival purposes, we learn to hide, hold back, and fudge the facts some of the time.

Dishonesty as a Trauma Symptom

The idea of honesty often has a heavy moral overlay. Just thinking about the times we have lied, we may go into a reaction of guilt or shame.

However, dishonesty may also be looked at more matter-of-factly, as a sign of what was once necessary for us to get to where we are now.

The bigger the “bad reaction” to our authentic being, back when we were small and dependent on people for our lives, the more we may have developed lying as a survival strategy.

For example, if our attachment figures responded to our truth with shaming, anger, punishment, or abandonment, it’s very likely that we developed many different mechanisms for hiding the reality of what we feel, think, and experience.

Fast-forwarding to the years in which we were active in addiction, dishonesty very likely became a commonplace, daily habit. Lying to others helps us hide the truth of our addicted state, as well as our true feelings, thoughts, motivations, and actions. Lying to ourselves helps us to continue to use addiction as a coping tool without getting flooded with deep shame and desperation about our powerless condition.

Is it a coincidence that both lying and addiction are connected to trauma? What do you think?

Honesty in Recovery: Understanding That Dishonesty is a Common Relapse Trigger

When we get into recovery circles, we learn that to reverse the addiction’s pattern of misery and enslavement, the most powerful tool is the plain truth. All we have to do, on any given day, is tell the truth.

The truth about what? In the beginning, all we need to do is tell the truth about our addiction. In AA parlance, we learn to “tell on the addict within”.

We say, “The addict told me my use wasn’t as bad as the guy who spoke at the meeting, so maybe I don’t need to be in AA.” Or, “My addiction wants me to go to my cousin’s wedding, I think it’s hoping I’ll have a slip there”. We use this name-it-to-tame-it language, with its slight note of distancing, to differentiate from the addiction, which enhances our ability to see it and to understand that it isn’t who we are.

When we notice that we have moved back into patterns of dishonesty, we are moving in the wrong direction – towards relapse.

Dishonesty Will Make You Feel Trapped

Honesty is the protective talisman, the white magic of recovery. Honesty affects the nervous system and the body, creating the sensation of coherence, which means that everything within us can feel connected and unified as one whole.

Our physiological sensations, our emotions, and our thoughts can come into balance through practices of honesty – noticing and transparently naming what we notice. The feeling that goes along with honesty is liberation: the truth sets us free.

Every time we tell the truth, we slowly unravel more and more of the web of lies, the false persona, the person we have pretended to be. In sharing what we notice about our internal process as transparently as we can – naming thoughts, feelings, sensations, behaviors – we activate the prefrontal cortex.

The pre-frontal cortex is the seat of the so-called noticing mind, the wise part of us that is accessed in mindfulness-based therapies. In truth-telling, we move into compassionate, calm curiosity, out of reaction and judgment.

Over time, we may get very good at sensing all of it without becoming overtaken by any intense feelings, negative thoughts, or scary body sensations.

We may be able to say things like, “I notice there are some thoughts in my head, a part of me that’s saying she hates what I have done to my family. She’s being hard on me, creating feelings of guilt. I notice my chest is collapsing around my heart as she’s saying these things. I think this collapsing is coming from another part, who’s pretty young – it feels like the part that used to get yelled at, and she would feel so trapped and scared and bad.”

We do this to help protect ourselves. If we were to go back into patterns of dishonesty, for whatever our reasons, we would start to rebuild the thick web of lies and feel trapped in it all over again.

Dishonesty Destroys Relationships

Dishonesty shatters the most basic level of trust, which is necessary for a bond to exist between two people. Lies, even those meant to spare people’s feelings or control their reactions, compromise the chance of intimacy. Intimacy is only possible when two people are being their real selves. Any relationship based on a faked self won’t touch on real love, connection, nurturance, or growth.

At the same time, we might not know how to stop lying to ourselves or others.

We may struggle to stop withholding important information about our thoughts and feelings, fearing what will happen to our inner sensations and feelings if we do.

If we associate truthfulness with past overwhelming experiences of judgment, shame, and rejection, it puts us between a rock and a hard place. We have to tell the truth about what we’re thinking, feeling, and doing to recover, and doing so will make us feel better, but we may also believe deep down that if we tell the truth, we’ll experience the feelings we’ve been trying to avoid. We may expect to be flooded with shame, guilt, fear, rage, or other difficult sensations.

The answer to this conundrum lies in the choice of person to whom we tell our truths. In the beginning, recipients of our honesty must be people who are reasonably able to hear it.

It is very likely true that in the past, the people we depended on responded to our truth in ways that hurt us, scared us, made us angry or want to run away, maybe all at once.

With a therapist or a recovery friend, however, we are in a position to have a different experience of telling the truth. Though it takes some getting used to, the practice of telling the truth grows our feelings of resonance and relatedness.

Honesty brings us closer, into a zone where our needs for compassion and witnessing can be met by another human. We find we are strengthened by truth and learn to rely on it as a clarifying, healing factor.

Over time, we will learn how exactly we can be fully authentic without hurting or triggering others so much. We will eventually learn to do this even in our closest relationships, where it is most likely all that we encounter our deepest, oldest pain, coded in memories of vulnerability gone wrong.

How to Maintain Honesty in Recovery?

The secret to authenticity in the face of risk lies in sharing neutral observations gathered through mindful noticing, without interpretation or assigning blame. It also helps to tell the truth only when we’re feeling calm and safe and to use that same, slightly distancing kind of name-it-to-tame-it language.

We can say, “I noticed that when you said ‘you’re late’ to me, I began to feel agitated and a bit angry. I think there’s some triggering going on, some sensations and memories that belong to my past more than they do to this moment. Let me take a moment to regulate myself and look into what this reaction in me is about, and then I’ll return to finish this conversation, OK?”

It takes practice to learn, but this kind of truth telling is easier for another person to hear without being triggered. Emotional, blaming, or judgmental language that sometimes comes out of our mouths when temporarily hijacked by a trauma-based part of us, on the other hand, all but guarantees that we trigger the other person!

Sometimes, even calm, regulated truth telling triggers other people – that’s part of life. In such moments, it will be our ability to compassionately witness our truth, internalized from our years of practice telling the truth in recovery circles and/or with therapists, that will help us hold strong and yet stay open in the face of a loved one’s triggered state of being.

What to do if we realize we have lied or we are tempted to lie? Tell the truth as soon as you can. Even if the truth is embarrassing, makes us look bad (often only to our perfectionistic inner critics), or causes another person to have a reaction which is hard for us, the truth is necessary for recovery. If we start lying again, we’ll end up using again.

Tell the truth, then choose not to beat yourself up about whatever the truth is, nor about the fact that you slipped back into lying. You can comfort yourself by remembering that lying is a feature of addiction and is connected to survival strategies from your past. You can remember the wider culture and how it teaches all of us to hide.

You aren’t the only one. It is hard for all of us to stop falsifying. We may still feel that we need our white lies now, for a million reasons – because it is more socially comfortable, to avoid conflicts, or because we fear judgment from people whose rejection of us would be felt as very painful.

If you react, tell the truth about that reaction, too. “I notice some shame creeping in as I’m telling you this.”

Whatever you do, tell the truth about what you’re experiencing, sensing, thinking, feeling, and what your behaviors are to a safe recovery person, and you’ll be back in the right flow for recovery.

Villa Kali Ma can help women with honesty in recovery

At Villa Kali Ma, we aim to help each woman who comes through our doors to recover enough of her spunk, spirit, and capacity for calm, joy, and courage that she can tell the truth about who she is.

Our holistic clinical programs show women how to un-snag from fallen branches, move around boulders, and unblock the way. We know that once a woman is back on her true journey, magnificent things will happen in her life. Yes, life will challenge her, but she will be flowing and growing again. In this, we trust completely. And that’s the truth!

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Sobriety

What is California Sober?

Post author By VKM
Post date March 7, 2025
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What is California Sober?

The term “California Sober” means that a person is abstinent from alcohol, addictive prescriptions, and hard drugs.

In contrast with the ordinary understanding of the term “sober”, someone who is California Sober may still use marijuana. In some instances, the person may also use psychedelics, such as shrooms, ayahuasca, or acid.

California Sober is, in its essence, a harm-reduction approach to managing addiction. It has gained popularity in recent years, largely due to endorsement by some celebrities.

Does California Sober work?

California Sober may work for some people as a temporary measure, but it is unlikely to last as a solution for most people who struggle with addiction. Since marijuana and psychedelics are generally less harmful and addictive, especially when compared to serious narcotics like opioids, California Sober may still be explored as a potentially beneficial approach, especially if someone is not yet ready to embrace full abstinence.

The concept of being California Sober was probably seeded by singer Demi Lovato, who went so far as to release a song with the same title in 2021.

At the time of the song’s release, Demi Lovato was of the mind that the approach helped them (Lovato uses they/them pronouns) to recover from the use of opioids. After a near-fatal opioid overdose, Lovato felt that being California Sober helped them stay away from more dangerous substances.

