Author: VKM

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Alcohol Addiction

Effects of Alcohol on Women

Why Do Women Face Higher Risks of Alcohol Addiction?

Alcohol has stronger effects on women than on men, due to biological factors like body weight and how much water women’s bodies retain compared to men. These biological distinctions explain why women can tolerate alcohol less easily and will have a higher blood alcohol level than men consuming the same amount of alcohol. Women have a higher likelihood of blacking out from drinking too much and are also more likely to experience hangovers.

What Are the Health Risks for Women Drinking Alcohol?

According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, alcohol presents many health risks for women.

Alcohol Addiction

Primary among the health risks for women who are associated with alcohol use is the risk of developing Alcohol Use Disorder, which is the clinical name for a spectrum of conditions ranging from alcohol abuse (drinking too much periodically) to alcohol dependence, to full-blown alcoholism.
Alcohol addiction is a serious, progressive disease with wide-ranging impacts on physical as well as mental health.


Brain Damage

Alcohol may be more likely to result in brain damage in women than in men, according to the hypotheses of some researchers studying the effects of alcohol on women compared to men.

Alcohol-related blackouts, which create gaps in memory, suggest damage to the areas of the brain responsible for memory. Some researchers believe that there is shrinkage of portions of the brain in people who use alcohol beyond what the body can tolerate safely (which is a daily limit of 1 serving of alcohol).


Breast Cancer

Alcohol has been linked to breast cancer. It appears that women who drink one drink daily have a higher likelihood of developing breast cancer compared with those who do not drink that amount, and that chance increases when women drink even more than one drink daily.


Liver Damage

Alcohol is notorious for leading to liver damage, such as cirrhosis, which is what happens when there is permanent liver scarring due to the use of alcohol. Women who regularly drink more than the body can safely process (again, a daily limit of 1 serving of alcohol) also have a higher risk of developing the potentially life-threatening liver condition of hepatitis.


Alcohol and Pregnancy

Drinking during pregnancy is unsafe for the mother and the infant. Known impacts of drinking during pregnancy include fetal alcohol disorder, higher risk of pre-term labor, brain damage, and physical as well as developmental impairment in children.


Heart Disease

Alcohol use over a long period leads to heart disease. Women are at a greater risk of developing alcohol-induced heart disease than men, even when consuming a lower daily amount than men.

All in all, women experience the adverse health effects of alcohol to a greater degree than men do.

Why Should Women Consider Avoiding Alcohol Use Completely?

Some women choose not to drink at all, and an argument can certainly be made for that choice. It is recommended to avoid alcohol completely if you are pregnant or plan to become pregnant, are under the age of 21 (underage drinking leads to disruption of normal brain development), taking medications that interact negatively with alcohol, or if you have a physical or mental health condition which is made worse by alcohol, such as anxiety or depression.

What Are the Treatment Programs for Alcohol?

Medically Supervised Detoxification

Alcohol represents a danger to your health during the withdrawal process and can result in death if not done with care. Seizures, delirium, and other complications are often part of the process.
It is wisest to detoxify in a medically supervised detoxification facility, especially if you also use medications of any kind in addition to alcohol, as not enough is known about interactions between alcohol and medications, especially ones that haven’t been on the market for so very long. Medical detoxification facilities have nurses and doctors on staff to monitor your withdrawals and provide medical support where necessary and will be able to intervene if something goes wrong.


Inpatient or Residential Treatment (Rehab)

Alcohol treatment is also offered in Inpatient Treatment Programs. These are your classic rehabilitation facilities, where you check in and receive treatment onsite as a stay-away option, usually for a length of time between one and three months.

Inpatient, also called Residential, is the best level of care in most cases of serious alcohol disorders because the safe, sequestered environment is critical to having a chance to stabilize away from temptations and triggers. These facilities also have trained medical staff onsite.


Outpatient Programs (IOP)

It is also possible to attend a day treatment program while still staying in your home and keeping your work schedule if that is advisable in your case.

Intensive Outpatient Programs offer addiction treatment services several days a week including during evening hours. Depending on how much care makes sense in your case, you may want to enroll in a higher or lower degree of structure and supervision to help you have success.

It’s important to understand that your level of care is something to be assessed by a medical professional. Generally speaking, more structure, safety, and length of treatment are better if it is possible to secure that for yourself, as time helps when healing from substance use.

Villa Kali Ma Can Assist Women With Alcohol Addiction

Villa Kali Ma offers addiction and mental health recovery programs for women who suffer from substance abuse and co-occurring disorders. We offer treatment at all levels of care, so whatever your circumstances, you will likely be able to find a program with us that fits your needs.

At Villa Kali Ma, we heal alcohol problems alongside underlying mental and emotional struggles, including traumatization, which is a very common problem for women.

Our facilities are located in sunny Southern California close to San Diego. At the core of our program, we believe in the health and individuality of each woman, and that there are many paths back to wholeness. For that reason, we offer a range of holistic modalities alongside our core treatment program.

References:

https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15303629/

https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/brochures-and-fact-sheets/women-and-alcohol

Categories
PTSD Treatment

Women With PTSD: Signs, Symptoms, Tips, and Treatment

PTSD and Women

When you imagine a classic sufferer of PTSD, do you think of a man or a woman?

You don’t need to be a male combat veteran to have experienced deep shocks to the core of your being, of the kind that create severe and lasting psychological distress in your life.

Post-traumatic stress disorder in women is gaining recognition as the field of trauma research matures. The more we learn about the subtleties and finer details of how traumatization can present in a person, the more women’s suffering is recognized.

Part of the delay in recognition of PTSD in women stems from the fact that women tend to manifest their symptoms in more subtle, internalized ways than men. For example, women are more likely to be diagnosed with anxiety and depression, whereas men may act out violently or use substances in ways that create more obvious problems.

Once we can recognize the telltale signs of lingering biological states of distress, we can see how much trauma has been a part of the lives of women all along.

Signs and Symptoms of PTSD in Women

Gender is not a determinant of PTSD. The symptoms of PTSD can present in any gender. However, it seems that some PTSD symptoms are especially likely to be present in women who have the disorder.

Startle Response

Are you easily startled by sudden sounds or movements in the environment? Women with PTSD are more likely to present with this trauma symptom than men and may be more visibly frightened or rattled.


Hyperarousal

Do you find yourself in heightened states of awareness, on guard, watching your back, monitoring situations for safety? The state of hyperarousal, or hypervigilance, is often accompanied by anxiety, trouble sleeping, agitation, inability to concentrate, and panic attacks.


Re-Experiencing

Re-experiencing trauma is a core component of the PTSD diagnosis. Re-experiencing means feeling the feelings all over again, often provoked by distressing thoughts and bad memories invading the mind from out of nowhere. Re-experiencing may mean having nightmares, flashbacks, and intense fears or dread that an event is about to happen again or is happening again. Women are especially prone to re-experiencing.


Avoidance

When we start going out of our way to avoid contact with people, places, and topics that might remind us of our trauma because we are afraid of the feelings and flashbacks that could be triggered, we are in an avoidance behavior pattern.
Avoidance is one of the most widespread signs of PTSD in women. Depending on how much time and disruption to our lives is caused by our avoidance behavior, avoidance can represent a significant problem or merely a sign that we have wounds that need healing.


