Category: Addiction Treatment

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Addiction Treatment Self Care Self-care Strategies

Self-Care Isn’t Selfish: Essential Practices for Women in Recovery

best women rehab san diego ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building a Self-Care Foundation That Supports Lasting Recovery

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

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

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

Physical, Emotional, and Spiritual Self-Care Strategies

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

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

Improve Your Diet 

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

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

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

Exercise

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

Sleep 

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

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

Reflection

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

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

Support Network

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

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

Individual Therapy

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

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

Prayer

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

Mindfulness

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

Nature and Music

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

Overcoming Guilt and Prioritizing Your Wellbeing

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

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

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

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

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

Learn Sustainable Self-Care at Villa Kali Ma

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

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

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Addiction Treatment Internal family systems model of healing

An Internal Family Systems Take on Addiction, Part 2

At Villa Kali Ma, we offer Internal Family Systems Therapy among our many other kind, compassionate, and trauma-informed psychotherapies for women recovering from addiction, mental illness, and trauma.

In this series of posts, we explore the highly relevant issue of shame as it pertains to addiction, and how this particular burden might be lifted from the hearts minds and bodies of women of this world – through an IFS lens.

For part one in this series on IFS for addiction, start here.

Two Parts, One Woman

There is a part within each addicted woman that genuinely, sincerely wants to stop drinking and drugging. It’s easy to see: if there wasn’t a part that wanted to stop using substances, a woman would never come to treatment. She would never swear off drugs and alcohol, or make promises she can’t keep. She would never start Dry January, throw her pills in the garbage, or hate herself for not being able to stop.

But if there wasn’t a part that thinks it’s better to keep using substances, living inside each addicted woman, then she wouldn’t need treatment. She wouldn’t break her well-intentioned promises, drop out of Dry January, and get her pills back out of the garbage. She wouldn’t deny the impacts of her behavior on her loved ones and children, lie about her use, or hide her activities from people she knows will disapprove.

What does this self-contradictory set of behaviors, thoughts and desires mean? Are women with addiction crazy in some way, as some psychiatrists has maintained for so long? Are they morally weak, as some religious institutions have claimed? Are they possessed by unhappy spirits, hungry ghosts, as some non-Western cultures believe?

The Internal Family Systems Therapy answer to this question is no, women with addicted parts are not crazy, morally bankrupt, or possessed. Rather, they are experiencing what happens when parts inside are polarized in a long-standing war about the best way to deal with pain. Inside every addicted woman, there are at least two parts, locked in conflict.

One part believes continuing to use substances is vitally necessary to survive. The other part that believes quitting substances is vitally necessary to survive.

Chronic Polarization: an Inner War

Internal Family Systems Therapy says that everyone has parts, and that all of these parts are well-intentioned, working in service of survival of the person who has those parts. IFS also explains that our parts don’t always agree on the best approach for handling life. In particular, they disagree on how to manage the overwhelming pain burdening traumatized people’s psyches.

What’s going on inside a person who has addiction? To use parts language, what’s the quality of the relationship between the part that’s using substances, and the part that wants to stop?

In short, it’s all out war. The war is between a part that thinks ahead and foresees consequences, who judges, shames, berates and moralizes, on the one hand. The substance-using part, on the other side, continues to use drugs and alcohol, as a way to tamp down the rising flood of overwhelming distress.

Typically, the critical part is merciless, yelling at the woman to stop. But like a fireman in the midst of an out-of-control, blazing conflagration, the substance-using part can’t afford to think about later, about right and wrong, or collateral damages. The goal of this part is to put the flames out, now. Both parts are trying to help the woman survive, but in different ways, with different top priorities.

The Trouble with Confrontation

According to IFS and addictions pioneer Cece Sykes, the last thing that women with addiction need is someone to point out or remind them (even lovingly) that what they are doing is a problem.

The strategy of “tough love” is relatively common amongst friends, family, and even some treatment providers. It is intended, very often, as an act of kindness – indeed it takes quite a lot of care and courage for someone to confront a person’s self-destruction. And though the worry can come out wrong (as attempts at control, expressions of anger, or guilt trips), the concern is real and well-meaning most of the time.