Since then, Lovato has changed their stance, clarifying that full sobriety is the only kind of sobriety that they support, after California Sober did not protect them from relapse.

So the answer to whether or not California Sober works may be answered by Demi’s own example: it probably does not work for anyone with a substance addiction.

Does California Sober work for everyone?

California Sober may work for some women, but it does not seem to work for women who qualify for a substance use disorder. Once addiction has taken root within a woman’s body and nervous system, it is unlikely she will be able to stay sober from her more serious drugs of choice by pursuing partial sobriety while still using marijuana and psychedelics.

This is because to recover from underlying physiological and emotional conditions that feed into a pattern of using substances to cope, it’s necessary to abstain entirely from any kind of chemically induced mood alteration.

What this means is that while in the short term, California Sober may reduce the harm compared with continuing to use more dangerous substances like opioids, cocaine, or alcohol, being California Sober is not a permanent solution. It will eventually lead back to relapse in those more serious substances.

What are the benefits of being California Sober?

Compared to more toxic substances like prescription pills, alcohol, and cocaine, marijuana and psychedelics are less harmful and less addictive. California Sober may have a place in a person’s path of reducing overall harm, and it is certainly better to be California Sober than to be abusing alcohol, hard drugs, or prescriptions.

What are the main concerns with living a California Sober lifestyle?

The California Sober lifestyle is preferable to using hard drugs and abusing alcohol, as it is less life-threatening. The concern with California Sober is that it will be difficult for any person with an addiction to alcohol or hard drugs to stay “only” California Sober for a longer period of time. No one should undertake to be California Sober under the misconception that it is a solution to substance addiction; it does not prevent relapse on harder drugs.

Additionally, it’s important to understand that while marijuana and psychedelics are less damaging than other substances, they still can be used in a way that interferes with psychological healing, trauma recovery, and mental health.

A person who is in good mental and physical health to begin with may be able to use marijuana and psychedelics occasionally in positive ways, for healing or other consciousness goals. We know many such people, and we believe their experiences.

But people who use substances to self-soothe, cope with trauma symptoms, or reduce their inner pain are using these substances as “self-medication”, which is a way of engaging with these substances that ultimately creates damage to the nervous system and body. For such people, California Sober will not work because she is still attempting to use substances addictively.

Typically, a woman who is drawn to using substances to excess has co-existing and underlying dysregulation struggles, stemming from a history of traumatization or mental illness symptoms (that’s why she’s using substances in the first place).

Being California Sober will not heal underlying issues but rather block attempts to make contact with parts of her that need help. For such a woman, marijuana and psychedelics use would interfere with getting better, only delaying the moment of needing addictions treatment to a later date.

What are alternatives to living a California Sober lifestyle?

There are very good alternatives to being California Sober.

Full abstinence. For anyone with a history of substance addiction, we highly recommend full abstinence from any kind of mood-altering substance. Full abstinence is the only kind of sobriety that works with getting better, treating your underlying trauma, and healing mental health symptoms at the root cause level.

The good news is, if you have managed to get yourself tapered down from more serious substances to a state where you are now able to be California Sober, that is something worth celebrating. Don’t stop there – the fact you got this far means you can do the remaining steps all the way down to total abstinence.

Addictions, trauma and mental health treatment. For those who fear or already know from experience that they do not have the personal ability to stay fully sober, don’t worry. That’s what addiction treatment is for.

If it has been difficult for you in the past to stay fully abstinent from substances, you are not alone, and there is something you can do about it: get help to treat the underlying conditions you have been trying to self-treat or manage through your addictions. It is very hard to get and stay sober while your body and nervous system are still fully convinced that you need substances to survive overwhelming states and sensations. This isn’t your fault, rather, it is a common state that many women end up in, a vicious cycle that is best treated with professional help.

There are more and more trauma-informed recovery programs available, such as the ones offered by our own team at Villa Kali Ma. These programs understand the need for sensitivity and gentleness when approaching the complexity of addiction, making sure that each woman will be stable and safe enough to succeed in feeling ok in her own skin without substances. This is accomplished in a non-shaming, acceptance-based approach through psychoeducation, skills training, and trauma-informed psychotherapies and modalities.

Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy. Although still somewhat rare, psychedelics are sometimes used in clinical settings to help people recover from traumatization. If you strongly feel that you want to use psychedelics in a clinical context, you can do that in a supervised setting. In fact, Villa Kali Ma offers Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy when appropriate for a woman’s recovery from traumatization. However, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy approaches can’t be self-administered (or else we’re back to self-medicating, which is unlikely to be sustainable or safe in the long term).

Villa Kali Ma Makes Being “Fully Sober” Joyful and Possible

Many people fear that being fully sober means having no options for self-soothing, fun, or enjoyment of life. We fear it means returning to the time before we found the solution of drugs and alcohol, back to overwhelming sensations of dread, fear, rage, loneliness, or other kinds of pain that colored our early experiences of life.

We here at Villa Kali Ma have found the very opposite to be true. Full sobriety, in the context of a loving, re-connective recovery path, is not only achievable but a way to experience deep liberation that goes beyond all previous attempts to heal the pain we have carried.

If you’re curious to find out what we mean or you need help getting your substance behaviors under control, connect with us to find out more about how it is that we know beyond the shadow of a doubt that full sobriety is a path to joy, re-embodiment, and full-hearted living.

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Rehab

Destination Rehab

What is a destination rehab?

A destination rehab is a treatment facility set in a desirable location. Destination rehabs are often built in settings naturally conducive to healing and recovery, such as by the sea, forests, the desert, or mountains.

The grounds of a destination rehab facility are meant to bolster feelings of safety, ease, and harmony. Offering a measure of seclusion and/or exposure to a healing climate, the facilities may be nestled in natural environs, healing gardens, or working farms.

Depending on the program, a destination rehab may emphasize the luxury of accommodations or place more emphasis on the chance of interaction with greenery, animals, and features of the natural world.

What are the benefits of traveling for treatment?

There is a reason that for many thousands of years, people have traveled to the seaside, mountains, forests, and other healing nature locations to recover from illness of both the psyche and body.

Not only are such environments harmonizing to the physiology, restoring us through exposure to nature’s many healing and settling properties, but the physical act of taking distance from one’s home – getting a literal change of scenery – is a powerful way to create a protective boundary around the intention to recover.

Sequestering temporarily in a faraway healing setting is a way to get a fresh start and open a new blank page in the book of your life. In a destination rehab, it is much easier to focus on recovery due to being relatively free of distractions, interruptions, self-sabotage, and all that might keep our old patterns running as they were.

What is ecotherapy in a destination rehab?

One of the benefits of attending a destination rehab is the opportunity to participate in ecotherapy.

Ecotherapy, sometimes called Ecopsychology, Green Therapy, or Nature-Based Therapy, is a branch of the mental and behavioral health field that incorporates the power of nature, animals, gardening, and outdoor activities into the healing process.

While many people intuitively sense the many ways that nature helps us heal, it is only really since the 1970s that the effects of nature have been studied in a way befitting modern scientific requirements.

The study of nature therapy can be said to have begun in Japan, where the practice of forest therapy was first noticed, measured, and compiled into a method of treatment.

The evidence in favor of ecotherapy continues to amass. Studies support beneficial effects not only in subjective reports of how nature works to soothe and heal one’s inner world but also in objective measurables such as heart rate variability, cortisol levels, immunity, faster wound recovery, and more.

In a destination rehab that offers ecotherapy as a part of its programming, as we do at Villa Kali Ma, you have the opportunity to learn how you may relate to nature as a resource. Nature exposure can take many forms, including gardening, animal-assisted therapies, nature walks, hiking, foraging, making art out of natural materials, nature-bathing, and more.

What are things to consider before traveling for treatment?

Many women find that the advantages of a change of scenery, as well as entering treatment in a neutral, harmonious setting, outweigh the potential benefits of staying close to home for their treatment experience.

Some factors to consider before going to a destination rehab, however, include that it may make it harder for family and friends to visit you or participate in your treatment, at least in person (phone and Zoom sessions allow for more possibilities, but still).

While it’s important to stay in the now, you may also want to think loosely about what you intend to do upon completion of your treatment. It is often a good idea to stay connected to the treatment center staff and perhaps even enter a sober living environment close by. Keeping close in the first weeks, months, and even years of your early sobriety is often a lifesaver, protecting women from relapse, isolation, and overwhelm.

Staying close by makes it possible to participate fully in aftercare programming and keep the local recovery connections you made. The time just after you complete a treatment program is understandably wobbly for many women, and it is a time during which foundations for your future are laid.

However, it’s also normal not to know yet what will come after your treatment. You don’t have to know everything in advance. As a mental exercise, all the same, it can be clarifying to weigh the pros and cons of treatment close to home versus treatment in a destination rehab.

If you know that you will be returning to your home environment because of work or family, then it is relatively clear that your rehab will be a fully temporary retreat, with a clear beginning and an end. This also means that your follow-up treatment and new foundation will be laid back at home.