Depression

Depression is a sign of emotional distress that can be linked to some level of traumatization. Depression is typically connected to feelings of anger related to violations of boundaries of physical and psychological safety, and when anger is not released and resolved, depression is likely to result. Depression may be compounded in women because there is a greater social stigma around appearing to be angry and expressing anger.


Anxiety

Post-traumatic stress disorder is essentially an anxiety disorder in the extreme, as it revolves around the fear of having episodes of re-experiencing. Constantly worrying about when where and if we will suddenly be plunged back into psychological distress can create a lot of anxiety which is held in the physical body, mind, and emotions. Many women who are diagnosed with anxiety disorders are anxious because they are dealing with some form of traumatization.

Common Causes of PTSD in Women

PTSD is caused when an overwhelming, shocking event is perceived, and the event creates a nervous system response in the body and brain that becomes permanent instead of resolving back to normal.

To return to normal levels of arousal, the body would need to perceive itself as safe again, and the threat fully resolved. If the resolution back to safety does not happen fully, the hyperarousal energies become trapped in the body.

The residue in such cases is biochemical, in the form of elevated levels of certain neurotransmitters and hormones, specifically those associated with the state of stress.

The presence of these particular chemicals in the body explains why people continue to think fearful, angry, and helpless thoughts and feel stressed as a permanent feeling state, even when no longer enduring the original event.

The human nervous system gets activated whenever it is exposed to an event or situation that represents a threat to the human being’s survival. During childhood, our survival depends on being cared for by adults, so whenever there is a threat to a relationship bond with our caregivers, this is also interpreted by the nervous system as a life threat.

The trouble arises when the hyperaroused state is never concluded, and the body stays permanently shocked, and trapped in fear, anger, and helplessness rather than returning to normal after the event has concluded.

As you might imagine, to return to normal after a shocking event, we need a period of recovery and time away from more shocking events to repair in between. That is why repeated exposure to smaller shocking events over time can be just as damaging as one big event.

Any event that creates a big stress response that never gets fully repaired could be the origin of trauma. Examples of events that are commonly known to create big stress responses include:

  • Sexual Abuse as a Child
  • Sexual Assault at any age
  • Physical Assault, such as being mugged
  • Domestic Violence
  • Witnessing violence to another person or in a collective event
  • Car Accidents
  • Involvement with the Military, especially combat
  • Sudden and/or violent death of a loved one
  • Loss of a parent through death or abandonment during childhood

How to Manage PTSD in Women

PTSD can be healed through comprehensive trauma therapy.  Working over a longer period of time with a trauma modality like EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, or Parts Work represents the best path to healing the nervous system fully.

While recovering from core traumatization, it is important to also manage the symptoms of behavioral patterns of PTSD through many supportive modalities that will help reset thoughts, emotional patterns, and relationship behaviors.

If substance use is present, it is critically important to achieve sobriety first, or all trauma therapy work will be undermined.

Finding PTSD Treatment for Women

When looking for treatment for PTSD, look for a provider who specializes in trauma therapy, and someone who is working with a modality specifically designed for healing trauma at deep, and bio-neurological levels, such as Parts Work, Somatic Experiencing, or EMDR.

If you are using substances, prioritize getting clean and maintaining sobriety above all, seeking addiction treatment where necessary, as any work you attempt to accomplish while still using substances will not last. If possible, attend an addiction facility that offers trauma healing alongside addiction services, such as Villa Kali Ma.

Villa Kali Ma Can Assist Women With PTSD

Here at Villa Kali Ma, we have deep compassion and understanding for the intense suffering represented by a diagnosis of PTSD. We specialize in supporting women, and because women are especially likely to have experienced some form of traumatizing threats to their well-being, trauma healing is a daily part of our treatment work.

We offer EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, and Parts Work as a part of our core offerings for women. We also use other modalities that help women feel safe and strong again, including yoga, Ayurvedic diet, equine therapy, expressive arts therapy, outdoor therapy, spiritual perspectives (if resonant to you), and fun group activities with other recovering women, that help you discover core safety at all levels at last.

Categories
Trauma Therapy

Women and Trauma: Using Trauma Therapy to Heal

What Is Trauma?

Trauma comes from the Greek word for “wound”. Just as we sometimes say that the physical body has sustained trauma, for example, if we have been injured in a car crash, the subtle tissues of our minds and emotions can also be wounded.

Psychological trauma is defined as a lingering experience of intense mental, emotional, and physical distress. Trauma from past events gets triggered when we encounter situations resembling the conditions in which we were first wounded. Trauma is periodically re-experienced as flashbacks of specific frightening situations, and also as ongoing feelings of terrible dread.

The experience of trauma is intense and uncomfortable and feels like fear energies (anxiety, panic, dread, obsession, a need to be in control) anger energies (irritability, rage, depression, aggravation, impatience), and numbing or spacing out energies (floating away, checking out, dissociating).

These three components of the trauma experience, fear, anger, and numbing, correlate to the body’s three main natural biological responses to survival threats – flight, fight, and freeze.

It’s important to understand that trauma happens when the body isn’t able to recover from a shocking, intense experience. It is normal and biologically okay to experience temporary anger, fear, and immobilization during a life-threatening moment. In a healthy body and nervous system, we might be scared, angry, or frozen in feelings of helplessness for a short period of time, but then these states dissolve away.

If terror, dread, rage, and helplessness become permanent or recurring episodic emotional states, this is a sign that we have been traumatized and need help healing from the impacts of events in our lives. Holistic residential treatment can be a valuable resource for individuals seeking support in overcoming and managing the effects of trauma.

Are Women More at Risk of Experiencing More Trauma?

It appears so, yes. Each person is unique and therefore traumatization happens differently to different people depending on how a person’s nervous system processes overwhelming events. A sensitive nervous system in combination with frequent and/or too-intense exposure to threatening situations will often result in some form of traumatization.

The meaning we make of the experiences we have is highly personal and depends on many factors including our unique personality and genetic make-up, which is why children with different temperaments may have different degrees of trauma even when they grow up in essentially the same conditions.

Trauma exists on a scale, and in severe cases, we have the classic archetype of the veteran with PTSD, who was so damaged by exposure to the horrors of warfare that they are psychologically shattered.

However, we do not have to have been exposed to combat to be wounded psychologically. Many conditions that are common to many of us may be traumatizing to us. Common sources of trauma are the death of a parent, neglect or abuse (including verbal), sexual abuse or too-early sexual experiences, alcoholic households, poverty, and living in a country at war.

A key reason that women are more at risk of traumatization than others is because of the higher incidence of sexual trauma, including childhood sexual abuse, assault, and rape. Women also experience considerable pressure to comply with sexual situations which may be classed as more subtle, and are typically groomed by society to ignore their own bodily sense of yes or no. For women who use substances, there can be traumatization due to participation in sex that they wouldn’t have chosen to be part of if not under the influence.

The Connection of Emotional Distress and Trauma in Young Women

There is a link between emotional distress and trauma. Trauma creates a background environment of fear, anger, and numbing, the three biological responses to life-threatening situations.