The problem with confrontation is that, the belief that what addicts need is to be made aware of the “reality” of their behaviors is misinformed. This strategy is based on the idea that people who are using substances don’t fully realize, or care, that what they’re doing is a problem. But that’s not so.

Women with addicted parts could write the book on what’s wrong with using. It’s not a question of not seeing themselves and the consequences of what they are doing, though they may not show you that they know. In sober moments, in private self-encounters, they do feel all the guilt, shame, and self-recrimination you think they should feel, or which you think they need to feel, in order to have the motivation to get better.

Trouble is, self-hatred, self-judgment, and guilt, rather than inspiring change, tend to drive the next using cycle. Adding shame to an addicted woman’s system doesn’t work, for the simple reason that women who are use substances, are using in part because of experiencing too much shame to begin with. That overabundant, preexisting shame is a hallmark legacy of traumatization, and a strong indicator of having grown up in a dysfunctional family system.

The Shame Cycle

Where there is addiction, Sykes insists, you may rest assured that you will find a staunch set of protective manager parts who use shame regularly and without mercy, locked in a feud with the parts that reactively seek numbing substances to deal with the pain of that very same shame.

The shaming parts flood the woman with feeling like a bad person: guilt, fear, and inferiority, whenever they can. The purpose of generating all these bad thoughts, feelings, and sensations, is to try to get the woman to stop using substances (and many other “shoulds” and “oughts”).

The parts that use addiction to deal with shame in the first place, will, like clockwork, turn to the same coping tool all over again. The more inner judgment coming from inner critics and protectors, the more the body is flooded with overwhelming feelings and sensations of shame, in turn activating the firefighter, reactive protector parts that use substances.

Siding with Manager Parts Amplifies Substance-Using Parts

Confronting, or siding with the part that wants to stop is not the right answer, according to IFS. Trying to get someone to stop, without understanding the part that believes survival depends on using, only makes this polarization worse. The addict part will dig in its heels, feeling itself to be under siege not only by the inner critic and concerned parts inside, but also by friends, family, and therapists.

This onslaught of pressure to stop using isolates the using part of the psyche, marginalizing it and making an enemy out of it.

When people who have addicted parts are confronted with consequences, the amount of shame that floods the system is geologic in scale. If the woman we’re confronting were to let in even the tiniest truth of what we are saying, she fears, the fragile dam of her defenses would go crashing down. This loss of any defense against a picture of herself as unworthy, damaged, or inferior, is a reality she dreads to her core.

So when we meet a part in someone else that uses denial to cope, a part that says “It’s not a big deal” or “I’m not really addicted”, this part doesn’t represent the whole woman. It is a defensive part who is trying to keep the woman away from catastrophic floods of shame, which this part believes the woman would not be able to survive.

The Cure in Curiosity

Rather than attempting to strengthen the parts that criticize, berate and shame, by giving voice to parts within us that also criticize a substance-using woman’s choices, it would be far more helpful, IFS says, to get curious.

Genuine, non-attached curiosity can open up many forms of friendly, exploratory dialogue. It may lead to the asking of such questions:

What does the substance using part need everyone to understand about what it’s doing and why, what burdens it carries?

Why and how does addiction help this woman?

What problem are these substances solving?

When did using substances become a coping strategy, and why?

Which parts are protected by the substance using part?

What do the substance-using parts fear would happen, if using substances were no longer an option?

Finally, if there were an effective, valid alternative to using substances – a credible way to heal the underlying pain the substance is managing – would the substance-using part be willing to consider stopping?

The only way to get answers to such questions, IFS says, is to make friends with the substance using part.

For more on how to befriend the parts that use drugs and alcohol, look out for the next post in this series, next month!

Lots of love, your friends at Villa Kali Ma

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Addiction Treatment Intensive Outpatient Program

The Power of Community: Why Connection Matters in IOP

Community is one of the most powerful curative factors in the treatment of addiction, mental illness, and trauma. In this post, we here at Villa Kali Ma explore some facets of this most precious of recovery diamonds: community.