If you are not sure what will happen after treatment and you are open to a change of scenery, you may want to take into account whether you like the part of the world in which your destination rehab is located, just in case you decide to stay in the area for some period of time.

If you are overwhelmed by these considerations, don’t worry. Both options can be good for your recovery, and our treatment team will help you figure out how to best support your new life, whatever environment you choose for your after-treatment life.

Villa Kali Ma offers mental health and addiction treatment

Villa Kali Ma is a unique provider that blends holistic modalities with clinical treatment for addiction, mental health disorders, and trauma.

Located in the warm, sunny coastal San Diego area, we are rooted in a part of the world that offers exposure to the many healing factors of the seaside. San Diego is famous for being a health-oriented part of California, where people prioritize care for the physical body, spend time out of doors, and enjoy the beach as much as they can. And no wonder, as the ocean is a great healer, emotionally and physiologically.

In our residential treatment facility and our trauma recovery center, the Retreat, as well as in our Intensive Outpatient program, we offer many options for experiencing nature-oriented healing modalities related to the coastal climate and other features of our area. Through yoga, creative arts therapies, earthing, Reiki, massage, Ayurveda, equine therapy, gardening, outdoor activities, and more, we help women connect with the many healing possibilities of our destination.

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Intensive Outpatient Program

Benefits of IOP

For those struggling with substance abuse, mental illness, and/or trauma, lasting help can be found inside the supportive, healing structure of a high-quality women’s IOP.

Designed to bring a high saturation of treatment hours within the most flexible structure possible, intensive outpatient programs are made for women who want to or need to keep one hand in their existing life responsibilities, while still receiving a high level of healing care.

Here at Villa Kali Ma, we are big believers in IOP as a functional model for women on the healing path. IOPS is for women who need a short phase of high-intensity treatment to bring their hearts, minds, and bodies back into sustainable balance.

While we certainly would wish a healing stay in our retreat-like residential rehabilitation facility for any woman who wants and needs it, we recognize the option isn’t always possible or necessary, depending on each woman’s needs and life situation.

In this blog post, we’ll explore the many benefits of Intensive Outpatient Programs as we see them, through our holistic, female-centric lens. As always, we’ll steer the conversation towards the many ways, clinical and alternative, that women can get free from the weighty burdens of addiction, mental illness, and trauma.

Why choose an IOP for women?

The key reason women participate in an Intensive Outpatient Program like the one we have at Villa Kali Ma is to undergo a short-term, but very powerful course of therapeutic treatments.

The goal of an IOP program is to halt a downward spiral and gently but firmly reverse it, so that our life begins to move outwards and upwards again, towards health, healing, and all that’s beneficial in life.

The restoration to stability and health is accomplished through immersion in a program packed with a high number of treatment hours, involving multiple days a week for multiple hours.

IOP’s structured program of treatment hours – at least 9 hours a week, broken into segments occurring on select days of the week – comprises multiple kinds of therapies, each of which addresses a different facet of a woman’s life.

Some therapies we use in our IOP at Villa Kali Ma, like Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Brainspotting, and Tension and Release Exercises, are primarily directed towards helping a woman feel safe, secure, and capable in her body again.

Many women do not feel adequately safe to experience their own body sensations without tensing up or cutting off from what they feel, living instead at the mercy of their amped-up or numbed-out nervous system states. Women who have this problem are not doing it on purpose – the struggle to experience regulation is not a choice, it is an automatic biological function that needs to be compassionately retrained with an appropriate therapy.

Other therapies, like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Motivational Interviewing, and Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Therapy, help women safely develop greater awareness of the role that negative and positive thoughts have in their lives. These therapies empower women to make conscious choices about how they choose to look at themselves, others around them, and the world at large.

Some therapies, like Equine Therapy and other Nature-Based approaches, use nature and animals to help women recover deeply, at levels of being that have nothing to do with words. Other therapies and activities use creative expression, mindful movement, healing touch, spirituality, and imagination.

Finally, many groups, such as Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Relapse Prevention Planning, and Love and Relationships, coach practical skills for handling relationships, getting our needs met, opening our hearts again, and experiencing the juiciness of our emotional lives without fear of drowning in overwhelming sensations.

Intensive Outpatient Programs help women stabilize anything that has gotten out of control – problems like self-destructive behavior and substance abuse. They will also get at the inner heart of a woman’s subjective experience, to help her experience safety, containment, grounding, sanity, and good feelings again, inside her own skin.

Who can benefit from an IOP for women?

Intensive Outpatient Programs have powerful effects, provided women are able, ready, and willing to undergo a transformation process and change. Recovery is, in the end, an inside job, and the psyche can put up a powerful fight against treatment if a woman isn’t ready yet.

But if a woman is reasonably willing to surrender herself to a process of getting better, IOP can work wonders. Part of treatment is dedicated to the delicate dance of building up enough trust and safety internally, to open to greater and greater levels of healing, so you don’t need to be perfectly ready, just willing enough.

It’s not necessary to know how to recover (the IOP will guide you through it), but rather to feel an honest inner “yes” to the what of recovery. A good way to test your readiness for the what of recovery is to explore the following in your imagination:

Short Compassionate Inquiry on Readiness

Imagine you had a magic wand, which would give you anything you want. How do you feel about the following wish: Make me sober, healthy, happy, “all better”.
Would you make that wish, given the power to?

If your answer is a genuine yes, you’re willing enough. (If your answer was no, but you wanted it to be yes, the part of you that wants it to be yes is your starting point. You can pull on that thread to discover a more deep and genuine yes. Explore your no, too. Why not? What do you fear might happen, if you were sober, happy, healthy, “all better”? We can learn a lot from these answers).

Signs of Sufficient Change Readiness

Usually, when we are ready to change, certain qualities will be present with us.
Change readiness is generally signaled by:

-strong motivation to recover. We know why we want to get better, and for us, it’s a compelling reason.

-willingness to be accountable and to tell the truth. We are more interested in getting better than in saving face or pretending everything is ok.

-our actions show that we have made some steps towards healing and recovery. For example, if we ourselves reached out for help, told someone we love the truth about our true level of need, these are positive signs that change has begun within us.

-we have stopped fighting, resisting, managing, and controlling the change that needs to happen. A level of surrender, giving up and acceptance is usually palpable when we have decided to change. We are no longer in a bargaining or argumentative state about whether or not we need to. We are less defensive, a little more humble perhaps, and more quietly open to receive a new reality.

How Severe is My Situation?

In addition to readiness to change, there’s a question of how severe a woman’s case is. It’s not uncommon that a woman might need a higher level of care than Intensive Outpatient, in which case the intake specialist helping you will suggest that you should probably go into a medically supervised setting, such as an inpatient rehab, medical detox, or partial hospitalization program, these three being variations of treatment settings with round the clock supervision.

This is the case when a woman’s addiction has become a strongly medical issue, or when the interactions of mental health symptoms, psychiatric medicines, self-destructive behavior, and mood-altering substances are unpredictable and dangerous without supervision.

Some women won’t be able to stay sober if left unsupervised between treatment sessions. This isn’t personal, it’s the nature of addiction. For IOP to work, we need to be able to refrain from substance use throughout the course of treatment, even when exposed to triggers from our home and work life.

In general, if it is possible to take a pause from work and home environment, residential treatment is a strong, supportive option to consider before IOP. A retreat from one’s ordinary environment lends many kinds of protective and curative factors, a deeper level of safety, and release into the healing program which isn’t available if we are regularly revisiting our home and work environments.

That said, not everyone can take or afford a full pause from their life circumstances, and not everyone needs that higher level of care, in which case, IOP is the next best thing.

What are the benefits of IOP for women?

Intensive Outpatient Programs for women offer many benefits. Here are a few of them:

1. High Amount of Treatment Hours in a Relatively Short Period of Time

Women struggling with addiction, mental illness symptoms, and/or trauma need a high level of face-to-face hours per week, in order to stabilize their outer lives and inner worlds enough to be able to safely engage with the healing process successfully. IOP provides that saturation and frequency of therapeutic hours, and a safe consistent structure, using a variety of methodologies to address many facets of a woman’s being at once.

2. Flexibility and Options

IOPs give women the option to stay involved in their work and home lives, while still participating fully in treatment. Treatment takes place after work, over lunch hours, evenings, and weekends, and can usually be adapted to fit a woman’s schedule (though keep in mind that it is still many hours a week, typically at least 9).

Therefore during IOP, women can continue to live in their own homes, going onsite to a facility to receive treatment but then returning home each day.

Flexibility of schedule has many advantages for women with children, who are economically not in a position to take a break from working, or who have other kinds of responsibilities that make residential treatment less viable.

3. Cost and Insurance Coverage

Compared to higher levels of care, Intensive Outpatient Programs are more affordable. Since clients do not board or take meals at the facility, the costs of treatment are simply lower. For the same reason, many insurance plans that don’t cover residential treatment will cover some or all of the costs of an IOP.