Most mental health disorders can be looked at through the trauma lens for extra understanding. Anxiety disorders are about the experience of fear. Depression, suicidal thoughts, and self-harm are related to anger (turned inwards), and all addictions are connected to the biological drive towards numbing.

Women are more likely to experience anxiety, depression, emotional instability, low self-esteem, and self-harm. These kinds of suffering match women’s greater vulnerability to traumatization.

What Does a Trauma-Informed Treatment Approach Look Like?

Taking a trauma-informed treatment approach means understanding how symptoms are connected to a root cause of deep unsafety at the biological and nervous system levels.

It is important to understand this factor before, for example, prescribing solutions aimed at lessening the impacts of a symptom. Symptoms are uncomfortable, but they are messages from deeper levels of a person’s being, and these deeper levels should be addressed if you want a long-term cure.

Understanding mental health disorders and especially addiction in light of the likely presence of traumatization is an enormous help. It makes sense why certain behaviors, dysfunctional as they may seem at first when viewed only on the surface, are actually in place.

When we understand why a person has felt it was helpful or necessary for their survival for them to behave in a certain way, or think certain distressing thoughts over and over again, we can begin to unravel the Gordian knot of mental health and addiction trouble. Trauma treatment, rooted in this understanding, becomes a crucial aspect of addressing the underlying issues.

Trauma-informed approaches to therapy are exceedingly gentle, compassionate, and kind. They work with us at the very most basic and tender levels and are focused on creating feelings of safety and basic OK-ness in this world, first and foremost. They work with the principle that when we are at last able to feel sufficiently all right in our own skin again, we will naturally have no need for coping mechanisms that cause us harm in the long run.

Villa Kali Ma Can Assist With Trauma Therapy for Women in California

Villa Kali Ma places high value on addressing trauma alongside addiction and mental health problems. We take a kind and comprehensive approach to getting at those deep levels and layers of being that are most tender and sensitive and which have been most hurt by the slings and arrows of this world.

You don’t need to have grown up in a traumatic environment to have sustained traumatic patterning in your soul. Suppose you are wounded at the psychological level. In that case, it will affect every aspect of your experience, including your capacity for joy, loving and connected relationships, creativity, career, physical health, and spirituality.

That’s why we offer trauma therapies like EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, and Parts Work, to help you repair and restore at the deepest levels of your biology, knowing these core changes in your experience will have transformational effects on the rest of your behaviors and choices.

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Outpatient vs Inpatient

Outpatient vs Inpatient Rehab for Women

What Is an Outpatient Treatment Program?

An outpatient program is a structured, supportive treatment setting that offers help for people who are recovering from substance addiction, mental illness, or both.

Outpatient programs and intensive outpatient programs (IOPs) represent a medium level of care. Because addiction and mental illness vary in severity, treatment is offered with greater and lesser degrees of structure, depending on how much direct care (time with a healing professional) is necessary for an ill individual to get better.

Greater structure, intensity, and frequency of treatment are offered to those needing higher levels of care. Fewer treatment hours per week are administered when people do not need as much direct support at this stage of their journey.

Outpatient programs represent a sort of “in-between” option, where people can receive varying levels of intensity while living in their own homes and working jobs. Within outpatient programs, there are differing levels of intensity, so it is possible to taper down the level of care gradually.

The stages of structured care offered in OPs are often pre-determined, such that a set number of weeks or several sessions are required to be completed before graduating to the next phase. Phases of less structure mean higher self-responsibility, greater ability to navigate risk, and less direct intervention by the therapeutic support team.

Outpatient programs offer different tracks for people requiring different levels of support, and so may have daylong, half-day options, and twice-weekly offerings. OPs are designed to provide some flexibility for work and family life.

Since the goal of all treatment programs is to be able to live one’s life independently, as well as more happily and meaningfully again, treatment is organized around what is truly needed in the current stage of recovery to be able to handle autonomy and experience well-being.

What Is an Inpatient Treatment Program?

Inpatient treatment programs, also called residential treatment programs, are stay-away programs, sort of like a healing retreat, where you leave your home environment and check in at a facility to receive intensive treatment onsite for some time.

Inpatient treatment programs are often preceded by medically supervised detoxification programs in California. Medical detoxification facilities are similar to hospitals, with doctors and nurses on staff to monitor your safety during withdrawal.

After completing your detoxification process, you would enter inpatient treatment at a rehabilitation facility, where you would stay for a predetermined length of time (usually somewhere between 1 and 3 months, depending on the program and your needs).

It is very common to follow your inpatient treatment with some length of time receiving follow-up outpatient treatment.

The typical recommended path would be to start with medically supervised detoxification, then complete inpatient (rehab), then attend outpatient while living and working in the community, then progress to relying primarily upon community resources (such as 12 steps).

What Is the Difference Between Inpatient and Outpatient Rehab?

The main difference between inpatient and outpatient rehab is whether you stay overnight at the facility (inpatient) or whether you stay in your own home, receiving treatment services only during the day (outpatient).

Inpatient is typically offered in rehabilitation facilities that are designed for around-the-clock care, involving daily treatment programming, activities, and a heavy component of community and co-living. These are sometimes offered in comfortable, retreat-like settings, (as is the case for Villa Kali Ma), and will provide an extra element of protection from one’s normal life challenges while you focus on stabilizing your recovery.

Outpatient provides as much structure and frequency of services as possible during treatment hours but does not also include the aspect of checking in and staying at the facility for the duration of your treatment. Outpatient usually has less intensity of activities and communal experience built in, though some group activities and meetings will be offered.

Outpatient treatment services are frequently provided for people who have completed inpatient treatment and are gradually stepping down the degree of structure and intensity of treatment.

Whether outpatient or inpatient is better for you should be determined together with an addiction services provider, who can assess your level of need and make recommendations.

What Are Some Therapy Options for Outpatient and Inpatient Treatment Programs?

Both inpatient and outpatient treatment programs provide a comprehensive core structure of addiction treatment. The core treatment programming of either will cover certain required aspects, which include education about addiction, individual therapy, family therapy, therapy groups, activities, and involvement in 12-step or another community-based recovery model.

For example, at Villa Kali Ma you can receive many of the same core services and therapy modalities whether in outpatient or inpatient, though there is a difference in frequency and intensiveness. We provide individual counseling, groups, and our many holistic modalities in both contexts.

What Are the Benefits of Inpatient Treatment?

If possible, it is best to attend inpatient treatment, as it is the most effective way to reset to a sober life pattern.

Inpatient settings such as Villa Kali Ma’s residential treatment program at the Villa are designed to provide a holistic, round-the-clock treatment that works best when approached like an intensive or a retreat (like a yoga retreat or a teacher training, for example).

Being in a harmonious, safe setting that is designed to support your initiation into your new life is enormously beneficial for getting everything settled in place. It is very helpful to be away from the possibility of using or drinking and to be away from life stressors and even loved ones for a short time in which we are fully free to prioritize our safety and sanity first.

The community aspect is also an important part of treatment, as living with other women in a retreat-like setting, and forming bonds of trust with others who have similar stories to us, is a big part of getting better. Addiction is an isolating disease, and intensive togetherness – even if it’s an intimidating thought at first! – is a big part of the cure.

Inpatient is a short-term, non-permanent way to kick off your recovery and new life and make sure it has a strong foundation before you go test it out in the real world.

What Are the Benefits of Outpatient Treatment?

Outpatient treatment is the next best thing to inpatient treatment. It is often offered as a down-stepped level of care just after completing inpatient treatment and it is designed to support you while you return to your normal life, while still providing training wheels.

In cases where it is not possible to leave home long enough fhttps://villakalima.comor an inpatient stay, outpatient can be the next most viable option.

Villa Kali Ma Offers Inpatient and Outpatient Programs for Women

At the beginning of our recovery, we need treatment every single day. We need to have contact with healing professionals and to express our feelings, fears, and struggles to others who truly get it and have the ability to understand what it takes to put sobriety first (friends and family, even when well-meaning, typically do not understand what goes into making such a big life change).

Whether you’re looking for inpatient treatment in a retreat-like getaway, where you will eat healthy, get some sunshine, and have the chance to participate in activities and form bonds of connection with other recovering women, or whether you would like to participate only during our day treatment options at our office, Villa Kali Ma has programs for women to meet your needs in a creative, supportive, unique and healthy way.

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Whole Person Approach

The Whole Person Approach to Women’s Recovery

What Is a Whole Person Care Approach?

Women are more than their addictions. Any woman is secretly more resourceful and resilient, much larger in spirit than she may initially appear to be.

When treating someone with mental health problems, addictions, or trauma, it’s important to keep in mind the larger part of them that’s still well. Deep inside the most troubled, hurt person, there is a mysterious part that’s completely fine.

There is a wholeness inside each of us, a memory of who we are in our completeness, and, at the same time a prediction of who we can become. This part knows the way out of misery, back into health and wellness.

At Villa Kali Ma, we say we treat the whole woman, not only the disease. We have regard for the true self that waits only for her chance at full flowering. The whole person care approach takes into account that we are multidimensional, multifaceted beings with vast stores of hidden treasures inside us at all times.

What Are Some Important Factors in Treating the Whole Person in Recovery?

Treating a whole woman means shoring up strengths and fortifying what each woman has going for her. Even in the worst of times, a woman may still have her intelligence, her feelings, her courage, her humor, her creative inklings.

Many times, there may be some positive resources inside her home environment, her work, and her family relationships. These are all assets that can help her face what must be faced to get better.

We consider the context of a person, including different life roles, where she’s from, what she eats, what her body has to say, and what her moral values are.

Taking the larger view of a person’s wholeness, we can see patterns of connection, where problems truly originate.  The threads of disease entangle in multiple areas of our lives – our sexuality, our love relationships, our parenting, our culture.

A woman’s inner wholeness is an incredible resource, touching on what makes her unique as well as what she shares with all others.

What Are Co-occurring Disorders in Addiction?

In the field of mental health, the term co-occurring disorders is used to describe the case when we are suffering from more than one kind of trouble.

Mental health struggles often go hand in hand with addiction. When living in your skin is already a challenge, the sticky webbing of addiction can take root quite easily, promising relief.

Conversely, the habit of addiction leaves a residue of mental health troubles in its wake. States of anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem are the legacy of any substance.

What Are the Elements of Treating the Whole Person in Recovery?

Treating the whole person in recovery means activating different facets of a person’s larger self as a recovery resource. It also means looking to different parts of a person’s life, such as living environment, work life, marriages, and family relationships, for hidden strengths and clues to how to get better.

Better Thoughts

Cognitive behavioral therapy is a modality we use at Villa Kali Ma to address the thoughts we think and the worldviews we hold. Looking into the vast resources of mind and thought, we find a powerful portal into change. Negative, distorted thoughts create misery, but truthful, loving thoughts create health.


Healing the Nervous System

EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, and Parts Work are modalities that address the deep biological imprints left by trauma. We use these at Villa Kali Ma to help women free themselves from the impacts of past events.


Learning to Relate

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy helps women learn to have softer, more manageable experiences of their emotions. It helps us regulate and express our wants and needs in relationships. Through DBT, Villa Kali Ma helps women experience freedom from drama while staying richly engaged with feelings.


Community Is the Cure

12-step programs and other recovery community involvement help women experience being valuable and connected, worthy of receiving the support they need. Over time, these communities help women realize that they are worthy and wise enough to help others recover, as well, which provides life with greater meaning.

How Does Treating the Whole Person Work in Terms of Treatment?

At the beginning of whole-person treatment, it’s important to prioritize the physical body. Detoxifying from addictive substances is best done in the context of basic safety and supervision by professionals. Villa Kali Ma provides a secure and comfortable environment for a woman to first find and stabilize her sober state.

Once basic sobriety has been established, it’s important to begin with healing the mind, emotions, and physical body of toxic beliefs, painful emotions, and destructive habits. This stage may involve the removal of some aspects (toxic relationship patterns, old negative beliefs, etc), as well as the installation of new ideas and ways of thinking about life (better thoughts about oneself, forgiveness, and moving on, for example).

Before leaving a residential treatment facility, it’s important also to address all aspects of practical life that surround a woman’s experience, things like work life, family of origin relationships, marriages, and parenting topics. Home environment, exposures, and triggers all need to be looked at very pragmatically to come up with a useful plan for living.

Villa Kali Ma Can Assist Women With the Whole Person Approach to Recovery

Villa Kali Ma is a healing center that takes a multimodal, open-minded approach to healing each woman as an individual. We treat the woman herself and all that is within and around her.

Recovery is ultimately about joy. There is a life after addiction, mental illness, and trauma. That life is a good one – rich, creative, connected, and meaningful.

Each woman’s life is unique, and won’t be the same as anyone else’s. Even though we have many things in common, we are each divine and irreplaceable in this world. Finding the special story that is ours only to love and to keep close to our hearts is the gift of all the work we do in treatment.

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National Adhd Awareness Month

National ADHD Awareness Month

Here at Villa Kali Ma, we feel passionately that every woman has a right to peace of mind, body, and soul. To be distracted, disturbed, and restless is a form of misery that haunts too many of us!

Not only is it painful to live in a state of disarray and disorder, but our inattention to our inside depths robs us of the chance to glimpse the perfect beauty inside us. Only in the stillness of peace are we able to catch sight of the crystalline design that lies dormant inside our hearts!

We are unique and unrepeatable, so if we never get to activate what lies within us, it is a missed opportunity of the greatest proportions. The good news is, that we always have the chance to try again to set aside all that would lead us away from ourselves. Let’s do our best to return to the simple joy of being that awaits us like a treasure at the end of a long hunt!

Inattention, Hyperactivity, and Impulsivity

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, ADHD, is a form of suffering that afflicts more and more people, according to the meteoric rise in diagnoses and prescriptions for ADHD-related medications. October is designated ADHD Awareness Month, a yearly occasion to reflect on the meaning of this particular form of soul trouble.

In the United States, ADHD is one of the most commonly diagnosed mental health disorders, especially among children. The symptoms are summed up in the archetype of the hyper, distracted, un-subduable child, or the contemporary adult who struggles to focus, follow through on tasks, and sit still for long periods.