However, recognize that if a higher level of care is necessary, then it is necessary. Being housed and supervised onsite in a facility is sometimes medically required to be able to achieve basic stabilization.

If this is the case, a residential treatment stay is less costly for you and your insurance, than a long drawn-out course of escalating and worsening crises, which eventually will require hospitalization anyway.

We say all this to highlight that, while cost and insurance are a factor that deserves their fair weight in consideration, sometimes the level of a woman’s need will take precedence in the calculation. Addiction is, after all, a serious, life-or-death issue.

4. Practice Coping Skills in the Real World

For women who are able to attend their therapy hours at an outpatient facility, and still manage work and home life successfully, the hybrid combination of treatment with exposure to the real world provides many chances to practice coping skills in real-world scenarios.

Provided we are able to stay sober and do not get overwhelmed by regular triggers, these frequent tests to our new coping skills and behavioral choices can be very strengthening. We therefore leave treatment having already practiced and mastered some key recovery-preserving skills.

5. Build Community, In Your Community

All good treatment programs will incorporate the aspect of community, ideally empowering each woman to find a nourishing source of connections and support in her local area, be that through AA or another community-based recovery model.

Sometimes, in residential treatment, the initial bonds we form in community aren’t transferrable when we return home, for example when we came to a rehabilitation facility from a different state. In IOP settings, the community we are encouraged to build takes root right in the lives we are already in, surrounding home, work, and our local environment.

Villa Kali Ma offers an IOP for Women

At Villa Kali Ma, our philosophy is that women are healed best by a combination of powerful clinical modalities, together with alternative, healing approaches.

Wherever Western modalities stand out in the evidence and literature as holding special promise for women’s healing, we’ve incorporated those approaches – Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Mindfulness-based therapies, EMDR, somatic approaches, nature therapy, and expressive arts being examples from our therapeutic offerings.

We keep a keen eye on the evolving trauma field and its many revolutionary advances, bringing in practitioners to help fill out our roster of interventions so that we keep abreast of the times: ketamine assisted therapy and brain spotting is recent additions reflecting our interest in supplying the best opportunities to help women heal from trauma.

At the same time, we rely on traditions that have withstood millennia of verification and refining: massage, acupuncture, Ayurveda, reiki, yoga, and many other ancient healing systems.

Our Intensive Outpatient Program combines the best of our residential treatment program experience, with the flexibility and accessibility of the intensive outpatient setting. We feel that if you’re looking to engage in an intensive, immersive healing program, that our IOP would be the thing for you.

Whatever you decide, you have our support and blessings, dear reader, on your road to wellness!

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Intensive Outpatient Program

Does Intensive Outpatient Treatment Work?

Post author By VKM
Post date February 5, 2025
No Comments on Does Intensive Outpatient Treatment Work?

Intensive Outpatient Programs have many attractive benefits, but do they actually work to help people recover from addiction?

Yes! Intensive Outpatient Programs (IOP) are very effective at restoring capacity and sobriety for women, provided the women are a good match for the IOP level of care.

In this article, we’ll explain why we at Villa Kali Ma feel that our female IOP has an important place in our spectrum of treatment options for recovering women.

Does Intensive Outpatient Treatment Work?

Addiction recovery requires many hours a week of direct contact with treatment professionals, especially at the beginning of sobriety. In an IOP program, participants live at home and attend treatment at an outpatient facility.

Women attending IOP join for at least 9 hours of therapy programming a week, in the form of individual therapy sessions, groups, and healing activities.

While IOPs are a strong option for many women, there are some factors to take into account when making a decision for which level of care is right for you. IOPs are more flexible than residential treatment, but that flexibility can be a risk factor. If the addiction is in a condition where we are not able to make good decisions without continual supervision by treatment staff, then we may not succeed in IOP.

We are more likely to relapse when exposed to environmental stressors and triggers than when sequestered in an inpatient rehab facility, so it’s important to assess whether living and working in the community represents a threat to our ability to achieve and work on our sobriety. Tests and triggers are part of growing strong and forming new habits, but too much too early on in our sobriety can set us up to fail.

Intensive Outpatient Treatment Programs only work well for women who are ready and able to take full advantage of all the treatment and services that IOP programs have to offer, and who can sustain some level of exposure to “the real world” without falling into patterns of relapse.

Whether or not we are able to recover successfully in an IOP depends on the severity of our addiction, and whether or not that addiction exists alongside other serious troubles, like mental health disorders and trauma. Some women’s addictions and mental health vulnerabilities will be too severe, rendering them unable to take advantage of the treatment in the less structured environment.

All in all, for women who are stabilized enough to do the work of self-transformation without continuous supervision, who have made a commitment to do so, and are able to place primary focus on their recovery over all other life priorities, IOP is likely to work well.

Through Villa Kali Ma’s IOP, women can establish and sustain a life of sobriety, recover from mental health disorders, and resolve long-standing issues of traumatization in their bodies, hearts, and perceptions. The negative, downward spiral of addiction, that pulls women further into disorder and enslavement, can be reversed into a positive, healthy, upward spiral towards happiness and re-engagement with the growth process.

Analyzing the efficacy of intensive outpatient programs

Intensive Outpatient Programs are a “best of both worlds” option for people who need a relatively high level of treatment, but also need to maintain one foot in the ordinary world.

Like all “best of both worlds” options, some aspects of each world are lost in the balance. At Villa Kali Ma, it is our opinion and experience that residential treatment, or inpatient treatment, is a more ideal setting for any woman seeking recovery, because of the added benefits of full retreat and removal from one’s home, working, and even family environments.

Our recommendation is to complete residential treatment in the full shelter of our retreat-like program and to follow the residential stay with a gradual downstepping of treatment through an IOP program.

However, a full-stop retreat from daily life, responsibilities, and environment is not always a realistic or feasible option for women, for economic and family reasons, such as having children to care for, and work responsibilities which will not afford a pause.

For any women looking to get the highest level of care without leaving their home and work environments, Intensive Outpatient is the next best option. IOP can work just as well, provided the woman in question is able to meet the larger demands on self-responsibility which are required in IOP.

Intensive Outpatient is a superior addiction treatment option when compared to outpatient therapy alone, (such as trying to recover from addiction through attending individual therapy or group therapy). IOP performs better in outcome studies, with a rule of thumb rate of 50-75% of graduates from an IOP program staying sober long term.

Many studies suggest that Intensive Outpatient Programs are on par with inpatient or residential rehab, though this is only true when someone is an appropriate candidate for IOP and does not require round-the-clock supervision, retreat, and sequestering from environmental conditions (work and life).

The determinants of successful outcomes in treatment

One of the biggest reasons that treatment doesn’t work, is that participants do not complete the treatment. Leaving treatment before the recommended amount of treatment has been completed will obviously affect our ability to embody the benefits we had been meaning to get out of treatment.

Reasons for premature termination of treatment, therefore, are important to consider. The main reasons a woman might decide partway through her treatment to stop doing the recovery work include:

Lack of clarity of purpose (she hasn’t fully decided to undergo the change)
Difficulty tolerating withdrawal symptoms, lack of coping skills for self-soothing and surviving difficult moments
Life problems which get in the way of being able to attend treatment, such as childcare and work problems
Negative input from the environment, such as from peers who do not understand the treatment priorities, family dysfunctional relationships, and work stress
Co-occurring mental health problems and trauma disorders, which make it very distressing to experience life sober

Therefore, a program which aims to address all of these factors alongside administering addiction treatment, is more likely to be successful. At Villa Kali Ma, we offer:

Motivational Interviewing and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to help with change readiness
Several healing modalities and recovery skills training groups, to teach each woman how to regulate her nervous system, modulate difficult sensations and emotions, change toxic thoughts, and get through the difficulties of early recovery
Partnership with each woman to make a realistic plan that will work for helping her to attend all treatment and meet all participation requirements
Family and couples therapy sessions and education programs to help loved ones better understand and support treatment
A comprehensive program of treatment for mental health disorders and traumatization that runs in parallel to interventions addressing substance addiction

Strategies for Relapse Prevention

Relapse prevention is a core part of addiction treatment and a key part of our programs at Villa Kali Ma. We provide a tapered, careful downstepping of treatment intensity and frequency of services, which can last many months afterwards, through ongoing engagement and community involvement. Relapse prevention planning actually begins almost immediately, because it is such an important part of recovery.

Ongoing strategies for relapse prevention include:

Using the comprehensive, detailed, pragmatic plan for all post-treatment contingencies which you created with us during treatment
Committing to an ongoing course of individual therapy
Continuing with trauma healing, through a somatic, body-based approach to heal the nervous system, body, and brain in a bottom-up way, where trauma is a factor
Maintaining an exercise practice, such as Qi Gong, working out, yoga, or hiking, so as to keep building body resources for staying sober, and increasing capacity for joy and enlivenment
Continuous involvement in AA or another 12 Step program, to learn more about recovery, remember the dangers of relapse, and to form positive loving connections in the community

Villa Kali Ma offers an IOP for Women

Villa Kali Ma’s Intensive Outpatient Program was created with love and care. We took the successful core of our inpatient addiction treatment model, including its holistic heart, and nestled it into an IOP setting which we feel reflects the best path for recovering women.