ADHD is diagnosed when a specific profile of behavior is observed in a person, which includes three key factors: inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity.

Inattention is the diagnostic label for when a person finds it hard to focus and follow instructions. Hyperactivity is the label for a condition of needing to move constantly in situations where it is inappropriate. Impulsivity is the label given to a person who has trouble suppressing instincts and urges to act. Inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity all in the same person is the diagnostic profile of ADHD.

Why is National ADHD Awareness Month Important?

Many of us can relate to the description above, of struggling to focus and sit still. That’s because as a collective, we are witnessing a serious loss of the ability to experience basic self-discipline and the benefits of concentration and focus.

This national loss of the ability to concentrate and pay attention is due to many factors and may include everything from the impacts of social media, changes to the education system, and what we’re eating. Toxic exposures from agricultural and manufacturing practices and other factors contributing to poor physical health and neurology have been theorized to play a significant role.

It’s important to understand that even if you relate strongly to the symptoms of ADHD, you may not have a clinical case. To be diagnosed clinically with ADHD, it is required that the symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity represent a significant disruption to one’s ability to perform basic tasks required for life.

It is widespread to find it somewhat challenging to focus and complete tasks, and there are many reasons besides ADHD which can explain why you may have problems with poor focus and impulsivity.

The reason it’s important to be mindful of whether or not you qualify for an ADHD diagnosis is that sometimes people take a diagnosis to mean that they are in a permanent or incurable state, or identify with their diagnosis in a way that doesn’t serve them (at least, that’s happened to some of us at Villa Kali Ma!).  If we start to think of our diagnosis as a part of who we are, or even just a fixed state, we may form attachments to being sick that limit ourselves unnecessarily.

The Push to Medicate ADHD Symptoms

ADHD diagnoses are usually paired with a prescription for a stimulant like Ritalin. Stimulants represent the risk of addiction and change brain chemistry, so introducing them to your own or your child’s nervous system is something to be carefully considered.

More and more voices within the medical and psychiatric community have raised questions about the narrative surrounding the supposed efficacy of stimulant medications, and these voices say that short-term benefits are followed by long-term detrimental outcomes. A good reference if this is news for you may be this overview from Mad in America:

Discomfort due to struggles with attention is widespread, we are not alone in this trouble. It is in our interest to consider the many holistic paths to recovery of our ability to have attention, focus, peace, and stillness, before necessarily assuming that we have a disease that can only be treated, not cured.

That said, each woman should find out for herself and walk her path! No judgment or doom is casting if you do feel you have clinical ADHD, nor if you do decide that medication is the path for you. You are allowed to try anything and find out for yourself, so please follow your own heart. Everyone deserves help and needs to discern for themselves, what’s best and right for them.

Here at Villa Kali Ma, we would define our support for National ADHD Awareness Month as helping to spread and uphold compassionate awareness of the suffering and challenges related to the widespread phenomenon clinicians call ADHD, including the many possible interpretations of why ADHD continues to sweep through the nation at such alarming rates.

It’s important to look out for and support people who are bearing the impacts of ADHD topics, such as children, parents, and teachers. Millions of people in the US are affected by the negative effects of ADHD, and loving, informed awareness of their suffering is important. Let’s not leave people alone with this burden.

How to Observe National Awareness Month

How might you personally help with the topic of ADHD?

If you’re motivated to help shine a light on the complexities of this topic, then your loving intentions to help share awareness will guide you.

Here are our ideas:

1. Watch the numbers and the narrative

Be aware of the rising numbers of diagnoses and prescriptions and ponder in your heart what that means to you. Why is ADHD on the rise? Are we getting better as a nation? If not, why not? What do you think a solution could be? How is the situation being framed and how is the narrative being told to us? What is the story about ADHD? What do you personally make of it all?

2. Start Dialogues

At Villa Kali Ma, we are big believers in considering different angles and exploring personal points of view. We live in a world of multiple truths coexisting, and each person’s puzzle piece helps make the biggest picture more clear.

By engaging curiously and compassionately with the topic, you can help spark awareness and spread compassionate awareness among people in a situation to make changes that can help humanity.

It’s especially helpful to talk with people who represent an opposite point of view from your own. If you think ADHD is being overdiagnosed, talk with someone who believes it is underdiagnosed. If you think stimulant medications are bad for children, talk to someone who has a personal positive story of recovery and benefit long term. On the other side, if you’re sure that the medical path is the only way forward, engage with people who have healed their ADHD with yoga. And so on!


3. Share your Story

If you have personal experiences with symptoms or even a clinical diagnosis of ADHD, and/or experiences with stimulant medication, share your story! For other people who suffer from the same struggles, but are isolated, hearing even one person’s true, first-person narrative can be all the difference needed to feel less suffering around it.

For humanity to recover and face the many burdens we’re up against, we need to be less isolated and less ashamed of whatever it is we’re honestly grappling with. We can be the first people to reduce shame and isolation around us just by being open about the unique details of our own experiences.


4. Educate Yourself

In the interest of forming your own opinion based on what has truth resonances for you, we suggest perusing both the information put forth by entities like ADHD Awareness Month, as well as by people who explore alternative ways of understanding and healing the impactful presence of ADHD symptoms in our world, such as Robert Whitaker and those exploring the benefits of functional medicine approaches to psychiatry, such James Greenblatt. More information will never hurt the truth.


5. Practice Your Peace of Mind Skills

Finally, let’s not forget that ancient wisdom teachings from cultures around the globe have offered a solution to the problem of scattered monkey minds and impulsive behaviors for thousands of years already – meditating!

Meditating is a little bit hard, I know, it’s true (if you resonate, you may want to read my post on meditation tips for people who don’t like meditating).

But meditation is hard in that way that it’s hard to run when you’re out of shape – the solution is just to do it. May we all be blessed with the humility to start where we are! If we can only meditate for five minutes, let us do that. If we can find peace through listening to classical music or after going for a run, let’s do that! Whatever works!

If we actively work on our peace skills from wherever we’re at, we are actively contributing to healing the imbalance of unruly, uncontained attention that is hurting so many of us and our loved ones. Sometimes the best thing we can do is hold a peaceful space for others who can’t do that right now.

Thanks for reading!

References:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8760933/

Categories
8 limbs of yoga

What Is the Purpose of the 8 Limbs of Yoga

What Does Yoga Mean?

The word yoga represents the concept of union. From the ancient, beautiful mother-language Sankskrit, the word is related linguistically to our contemporary word “yoke”, which means to unite together, as when we yoke a cart to a horse.

Yoga is for uniting the ordinary level of consciousness with superconscious domains, and ultimately with the Cosmic Source Self, who dwells in all. The practices of yoga are offered to humanity as a viable way to unite with our own most precious sovereign divine nature.

Our own divinity is available to all as an incredible resource of love, creativity, intelligence, and connection, if we choose to develop a relationship with it. Through yoga, we may find our way back to our mysterious true source, and reunify with our own best and highest nature.

Reuniting with the best of what’s dormant inside human potential requires disentangling from that which is negative for us. The force of habit which binds and chains us to patterns and shady expressions of our nature which we do not wish to continue, is dissolved through practices of yoga.