With adjunct therapies like Equine Therapy, Yoga Therapy, Nature-Based Therapy, Shamanic Healing, Creative Therapies, Massage, and Nutrition, as well as powerhouse clinical models like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Mindfulness and Self-Compassion, and EMDR, we have created a nourishing and restructuring blend of transformative treatments and courses of therapy.

With more flexibility and a less intensive structure than residential treatment, our IOP provides effective therapies and resources for healing trauma, mental health disorders, and addiction.

References:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24445620/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4152944/

https://library.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/pep20-02-01-021.pdf

Tags does intensive outpatient treatment work

Intensive Outpatient Program

Do I Need an Intensive Outpatient Program?

Post author By VKM
Post date February 5, 2025
No Comments on Do I Need an Intensive Outpatient Program?

Figuring out what kind of care we need for our escalating mental health troubles can be intimidating. Amid the many approaches and pathways to mental health recovery available out there, how can we know which is the best for us? How can we avoid getting bogged down in information overload?

In this blog post, we at Villa Kali Ma will do our best to demystify one of the best treatment options for women who struggle with mental health disorders, trauma, and substance abuse: Intensive Outpatient Programs.

Do I need an Intensive Outpatient Program?

When we’re really struggling, we need more help than the traditional, once-a-week therapy model provides. We need more attention, different kinds of help than we’ve had until now, and a safer, more contained setting. This is most likely to be true when we have serious mental health symptoms and/or trauma, and also if we use substances.

Our Intensive Outpatient Program for women aims to offer this higher level of care. By providing a high frequency of face-to-face therapy hours, including individual psychotherapy, group, couples, and family therapy, education about mental health, training in coping skills, and many other kinds of support, IOPs immerse women in a healing program that addresses many levels of need at once.

At Villa Kali Ma, for example, our IOP helps women address trauma and mental health disorders, while also receiving treatment for substance use disorders. We do this through a core program of contemporary evidence-based clinical approaches – interventions like Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

These robustly effective clinical modalities are nestled into a comfy cushion of ancient holistic practices. Therapies like massage, acupuncture, nutrition, and yoga help women embody their inner and outer changes more comfortably.

All in all we aim to create an environment that guides women through the phases of healing with the maximum amount of regard, respect, and sensitivity to each woman’s unique soul journey.

In contrast to traditional rehabilitation settings, participants can attend Intensive Outpatient Programs while living at home and maintaining some level of life responsibilities. For this reason, they’re a popular choice for women who do not feel they need to fully pause their current life, or for whom that isn’t a viable option.

In the end, figuring out whether an IOP is a good idea for you is a decision which can be made most easily with an intake specialist, who will make a recommendation for you that’s tailored to your individual case. An intake specialist will ask the right questions to help you figure out what kind of care you realistically will need to get better.

How do I know I need an Intensive Outpatient Program?

Stability and Safety

If you need therapy more often than once a week, but you don’t need round-the-clock supervision, attending an IOP could be a good option for you.

How do you know if you need therapy more than once a week? If you are struggling with severe negative emotions, and have a hard time refraining from negative behaviors – drinking too much, using too many prescription pills – or you’re constantly experiencing triggers and flashbacks from your trauma, once-a-week therapy most likely won’t cut it.

Once-a-week therapy is good for people who have a relative degree of stability and safety, who can therefore participate in therapy productively without overwhelming pain and crisis interfering with the healing process.

Not sure? One way to find out would be to attend weekly therapy and see if you are able to stabilize and feel safe at that level of care – if you are, great! But if you’re not, read on.

Crisis As A Call For Help

For those who are not able to feel safe and stable with weekly therapy alone, please know that there is no shame in this. It’s actually rather common for women who have been very deeply hurt, as many women have. Many of us need a chance to reset our bodies, minds, and spirits to a safer baseline, and that takes an approach which addresses all these layers of our being in tandem.

If we haven’t yet had the chance to deal with our deepest wounding, addiction, trauma, and mental health symptoms tend to erupt into the surface of our lives. These disruptive symptoms easily reach crisis levels, overwhelming our current ability to soothe and normalize ourselves. This is just how it works – not a personal failing on our part.

These crises are a sign from our inner depths that we need help, that something serious needs addressing. When we lose control of our behavior, our emotions, or our thoughts, it’s because part of us deep inside is pulling the fire alarm, saying that something is deeply wrong. If you feel like your body, mind, heart, and spirit seem to be going haywire, this would be a signal that on a deep level, you are sounding the alarm as a way of getting the help you need to heal.

What are the signs you need an Intensive Outpatient Program?

If any of the following apply to you, you would most likely benefit greatly from an Intensive Outpatient Program.

1. You’re not able to refrain from using prescriptions, drugs, and/or alcohol.

If you recognize, or have been told by your therapist or loved ones, that the way you use drugs, alcohol, or prescriptions represents a block to your healing, relationships, or ability to participate positively in life, you probably have a substance-related illness which is best treated in a clinical setting. IOP can be a good resource for people who don’t necessarily need to be supervised constantly but do need substance abuse treatment.

2. You experience out-of-control emotions, and/or engage in self-harming behaviors

If you often feel overwhelming emotions, including rage, fear, sadness, and devastation, you may need a higher-intensity therapy program to help you address what’s going on that’s manifesting as these imbalanced emotions. This is also true if you have obsessive and painful thoughts, thoughts you can’t get under control, which make you unhappy and get in the way of your life.

Finally, if you engage in any kind of self-harm, such as cutting, disordered eating, risky sexual behavior, or drama-filled relationships, these are all signs that something within you needs help at a deep level so you can feel better. A trauma-informed IOP like the one we offer at Villa Kali Ma would be a good setting for you to get help that matches your level of need.

3. You have a mental illness or trauma and you also use substances

If you have been diagnosed with a mental illness, such as depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder, and you use substances to cope with your symptoms, you are very likely locked into a negative interaction between these two conditions, which will feed into each other in ways detrimental to your wellbeing. It is highly advised that you enter a structured program that will address both sides of the coin.

4. You have completed an Inpatient Program in the Past

If you have completed a residential rehab program recently, the staff probably recommended that you follow up with an Intensive Outpatient Program to support you in transitioning into your post-rehab life. If that’s your situation, we also highly recommend that you engage in an IOP program, to help you down-step safely and gradually.

If you completed an inpatient program a while ago, and had some measure of success staying sober and safe, but now you have slipped or relapsed, an IOP program is also a good choice. IOP can help you restart and refresh your healing path, without necessarily needing to go back into a supervised setting.

Villa Kali Ma offers an IOP for women

The Intensive Outpatient Program we created at Villa Kali Ma reflects our accumulated wisdom about what really helps wounded women recover from the triple burdens of addiction, trauma, and mental illness.

Modeled from our core residential treatment model, but adapted to provide more flexibility in schedule including work and living arrangements, our program is a good choice for women who need to stay in their home environments while receiving high-level treatment.

We’ve paired a solid clinical core of modalities together with a rich selection of alternative, healing therapies that help you connect to feelings of profound safety, meaning, and depth to help you understand yourself more lovingly.

Whatever your situation, if you’re sensing a need for a higher level of care than you’ve been able to have so far, to address your deepest and most aching levels of need, our Intensive Outpatient Program heals through body, mind, and spirit might be the right choice for you.

Whatever you decide, we wish you encouragement and strength, and all the best on your path to recover your inherent wholeness. It is worth it, and you are worth it.

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Sobriety

Why Do People Relapse?

Recovery is nourished by truth in all forms. Liberation comes not only from heart-opening truths, the kind that melts us like butter in the sun but also from ugly, uncomfortable ones. The kinds of truths that make us squirm with a crawling unease, may be the most freeing of all.

In this article, we’ll do our best to talk about something that is no fun to think about, a shadowy, but valuable truth. This liberating truth is: that there is a pretty high probability of relapse, even after getting professional help.

Any relapse could be our last. The last because it’s the one that leads us to turn our backs on the sweet lies of addiction forever, or the last because it’s the one that gets us, for good.

A life in sobriety is not guaranteed, but rather something we must daily choose and pursue with every ounce of life force and will given to us.

Relapse statistics

It sure would be nice if, after all the hard work, economic expense, and the sheer time it takes to get clean and start a life in recovery, we could at least count on favorable odds of survival.

Actually, the odds are about 50-50. The National Institute on Drug Abuse says there’s a 40-60% chance of relapse, on average, across different drug categories.

Addiction Group, a site sharing data about addiction and recovery, cites relapse rates as high as 90% for certain drugs, such as opioids. 75% percent of people receiving treatment for stimulants relapse in the first five years of recovery. Alcoholism relapse rates fall in the 40-60% range, though some studies show more dire outcomes, suggesting we can expect more like 8 out of 10 individuals to relapse within the first year after treatment.

You might be thinking: where’s the liberation in all of this truth? Isn’t this depressing? Am I doomed to fail? Why work so hard when my chances of making it are so bad?

That’s a serious question to sit with and to hold with reverence. Let us not bypass it. Let us not miss the grimness.

But all darkness holds a grain of light. Here’s one grain: you could also see the reverse, that a percentage of seriously addicted people manage not to relapse.

Taking a glass-half-full approach, 50-50 odds means it’s equally likely that the liberating, healing force within you wins out. This fact alone is remarkable, at least when you’ve seen how bad it can indeed get in some addiction cases.

All of this shows the danger and also shows what’s possible. What can we do to help ourselves and our loved ones be in that percentile?

Why women relapse

It’s good to remember that relapse is caused most of all by the phenomenon of addiction itself. Prolonged exposure to addictive substances changes the human body dramatically and irreversibly.

Some positive repairs and regeneration of physiology are possible in recovery, but halting the advancement of the disease is the only realistic hope. We do not regain our pre-addiction body. As they say in AA, “You can’t turn a pickle back into a cucumber”.

If that’s true, how is it that we recover and go on to live lives of joy and meaning? The answer is: that we find new pathways, workarounds, and ways to repair our hearts and minds so that what got changed in the body does not determine our fate anymore.

Since addiction never really is fully uninstalled from the body, relapse is always a risk. Relapse isn’t so much a bug in our recovery, as a core feature of the addiction that still lives in us, lying in wait for us to lose focus on recovery.

Another way to say this is: if we were not prone to relapse, you wouldn’t use the word addict to describe us. It is part of the diagnostic criteria of addiction to establish that there have been past failed attempts to stop using the substance.

It is this peculiarity of broken willpower, and inability to act in one’s own interests nor to obey one’s own higher intelligence, being instead completely overrun by appetites and urges gone rogue, that defines addiction.

Within that, there are several common causes for relapse. It’s helpful to be aware of these so that they do not blindside us entirely.

1. Women are more vulnerable to relapse than men

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, women are more vulnerable to relapse than men. The reasons are considered to be psychological as well as biological, as subtleties of neurobiology and hormones are affected differently than in men.

What to do about this? Take extra care. Do not diminish or self-gaslight what your emotions, especially your pain, are telling you. Listen to the female experience – it is often ignored. In the case of addiction, we do so at our own peril.

2. Withdrawals

The top reason that people relapse is because of overpowering physical and psychological discomfort during withdrawal from the substance. The combination of painful physical symptoms and emotional agony is often too much for people, and they are pulled back in.

For this reason, it’s wise to check yourself into a professional facility for detoxification, such as a medically supervised detox like the one we offer at Villa Kali Ma. Initial withdrawals are over relatively quickly, within a week to ten days, but they are fierce. These withdrawals are dangerous and can kill a person if not medically overseen, especially in the case of alcohol, and prescription drugs like opioids (OxyContin) or benzodiazepines (Xanax, Ativan, Klonopin).

Examples of overwhelming physical withdrawal symptoms may include nausea, vomiting, sweating, muscle pains, tremors, seizures, and psychosis. Emotional torment may include severe anxiety, panic attacks, deep depression with suicidal feelings, and bizarre delusions and hallucinations.

Post-acute withdrawals refer to the ongoing symptoms and effects, which may linger for many months or even years, depending on each individual case. While these are more easily addressed with gentler interventions, they should not be underestimated, either. Depression, anxiety, suppressed immunity, ongoing physical pain, and other impacts can take a toll, and pull a person into using again.

3. Trauma and Mental Health Disorders

Even when we are able to get through the shorter-term wave of withdrawals, our next challenge is to face our mental state and our emotional health.

For the majority of women who have substance abuse problems, this means dealing with our traumatization. It means finding ways to mitigate mental health symptoms, like anxiety and depression. If we do not have adequate, timely support for doing the emotional work that is necessary to heal from our emotional damage, our chances of staying clean and sober plummet.

If we are appropriately committed to doing our step work in our 12-step program, that will guide us through the mental and emotional changes that are necessary to recover. It is also highly recommended to enter into therapy and to get specialized attention for trauma healing.

4. People, Places and Things

Another major cause of relapse is placing ourselves in physical proximity to people, places, and things that are linked to our past history of using substances. People who are still using drugs and alcohol, people who are emotionally charged for us (family, friends, enemies, loved ones, old flames, etc), and people who are just associated with our use for whatever reason are all sources of trigger to relapse.

Places we used to frequent when in our addiction, or which are new to us but frequented by other people who are using drugs and alcohol actively, are clear danger zones. But due to the complicated ways that triggers work, our list of places may include locations in themselves benign, but made dangerous by our personal connection to them during past phases of life.

Finally, even things, like objects, movies, music, and sounds, can suddenly act on the body to release the state of craving.

5. Underestimating Addiction

Perhaps the simplest way to explain how and why relapse happens is that each person typically needs to find out for themselves, through their own experiences, how formidable a foe addiction really is. Addiction infiltrates us in every aspect – our bodies, our minds, our hearts, our very sense of who we are, and what we are doing here in life.

In recovery, we have a chance to start over, but it requires a steep learning curve. We must find a way to be much more wakeful, present, and self-responsible than we ever dreamed a person has to be. However much we think recovery asks us to change, it is more than that.

Due to the fact that many of us just can’t quite conceive how thoroughly we must change in order to recover, we may have many phases of getting complacent, losing our fear, becoming bored, feeling sorry for ourselves, overestimating our progress, broiling with resentments, nourishing a sense of victimhood, and in general starting to think things which perk up the ego, but aren’t actually correct. All of these forms of fantasy, deception, and manipulation pull us back to the addict.

It can take some years of experience to detect the difference between our own self-sourced thoughts and the thoughts that are coming from addiction. Living in fear doesn’t help, but we must be wisely apprised of the facts about addiction. We can never afford to lose our vigilance and wariness, and we must, if we want to live, learn to discern the difference between the voice of truth, and the slippery, self-serving thoughts and feelings that arise when the inner addict is coming around, asking to be let back in.

6. Intimacy too Soon After Getting Sober

Dating isn’t recommended in the first year of recovery and is generally approached with caution and support within recovery circles. The reason for this is that intimacy, sex, romance, fantasy, and intrigue are all closely linked to relapse.

Many people relapse over a relationship or romantic scenario, that has gone south, or even one that has gone well. Heightened emotions, self-destructive urges, and our deepest wounds are connected to love and sex. Likewise, inappropriate entanglements, especially in dramatic scenarios or with unhealthy choices of partners, are so common as to be predictable in our first years of trying to recover. The addict within often hides under the cover of “love” and romance and its roller coasters of drama, so it’s wise to watch out for that, especially in the beginning.

Holiday Relapse

Many people relapse over the holidays. The holidays tend to bring us into contact with people, places, and things related to our personal history. The holidays are also linked to painful emotions for many, including isolation and grief, which are triggers. Finally, the holidays are associated with celebration, blowing off steam, and excess. Extra caution is advised during this season.

Ways to Prevent Relapse

Relapse may be common, but we also can’t afford to be fatalistic about it. We have to try our very best to succeed at staying sober and hope we are among the group of people who make it.

If a relapse were to grab us again, the chances that it takes many more years out of us would be very high. It might even kill us (or someone else). Make no mistake, if a relapse does happen, it will be bad for us.

So in the words of Julia Cameron, let’s pray to catch the bus, then run like heck.

Here’s how to do your very best to prevent a relapse:

1. Daily Contact with Recovery People

The best way to nurture your ability to live in the eternal now moment of freedom, where the gift of recovery exists, is to place yourself with people who are already living that reality. You can find these people in the halls of AA and other 12-step recovery circles. No, not every single person there is free. But there is a higher percentage here than anywhere else.

There are many ways to be in daily contact with recovery people. The most powerful is to be physically present in meetings. One meeting a day for the first year is not too much, if you are serious about your recovery you will understand how these meetings give you time, rather than taking time away.

It is also wise to have daily phone calls, daily step work, and a volunteer position that requires you to be accountable. Whatever you do, and however you do it, do not let yourself get separated from the people and places where recovery exists.

2. Do Your Psychological Healing Work

In addition to psychological healing which will come as a result of participation in your recovery community, it’s highly recommended to get individual therapeutic support, especially when mental health problems like depression and anxiety are present in your experience. Trauma must also be addressed as soon as humanly possible.

3. Get Trauma Treatment

If you have any reason to believe you may have trauma, from a childhood of neglect or abuse, and most especially from sexual abuse or assault in any form, it is highly recommended to receive healing for that right away.

Timely trauma healing makes the chances of relapse much, much lower. This is the driving reason behind Villa Kali Ma investing so heavily in trauma therapies, to the point of opening our own trauma healing center for women, The Retreat.