Whether you think of yoga as liberating you from bonds and chains, or whether you think of it as joining you in a chosen union with your higher better nature, either way, yoga is a rigorous, loving practice that has humanity’s best interest at heart. It is accessible to all of us to be used for healing purposes and positive intentions.

What Is the 8 Fold Path Leading to Liberation?

Yoga is extensively codified and systematized, an all-encompassing path for healing body, emotions, mind, and spirit. It represents a holistic and reliable method for curing all manner of human ills.

According to the Yoga Sutras, (books of knowledge recording the best ways to practice), yoga can be conceptualized as having 8 limbs, corresponding to the 8 fold path of liberation.

If you practice yoga, you may already be aware of the word ashtanga, as there is a kind of yoga called ashtanga yoga. What Ashtanga means literally is “eight limbs”. These eight limbs are:

  1. Yama – moral disciplines and restrictions, rules and vows
  2. Niyama – positive duties and observances
  3. Asana – posture
  4. Pranayama – breathing practices and techniques
  5. Pratyahara – withdrawal from the world of the outer senses
  6. Dharana – concentration, focus
Yama - Moral Discipline, Restrictions, and Vows

When embarking on the path of yoga, we make vows of intention that we will abstain from destructive behaviors. We abstain from that which creates harm in a kind of do-unto-others spirit, as a way of not hurting others but also because we understand that when we hurt others we create karma.

The root a- in Sanskrit means non (as it often does in English). So some of the words indicate a sense of non-doing, or refraining from.

Ahimsa means non-violence, or harmlessness, in essence, to refrain from hurting others. Satya means to maintain honesty and truthfulness. Asteya translates to non-stealing or respect of other’s possessions and sovereignty. Brahmacharya refers to the right use of our personal energy, and aparigraha means generosity, or non-greed.

Yoga practiced without ethics and integrity will bring little benefit. Therefore it is encouraged to make personalized vows and commitments that we follow the golden rule in our lives, treating others with the kindness and regard with which we ourselves want to be treated.


Niyama - Positive Duties and Observances

Niyama, the second limb of the liberation and union path, refers to positive actions and practices we take:

Saucha (cleanliness), santosha (maintaining a satisfied, happy state of mind, also called contentment), tapas (discipline, or transmuting of our desires through non-indulgence in negative habits and impulses), svadhyaya (self-reflection and study of spiritual ideas and written texts), and isvararpanidaha (surrender to a positive higher power we recognize to be better than our own ego mind and its willful desires).

Niyamas build our character, turning us into the people we really mean to be in our hearts and highest wishes.

Asanas - Meditation Posture

The physical postures of yoga are called asanas, (as in bal-asana, or child’s pose). In the 8 fold path of yoga, the third limb, called Asana, refers to one important pose, the pose you take for the practice of meditation, which is a seated pose.

There are different kinds of poses for meditating, such as lotus pose or hero’s pose, but the most important feature of this pose is that it is a posture the meditator can comfortably sustain. Therefore it’s not better or worse to sit in lotus pose or hero pose, rather the importance is what works for each meditator.

A good seated pose will feel that you are able to stay seated like that without constantly being mentally pulled into sensations of pain or restlessness induced by the discomfort of the position. The position should be supportive, not a hindrance.


Pranayama - Breathing Practices

Prana refers to vital life force energy or our source of aliveness. It means the subtle essence that flows through all living forms.

Prana is so intimately connected with breath, that these are often interchanged to mean the same thing. As we know, all of the human form is affected by the flow of breath and requires unobstructed, free-moving healthy breath to thrive.

Pranayama breathing practices artfully affect the breath in a way that optimally flows throughout the human form. Thus we restore maximum vitality, or life force, throughout all portions and systems of the body.

Flow of breath intimately affects thoughts, emotions, and moods. Everything about human consciousness relies on the flow of vital life force energy, and working with the breath is a powerful way to ensure this vital life force stays fresh in us.


Pratyahara - Withdrawal From Outer Senses

Pratyahara means to withdraw or pull away from the outer sense experiences. In other words, to go within.

Rather than switching off the senses, it is more a question of tuning into the inner world and subtler inner sensations. This is why we seek out a quiet, non-stimulating environment for our meditation so that it is easier to give less our attention to what may arise in our hearing, sight, and other senses.

It is not that outer world senses are bad or wrong, just that what we seek to strengthen is our inner life, our interiority. Although oneness infuses all forms, we do not find unity by pursuing something outside of us, but rather by going into ourselves and discovering the in-dwelling source nature we already all, have and merging with that.

Once we feel our unity with the source we are, it is also easier to recognize it in everyone else, too.

So we practice pulling inward so that we are looking in the right place for our own personal path to source.

Dharana - Concentration

Yoga offers multiple ways to practice our ability to sustain our focus on one thing without wandering off in our minds. As we develop this ability we may use visualizations, focusing on the breath, or other kinds of mindfulness practices to practice the pure ability to stay concentrated without dissipating our attention.


Dhyana - Absorption Into Meditation

Dhyana is the state that can come upon us when we have been practicing our ability to go within and stay there with our attention. Dhyana is a gently pleasurable state, similar to creative absorption, a flow state similar to being “in the zone”.

Dhyana is not so much a practice that we directly “do” as much as a state we train to be able to go into. Dhyana requires some experience settling in, getting past boredom and agitation, refraining from following thoughts or focusing on outer stimuli, and learning to get absorbed into the healing, peaceful, and spacious mind in the background of our own experience.

Samadhi - Bliss

Samadhi means bliss, or enlightenment. This is the fruit we plant by practicing the other seven limbs of yoga.

Samadhi is a kind of quiet joy that arises not from escaping the difficulties of human experience, but rather from waking up from inside them and finding one is able to be in a quite natural and organic bliss state in spite of it all.

Villa Kali Ma Offers Yoga to Assist You in Connecting With Your Inner Self

Here at Villa Kali Ma, we believe steadfastly in the relevance and power of yoga to heal Western women’s ills. Especially when used in combination with cutting edge treatments that can deal with the psychological trauma, toxicity from chemical exposures, severe nutritional deficits, mental illness, and other factors that affect us today.

At Villa Kali Ma, we seek to unite the best of the West with a strong foundation in the insights of yoga and other ancient traditions of healing.

Our founder Kay experienced her relief from the nightmares of addiction in large part through the path of yoga and holds this method of waking up from the mind spells of addiction dear to her heart.

Categories
Four paths of yoga

The Four Paths of Yoga

Even though we frequently fall for the illusion that happiness comes from outside of us, the truth is, that happiness is generated by our own perception.

How we choose to think about experiences we are having vastly impacts how we feel about those same events. At subtler levels, tiny perceptual impressions, interpretations, decisions, and conclusions we reached in formative moments of our lives give rise to qualities of experience now.

Just because we are self-creating most of our suffering doesn’t mean we don’t deserve superabundant love, compassion, and patient help to change the ancient, deep habits that perpetuate our pain.

According to the yogic way of looking at the world, the most basic cause of suffering is our disconnection from the rest of life and from our own deep source.