If you’re not sure whether you have trauma, but you are a woman with a substance abuse problem, chances are high that you do. The vast majority of women with substance use disorders also have trauma.

Villa Kali Ma can help prevent relapse

Villa Kali Ma is dedicated to helping women recover lives of freedom, joy, and purpose. We know what it’s like to have the odds against us and to nevertheless prevail.

Every day, we help women find their way back to the land of the living, through holistic healing methods and evidence-based clinical approaches that treat addiction, mental health disorders, and trauma. If you’re worried about relapse, for yourself or someone you love, reach out to talk over your options!

References:

https://nida.nih.gov/publications/drugs-brains-behavior-science-addiction/treatment-recovery

https://nida.nih.gov/publications/research-reports/substance-use-in-women/sex-gender-differences-in-substance-use

Tags why do people relapse

Rehab

A Guide to Adjusting to Life After Rehab

Post author By VKM
Post date January 29, 2025
No Comments on A Guide to Adjusting to Life After Rehab

Recovery may be a steep mountain, but it has been climbed many times before. There are maps, supplies, campsites, watering holes, and experienced mountaineers to help you make the trek. In this post, we here at Villa Kali Ma will share a few ideas that may help you along the trail.

How women can plan ahead for life after rehab

To formulate a plan for life after rehab is essential. The staff of your rehabilitation facility will work together with you to make a comprehensive aftercare plan, covering every aspect of your post-rehab life.

Where you will live, who you will be hanging out with, what you will do for work, and how you will stay active in your treatment are all mapped out in your Relapse Prevention Plan.

A good plan outlines the recovery road in great detail and includes emergency protocols and contingencies – what you will do to protect and guard yourself against relapse when tested. This includes a full assessment of all potential risks and triggers and identifies useful tools and interventions that you will use to keep yourself safe and strong.

In addition to a good relapse prevention plan, we suggest that each woman embarking on a new chapter of life practice a little bit of active imagination, to foresee and create a path through life that will be good for her.

Here is a 2-part journal prompt:

Part I: The Dreaming

The inventor Nikola Tesla was famous for picturing the entirety of his creations, even testing them in a variety of applications and scenarios in his mind, before even beginning to build a prototype to prove his invention out in the real world. Do the same now for your ideal after-rehab life.

Allow your intuition to guide you in picturing the ideal scenario. If all goes as perfectly well in the next year, what is your first year after rehab like? Describe it in great detail, in the present tense, essentially dreaming up the invention of your new life.

Sample Dreaming:

After leaving rehab, I move into my sober living facility. I like the space and the people, it’s comfortable and even kind of fun to have roommates again. I make friends with the other girls and find support and connection in the meetings we go to. It feels like a little home and positive family, where we are able to laugh and cry together as needed. Soon after settling in, a synchronistic connection gets me an easy, interesting-enough job, that feels safe and steady, where I can feel useful and earn sufficiently…

Part 2: Preparing for Possible Problems

Now, like Tesla did, imagine all the possible things that could go wrong, and again allow yourself to dream up what the solution to those problems would be or could be. Think ahead in the mindset of preparing for potential scenarios, and ask yourself a series of what-if questions. Write up a list of “What ifs”.

What if I am tempted to relapse?

What if I slip?

What if I run into an old friend who’s still using?

What if my ex calls me?

Each of these questions can be pre-solved in imagination. The exercise of pre-seeing a solution helps strengthen your intentions and keeps you in solutions.

Sample Anticipatory Problem Solving:

-What if one of my friends relapses?

-If someone close to me relapses, and I feel upset or tempted, I could go to a meeting and seek advice on what to do in this scenario, I know a lot of people will have been through something similar. I could offer to take her to a meeting or back to rehab, but if I’m not feeling strong enough I can also say something like “I love you, but I’m not strong enough to help you right now because I have to protect my own recovery”…

Mentally preparing in this way can be a huge assist in rehearsing and preparing for possible scenarios. Of course, none of us knows exactly how life will roll out in the details, but through envisioning, we can clarify our intentions and this genuinely helps us act wisely in difficult moments.

If you’re not sure what the challenges in early recovery are, ask around! Your recovery people can tell you. Here are some potential prompts to consider, that we here at Villa Kali Ma suggest you think about:

What will I do about dating and romance?
How will I handle holidays and family gatherings?
What will I do about work? How will I make a living, and also protect my sobriety?
What will I do if something happens that makes me feel ashamed or embarrassed? What if I am triggered to use?
How will I handle conflicts?
What if I am invited to a location I don’t think I should go to, such as a work event where they are serving alcohol, but I don’t want to share that I’m in recovery?
What will I do for fun?
Who is safe to talk to about recovery topics?
How will I make sure I follow my relapse-prevention plan, no matter what?

How can family members help with this transition?

Family members can be an enormous resource in the first year after rehab. The good news is, that the path of helpfulness is relatively simple (though we won’t claim it’s easy). Our advice in a nutshell? Detach with love.

Tips for family members:

1. Let Go of Personal Attachment to the Outcome

Sticking to recovery after rehab is not a guaranteed outcome. It should not be taken for granted that a newly sober person will succeed. Nor should it be, on the other hand, assumed that they will fail. The truth is, we do not know, we shall have to see.

There is nothing you as a family member can do to control what happens. It is between the recovering individual and their path. If you feel attached to the outcome, try to let go and trust as best you can. Worry can easily turn into an interfering energy.

2. Believe in the Them

It’s ok to regard the addict with suspicion, but remember that the addict is a usurper. Somewhere in there, the person you love is fighting to get free. Therefore, hold space and unconditional positive regard for them. It takes a lot of courage, surrender, hard work, emotional release, and personal transformation to succeed.

Understanding that your family member needs support, respect, and recognition that they are doing something very important and vulnerable, will help you have proper reverence for what is happening.

What normally gets in the way of this is our own fears about them, (and less heroically, what their choices will mean for us!).

As best, you can take care of your own needs so that you do not unwittingly impose your needs too much on your loved one, and try on the idea that if you have faith in them, they are more likely to make it than if you worry.

3. Refrain from Trying to Do Recovery For Them

Your recovering beloved needs to walk on their own two feet. It is not the time to carry your beloved like a baby, but rather to let them toddle their way forward, metaphorically speaking, so that they build strength. They will fall down, yes they will. They might suffer a lot (is there anyone who doesn’t?), but they will also learn through this, to get up and to move forward.

You can be very empathetic and kind, offering simple statements like “I know, I understand”, and “I’m sorry this hurts so much”, but do not under any circumstances start doing for them what they must learn to do for themselves. They must be in the driver’s seat of their own recovery, even though we may be rightfully scared that they will crash the car. Pray for the best, and let go, it is literally not possible for you to do it for them. If you try to do it for them, you will mess them up.

4. Be Honest

Speak the plain truth of what you are experiencing. Harshness, criticism, and judgment aren’t helpful, but truth is. Truth is not opinions, distortions, and interpretations, but just the facts.

Learn to use observation language, such as “I noticed I got really tense when you said you don’t think you’ll go to the meeting tonight, after all. I notice my thoughts are centering on the fact that you told me you are doing 30 meetings in 30 days, and I’m wondering what it means that you want to skip. I’m wondering if it’s a bad sign. I know it’s up to you to handle your recovery, but I wanted to share that I got a bad feeling when you said that.”

What your beloved does with your truth-reflection is up to them. It might be bitter medicine that saves their life. Or they might ignore it. But you will have done your best.

5. Help Them Stick to the Plan

It is very helpful for people in recovery when their family members are aware of the Relapse Prevention Plan, even having a copy to refer to and occasionally pull out of the drawer and look at it together.

For example, in a good relapse prevention plan, there will be answers to questions like, “What do I do if I’ve had a slip but not yet a full-on relapse?”. Family members can always say: “Let’s see what the plan for this situation says: here it says the first step is to call your sponsor. How about we do that?”

The importance of not stopping recovery efforts

Sometimes, we need to remember the long game. Recovery is won, day by day, through consistency and repetition and starving out the enemy within. The addict within us cannot survive if every day, we make sincere efforts to recover. On any given day, we do not have to do all of the recovery work – only today’s piece.

If we keep doing recovery actions, we will keep recovering. If we stop doing recovery actions, we stop recovering and return to addiction.

It really is that simple. In recovery, there is no in-between – we are either walking up the mountain towards the heavens of recovery, making daily progress, feeling ourselves more and more to be enfolded into the sunny warm arms of life’s love for us, or we are sliding back down to cold shadows of addiction and its hatred for us.

There will come a time when we are tempted to rest, to skip, where we say, surely I have earned a break. I’m too tired to go to a meeting, and I just went to one yesterday.

Be careful in those times. Be careful of what your idea of a break is, and especially of what a reward is. These are the danger zones.

In anticipation of such moments, take a pause right now to consider what you could do:

What could I do when I feel tired out and depleted like I have been putting a lot into my recovery, and I need some restoration, some joy, some pause from it being such a steep climb? What are positive ways to restore, relax, to celebrate? What can I do when it all feels like too much emotional processing? How can I be nice to the part of me that’s working so hard, but not fall in with the addiction again?