The word yogis gave to this experience is avidyā, which means “forgetting”. We forget that we belong to all of life, that we are life’s kin. Even more relevant than that mental forgetting, perhaps, is the fact that we don’t feel loved, connected, valued, or at one with our own Source.

Instead, we experience ourselves as cut off, separate, and individualized. The confused ego mind, and all its many misguided defenses, that we originally said yes to as a way to shield ourselves from further pain and trauma when we’re young, keeps us locked away from our own essence. From that state of being parted mentally from our essence, we engage in all kinds of behaviors and thoughts that set us on the wrong track (if our goal is happiness).

Yogic philosophy can help us diagnose what’s going on in our minds that is giving rise to suffering. Yoga identifies three important mental misunderstandings, or bad habits, which mislead most of us on the daily.

What Are the 3 Impurities of the Mind?

According to the ancient scriptures of yoga, the Vedanta, three main mental problems create the condition of deep forgetting of the reality that we are all one with oneness. These are selfishness, outward focus, and not recognizing the source of life in form.

Mala, or selfishness, refers to pursuing benefits to ourselves as an individual; as our primary goal in life. Selfishness is a hard word for us in the West, because sometimes it is used to coax us out of our boundaries, and that’s not the true meaning here. (And many women need to be more selfish, in the sense of having more regard and care for their own lives and selves).

Yoga doesn’t say we have to give up our own beloved selves, nor are we to punish or neglect ourselves (after all, we’re part of life too) – the idea of turning on the self and sacrificing it overly is more of a Western legacy. All of that said, there is a deep truth in the fact that when we think only of ourselves, that strengthens the ego, and fortifies the walls of separation.

Vikshepa refers to our tendency to get caught up in externals, thinking about outer events and allowing the mind to be incessantly distracted by sensory stimuli.

Avavana describes how we don’t recognize our own true self, or source, in the world around us nor within us. We have a tendency to think that there are parts of creation which are not-God, (and not-Me), but at deeper levels that just isn’t true at all.

We exist in and as a sea of unity, like an ocean of consciousness that changes shapes but is always one with itself. Even though it appears quite convincingly on the surface that we are separate individual streams of consciousness, that is only relatively true, not absolutely so.

The purpose of practicing yoga is to purify us of these three bad habits. For our Western audience, again a reminder that this isn’t actually a moral issue, nor is this about being a good doggie or a bad doggie.  It doesn’t make us better people if we practice yoga or if we remember that all life is one with all of life. It only means that we are more likely to be happy.

Yoga offers four main paths to return to our unity with God, or the oneness we all are.

The 4 Paths of Yoga

Bhakti Yoga - The Path of Devotion

Bhakti yoga is a path of love. Bhakti is a heart-based way to God and involves full and total surrender and dedication to lovingly revere the divine in everybody and everything. The bhakti yoga way purifies us through the power of love, as we give our love to the divine essence inside of anybody and anything we come across. Through emphasizing that God is in all, and the guidance that we generously love all as God, the illusions of boundaries between us and God (and other people, plants, animals, as well as the physical world) naturally fall away as we love omni-directionally.


Karma Yoga - The Path of Service

The path of karma yoga emphasizes service to others, and the performance of loving, positive actions without attachment to outcome. That means we help people whether they are grateful for our help, whether they see what we are doing for them, or not.
When performing pure service without any expectation of personal gain over time, we eventually experience oneness. The pesky over-distinction between self and other dissolves. The illusions of separation between the well-being of ourselves and the well-being of another disappear, and we experience oneness.


JñāNa Yoga - The Path of Mind and Will

The path of jñāna yoga takes the route of logic. Jñāna engages our powers of reasoning to help the mind discover its own source as residing inside. Through careful, non-emotional examination of the thoughts that arise in our minds, their illusory nature is revealed and we see past them into the core of what’s true in us.


RāJa Yoga - The Path of Meditation

The path of rāja yoga targets our powers of attention, training them away from the restlessness and discontentment of outward focus and back in towards our own essence (where our own lovely divinity awaits our recognition).
Rāja yoga inspired most yoga classes available in the West and works well as a structured path that trains attention and focus to be still enough that we see the truth inside.

Villa Kali Ma Offers Yoga to Help With Mental Health

Villa Kali Ma embraces the liberating, healing powers of these four intertwining yoga paths to help women in the West wake up from their mental emotional pain, including the pain of addiction.

Our personal experiences with yoga, and our gratitude for the wisdom offered by these ancient traditions, infuse all offerings we create and steward for an ever-growing community of recovering women. Come see for yourself!

Categories
Sober Summer Tips

Sober Summer Tips

As we wind down the summer and look forward into the holidays, we can see we’re heading into a season of gatherings.

Office parties, family fêtes, holiday get togethers, old friends and group dynamics can all be rough to tolerate when we’re first stabilizing our lives. How can we keep our commitments to sobriety in the face of so many social events and festivities?

Tips on How to Protect Your Sobriety Among Friends and Family This Season

1. Set Your Intentions

It is enormously powerful to set intent. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Fortify your will by reminding yourself what you choose to create with your one precious life.

Journal on the following questions:

What are my intentions with respect to sobriety this season?

If these are my intentions, which behaviors match those intentions?

If someone else had these same intentions, how would they behave?

What do I need to do and refrain from doing, in order to experience the flowering of these intentions?

What behaviors and actions follow logically from these intentions?


2. Make a Plan of Action

Planning is a vital tool for those of us who have struggled in the past to hold steady to our real intentions and values. Planning protects us from unexpected free time, which in the beginning of sobriety is an opening for past destructive habits to pop in out of nowhere.

Planning follows from getting serious about your intentions. If you really intend something, the next natural step is to begin planning, coordinating and putting things in motion, talking to relevant people and thinking about resources.

With as much self-love as you can, create a detailed plan for yourself, that represents an ideal path for staying sober and matches your true highest intentions. Look out for areas of contradiction between what your best and highest good wants and what shadowy sides of you may want.

Design the plan that reasonably leads to the results you intend.


3. When in Doubt, Leave It Out

When your genuine intention is to stay sober, you might not attend certain events. In early sobriety we need to actively avoid some people and places if it’s not strictly necessary to be there, even if it’s socially uncomfortable to turn down an invitation.

If you get a quaky feeling about a situation, or if your inner addict seems a little too excited about this particular event or person, skip it this time. We have to be lovingly honest with ourselves about our true motivations and whether what is drawing us to something is a healthy urge or not.

When you’re not sure how to handle specific scenarios and what feel like obligations you can’t refuse, get help from who have walked this path ahead of you for how you could attend but still hold true to your real, best highest intentions.


4. Bring Your Plan to Life by Making a Schedule

Turn your plan into a schedule, by putting activities and positive actions you will take on the calendar.

Choosing specific times and dates for your positive activities often makes the inner addict squirrelly. That tells you something about how the inner addict may have been hoping to use some moment of undefined purpose to take you by surprise and ambush you.

To avoid giving the addict any room to work with, shoot for a realistic and sustainable schedule that balances positive activities and the necessities of work life with safely scheduled rest and down time. Of course life will be life, but when plan for what we want to experience, we are so much more likely to experience that.