Whatever you do, don’t stop climbing the mountain of your recovery. Some days you will only take a few steps, and other days you will make great advances. But every day must be oriented towards recovery.

It is a challenging, but important truth, that if we don’t find a way to keep moving, to stay warm and active, we may fall back into the cold teeth of the beast walking just a few steps behind us.

Villa Kali Ma can help women prepare for life after rehab

Preparing for life after rehab isn’t as complicated as it sounds. We can learn from the experiences of others; there are best practices and known routes up the mountain of recovery. Your sponsor will be your main mountain guide, recovery veterans a valuable resource.

At Villa Kali Ma, we take thorough care that when you leave the safety of our halls, you are outfitted with all that you will need to have the best chances of making your ascent.

The mapping, planning, preparation, and teaching of recovery survival skills, including awareness of what to do in any and all contingency scenarios, is our specialty.

Though it is your choice to recover, and only you can walk the steps up the mountain, if you desire to be free, we can help you memorize the path inside and out, before you even set foot on the trail.

Interested in how we may be able to help you recover a life of meaning, joy, and purpose? Reach out to connect!

Tags life after rehab

Mental Health

PTSS vs PTSD

At Villa Kali Ma, we talk a lot about healing women’s trauma. Healing women’s trauma is central to our mission of helping women recover lives of joy and meaning.

Unhealed trauma is a root cause of severe addiction and mental illness. We know from our own stories, and from the lives of women we have helped to recover, how important it is to recognize and have respect for the powerful role of trauma in human life.

These days, many people have heard about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but did you know there is also a diagnosis called Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSS)? In this article, we will talk about the differences between these two kinds of trauma.

What Is Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSS)?

Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSS) refers to a normal, healthy, and short-term stress response. PTSS is characterized by the following symptoms:

quickened heartbeat
trembling
sweating
muscle tension
agitation
sense of danger
a mental replay of events

PTSS is a form of acute, uncomfortable stress that can feel like impending doom. PTSS is triggered automatically, set off unconsciously by parts of the brain responsible for our physical survival.

PTSS is triggered when the body has perceived some kind of danger to its own survival, or the survival of another person. Perception of danger results in a cascade of neurotransmitters from the brain down into the rest of the body.

Neurotransmitters are the messengers in the body, and in this case, they tell the muscles, heart, and lungs to prepare the body for physical action. This is for the purpose of mobilizing the body to respond to the life-threatening event.

The acute stress response is also known as fight-flight-freeze. When we experience terrifying danger or shocking violence, the nervous system responds in a specific way, designed by nature to protect us and move us into instinctive, life-preserving action.

We can recognize the fight-flight-freeze response whenever our muscles have tensed up, we are breathing faster, and our heart is pounding. We may feel hot and sweaty, and feel like we need to move. We may notice tunnel vision and a strangely heightened awareness of specific details – fight-flight-freeze is a kind of altered state.

At the emotional level, it may register as fear, panic, dread, agitation, or rage. What’s going on is that the body has been primed for quick action, so that we can make a split-second decision to fight off an attacker or to move out of harm’s way, as may be necessary to protect ourselves or someone else.

A common source of PTSS is car accidents, injuries, surgeries, muggings, and similar kinds of experiences which can be perceived as harm or threat to our physiology.

PTSS is, generally speaking, a set of uncomfortable symptoms that are linked to something that happened very recently. With appropriate psychological processing of the experience, PTSS symptoms will fade and discharge out of the body within 30 days or so.

What is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a serious condition with heartbreaking effects on human life, can develop when fight-flight-freeze symptoms don’t get fully processed and released out of the body.

Symptoms of PTSD include:

Hypervigilance
Exaggerated startle response
Easily frightened
Easily agitated and irritated, low frustration tolerance
Intrusive memories of a scary event
Reliving a scary event as if it is happening again now
Insomnia
Nightmares
Depression and anxiety
Emotionally numb
Rage
Disconnected from people
Avoidance of people, places, and things that remind you of a scary event
Survivor guilt
Shame, negative thoughts, and self-destructive tendencies
Substance abuse
Eating disorders and self-harm

Like PTSS, PTSD is a neurobiological disturbance, caused by people being exposed to shocking and life-threatening events. Combat, natural disasters, and horrific collective events, such as bombings or school shootings, are the types of events that often give rise to PTSD. It is also possible to develop PTSD in response to childhood abuse, sexual assault, bullying, neglect, poverty, and other kinds of chronic adversity.

Both PTSS and PTSD have to do with the biology of survival, with fight-flight-freeze. There is nothing wrong with fight-flight-freeze, it is a life-protecting state of activation. However, if this activation in the physical body doesn’t get released through the resolution of the issue (a full return to safety), the energy of being rattled and riled up can get stuck in the body, where the cascade of hormones and neurochemicals turns toxic.

Although it is life-preserving, stress is hard on the body’s other systems, such as our organs of digestion, and the parts of the body responsible for healing, immunity, and restoration of our energy levels.

During stress, the body decides to prioritize safety and survival, but at a cost that it will need to recuperate later. If “later” never comes, because we do not get the help we need to be able to understand and psychologically resolve what happened, then the body and psyche may get sick with PTSD.

PTSD is a nightmarish state of experiencing and re-experiencing the terror, dread, and horror of a psyche-shattering experience. This state of permanent or recurrent terror, dread, doom, and deep lack of safety is one of the hardest psychological experiences for a human being to endure.

What is the difference between PTSS and PTSD?

PTSD is a temporary traumatic stress reaction, whereas PTSD is chronic and recurrent.

It is normal to experience symptoms like shakes, heart pounding, and psychological disturbances after having been deeply shocked or scared by something. If your shock symptoms arise and fade within 30 days of a traumatic experience, you may be given a diagnosis of PTSS. PTSD does not fade after 30 days; it may still affect a person decades after the original shock.

It is normal to feel guilty, scared, angry, ashamed, numbed, and confused after a shocking event. It’s also natural to have some nightmares, ongoing dread, to feel that your life outlook has changed, or to have some obsessive thoughts of the event, as you figure out what happened, why it went the way it did, and so on.

If you get appropriate therapeutic support for these feelings and for the resolution process, the disturbance doesn’t have to stay with you over time. You may be able to heal the wound in a way that it doesn’t turn into a scar.

What doesn’t help is numbing feelings, avoiding the mind’s meaning-seeking questions, or inducing the nervous system to relax artificially with substances. That’s how people end up with a double diagnosis of PTSD together with SUD (substance use disorder).

Trauma can affect women in several ways

Trauma is surprisingly prevalent. The more research is done on the subject, the more it turns out that wide swaths of the population are getting by in life while enduring semi-nightmarish states of being.

Very many people do not recognize their own traumatized state, because it is hidden behind substance use, behavioral disorders like compulsive internet and phone use, spending, or overeating, and plain old denial. Since numbing is a symptom of trauma, people may feel disconnected or unimportant, and not realize that without their trauma, they would feel more alive and well.

Women in particular are prone to traumatization, due to many factors that make the mainstream culture unsafe for us at multiple levels. Childhood sexual abuse, early sexualization, objectification, harassment, assault, and other forms of subtle or dramatic violence that affect women disproportionately, are major sources of serious traumatization.

Women with substance abuse problems very often have underlying trauma as a root cause. The majority of women entering treatment for substance abuse will end up tracing the self-medication habit to a need to deal with a disturbed nervous system and psyche, engendered by early experiences of not feeling fully safe, loved, and valued in this world.

It’s important to understand that trauma is the underlying condition, but the outer expression can look quite different in each woman. We all have different ways of coping, but what we’re coping with is the traumatization itself. Depression, anxiety, perfectionism, obsessions, compulsions, self-sabotage, negative thinking, guilt, shame, self-harm, narcissism, and overeating are all adaptations to a damaged psyche.

For more about women and PTSD, we share more detailed information on the topic.

Villa Kali Ma addresses women’s PTSD

Here at Villa Kali Ma, we acknowledge the central role trauma plays in the lives of women. Since we are dedicated fully to healing women’s hearts, minds, and bodies, we address trauma as a top priority.

When core trauma is treated in parallel, lasting recovery from substance abuse is much more likely. When trauma is resolved, mental health symptoms are no longer fortified by the body and nervous system. The unholy trinity of trauma, psychological disorders, and substance abuse can be unraveled and removed.

We have a holistic approach that makes use of the most effective clinical treatments in combination with the ancient, soul-repairing practices found in yoga and other alternative modalities. Read more about how we help women recover from PTSD.

We are also very proud of our dedicated trauma treatment center, lovingly dubbed The Retreat – a pioneering trauma-healing facility for women. Read more about why we’re excited about The Retreat.

Whatever your story is, dear reader, we honor you and your path of recovering from harm and all its many implications and effects. We’re here, cheering you on.

Tags ptss vs ptsd

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