It is recommended that you map out a 1-3 month projected schedule. See where you can already decide in advance to commit to a consistent rhythm of 12 step meetings, treatment aftercare programming, therapy, coffee dates with sober friends and mentors, exercise, time with pets and nature, sober social events, and nourishing creative activities or hobbies.

Make your calendar visible, even decorated. You can involve your inner child in this project – unicorn stickers and drawings of hearts and flowers go a long way. Making it a creative project is fun and also helps your powerful visual mind can grab a hold of your change intentions and start turning them into reality.


5. Make a Special Plan For Specific Events

As your calendar helps you see upcoming social and family gatherings ahead of time, pair each potentially challenging scenario with a thick, juicy set of tools and preparations you can and will use. Put your tools and events plan in writing as well, and share it with a positive person for extra accountability.

Plan to sandwich any contact with non-sobriety related settings and people (such as weddings, or other places where alcohol will definitely be in circulation) with sobriety-associated settings and people.

For example, if you are attending a wedding in a city you’ve never been to, you can already look up and commit to a 12 step meeting to attend that morning in that location. Schedule an evening call with a sponsor or therapist for the day of the event, so that you will have a pre-arranged reason to step away from the event. A private call with a sober person is a lifesaver, as it takes you out of the wedding context for a brief reorientation to your true intentions.


6. Carry a List of On-The-Spot Tools That Work

Have a list of on-the-spot tools you can use with you at all times. Things like “do square breathing for five minutes” (four counts of in-breath, four counts of holding the in-breath in, four counts of out-breath, four counts before starting the next in-breath), yoga poses that work to calm you down in an instant (such as forward bends that stretch out adrenals and release stress), hacks like “walk briskly around the block for at least ten minutes” and “re-read this list of top ten reasons why you personally want to be sober”, can be true miracles in the moment

Villa Kali Ma Helps Women Stay Sober Year Round

If you’re struggling to be and stay sober, Villa Kali Ma welcomes you here, we’ll use our cutting edge holistic treatment program to help you figure it out for good. We all need help to get and stay sober, every day of the year.  

Categories
Alcohol Use and Anxiety

Is My Alcohol Use Contributing to My Anxiety?

Does Alcohol Cause Anxiety?

Yes.

Although women often turn to alcohol to help them ease pre-existing anxiety, alcohol worsens our anxiety over time. Alcohol has dampening effects on the nervous system that make it seem as though it helps in the moment to aid with anxiety, but actually makes anxiety more serious of a problem once the intoxication wears off.

Anxiety is a symptom of alcohol withdrawal, as well, so using alcohol directly increases anxiety through the withdrawal mechanism. Also, alcohol doesn’t erase or heal underlying anxiety or its triggers.

Understanding the Impact of Alcohol Use and Abuse

Alcohol use has a tendency to lead towards greater use and abuse of the substance. That’s because alcohol is highly habit forming, and because it creates impacts in the brain and body that then further impel a person towards drinking just to counteract these unpleasant sensations.

Whatever a woman’s original reasons for relying on alcohol, these reasons get worse over time through the use of alcohol itself. Anecdotally, using alcohol to treat one’s anxiety or manage symptoms of anxiety is like using gasoline to put out a fire.

More About the Impact of Alcohol

Alcohol affects the brain and body through many pathways, leading to atrophy of the body due to alcohol’s toxicity, as well as to the condition of chemical addiction. Some brain imaging studies suggest permanent changes in the brain to have occurred through chronic alcohol abuse.

In addition to significant detrimental health effects of alcohol, for example to the blood, brain and liver, alcohol changes a woman’s personality and brings out sides of her nature which are more selfish, inconsiderate and emotionally toxic, as the spirit of addiction takes over and replaces her real self.

What Is the Relationship Between Alcohol and Panic Attacks?

Some people may turn to alcohol to cope with panic attacks, because of alcohol’s sedative effects. However, alcohol worsens panic in the mid to long term, because of the ways that alcohol damages the brain and nervous system.

In general, alcohol interferes with the ability to heal the underlying causes of panic attacks. As people progress in the stages of addiction, they are more likely to experience panic attacks. Panic attacks are a common experience during alcohol withdrawal as well, and are extremely uncomfortable to experience.

If you suffer from panic attacks, alcohol is not the friend it can seem to be in the moment. A significant number of people who come for help reporting that they are having panic attacks turn out to be having them because of their excessive use of alcohol.

Alcohol lowers resilience, detrimentally changing the way that we are able to respond to life events, stressors and overwhelming experiences, essentially making us more fragile and brittle.

Can Alcohol Increase the Symptoms of Anxiety for Those Who Suffer From Anxiety Disorders?

Yes.

Alcohol worsens the symptoms experienced by those qualifying for a diagnosis of anxiety disorder. This is true across the board, with all kinds of anxiety disorders. There is no kind of anxiety which is not negatively interfered with by alcohol use. This is because anxiety is intimately related to the pathways in the brain and body which are also affected by alcohol use and addiction.

The parts of the body that generate the experience of anxiety, as well as anxiety’s resolution (peace, or relaxation after over-activation), are impaired and damaged, sometimes permanently, by alcohol.

Alcohol also depletes the body’s natural store of beneficial hormones and neurotransmitters. We need these molecules to serve as chemical messengers in the body, to signal our muscles and other body systems to create sensations of peace and ease.

When alcohol is used chronically or in excess, the whole body system gets out of whack and we lose our ability to regulate and recover good moods and feelings on our own, even when we are engaging in positive and life affirming activities like exercise and connective relationships.

Although these positive behaviors normally would cause the body to reward us with a cascade of sensations of peace and pleasure, alcohol robs us of this option.

Why Might People Experience Anxiety After Drinking?

Anxiety is a symptom of alcohol withdrawal. The body will send a person into a state of acute anxiety when the substance is exiting the body and is no longer available for its sedative purpose. Due to the phenomenon of tolerance, the amount of alcohol required for staying out of withdrawal becomes higher and higher, so the anxiety associated with withdrawal becomes a more and more common experience.

How Do Alcohol and Anxiety Disorders Co-occur?

Many people get roped into alcoholism because of pre-existing anxiety conditions which feels unbearable to manage. Anxiety is almost always associated with traumatic experiences of greater or lesser impact which are held onto by the body and which could be treated with trauma work if not for the interfering presence of alcoholism.

For women this is especially so, as women are at greater risk of developing pathological anxiety as well as for that anxiety to be a result of a greater or lesser case of post-traumatic stress. In the absence of effective coping tools for shifting out of severe anxiety that is the residue of trauma in the nervous system, women with clinical levels of anxiety very often will develop alcoholism or another substance addiction, such as to benzodiazepines like Klonopin or Valium, because of their sedative effects.

Villa Kali Ma Helps Women Struggling With Anxiety and Alcoholism

Villa Kali Ma has the mission to help women recover lives of meaning, joy and freedom, to restore fully and never again have to go back to the nightmarish experiences of addiction, trauma, and mental health disorders.

If you are concerned about anxiety and alcohol and how these may be negatively impacting yourself or a loved one, please reach out and inform yourself about the treatments and pathways to recovery that are available for people who have found themselves caught in the alcohol-anxiety trap. There is a solution to this heartbreaking problem, and Villa Kali Ma can lead you to it.

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