We’ll also share more about how Villa Kali Ma’s Intensive Outpatient Program draws on the extraordinary, transformative effects of community work to help women heal from addiction, mental illness and trauma.

Let us begin with the problem that community cures: isolation. Isolation is a contemporary psychological and social burden, one that haunts many women in the so-called first world. It’s easy to recognize that the way we live, as a collective, generates loneliness for all. We may have more than we could ever need of material and virtual products for consumption, but we are undoubtedly impoverished in the realm of wholehearted relating. Loneliness is epidemic.

We can see them plainly enough in the external world, but the forces that subtly separate human heart from human heart also exist inside us. Most of us carry painfully difficult beliefs, reflecting an unresolvable polarity of dependence vs independence.

We think we shouldn’t need other people, or the opposite: that we can’t survive without their total approval of every aspect of us. Many of us are missing the middle place of interdependence, of unity in diversity, of belonging enhancing individuality and individuality enhancing belonging. The prison of imagined separation is inside us as well as outside of us.

This insight is not new, of course. Thousands of years ago, philosophers in the East (to whom we at Villa Kali Ma owe a great debt of gratitude, being a yoga-based program) correctly identified that there is something within each of us that believes in a deeply painful and ultimately incorrect illusion. That illusion is the perception that we are separate beings, rather than parts of a whole, cells in one body of life. This unfortunate habit of perception, passed on and reinforced, tends to shape our ways of considering who we are, and who others are.

All around us, this illusion is arguably disproved, mainly by the simple facts of nature. Our biology dictates that we are social animals. For deeply-wired, mammalian reasons, we cannot help but feel safer in groups, with families, partners, and friends around us. Polyvagal theory emphasizes the importance of co-regulation: in order for our nervous systems to turn off the inner fire alarms of panic and dread, we need to look into safe, available eyes. We need to register smiling faces, hear soothing voices. We need to detect, perhaps without even realizing that we do, the deep slow breaths being drawn by calm, capable others around us. In this age of replacement of the human with the artificial, are we remembering that most of what’s wrong with us, could be cured with some good old fashioned human contact?

Implications of our fancied separation, and the resulting psychological pain, are serious. Addiction, mental illness, and trauma are strengthened by isolation, and they also strengthen isolation. In many ways, they arise as attempted cures for isolation, in answer to the severe distress that appears in the human nervous system whenever there is severing of connection, exclusion from belonging, and withdrawal of human warmth.

The natural need for human contact cannot be made to disappear, only go underground. We may be ashamed of our loneliness, our craving for company, contact, and attention. We may long to be able to depend on people, but deeply believe (for good reason, even) that most people are unsafe to depend on. Perhaps we look down on our needs for securely bonded attachment relationships, thinking that we should be able to, it would be easier to, go it alone. We long to belong, even while we reject and marginalize each other when exposed for trying to belong or expressing the pain of our non-belonging.

In short, our wounds around the topic of belonging versus separation from people, and the very real ways we have been hurt by our separation, present many barriers to coming together in community. And yet, the pain of separation implies its own cure: to heal from the illusion that we are fully separate entities, we must rediscover that, in fact, we are kin. We must remember that we are cells from the larger body of all humanity, rather than far-flung bits of meaningless material, without which the body of humanity would be just fine. That’s not so. When one of us leaves this planet, our passing is grieved in ways we will never even realize. We must find ways to recall what has always been true: we belong. It just is.

So what’s the cure? Well, we at Villa Kali Ma believe that willy nilly, we women who have been wounded must find our way back to organic, home-grown, human community.

How Community Support Strengthens Women’s Trauma Recovery in IOP

In all of the programs we offer at Villa Kali Ma, we place the value of community front and center. We teach each woman who comes through our doors not only that community heals, but also how she can actually “do” community.

After all, being in community takes some skills. For most of us, it’s not so much that we don’t realize we are lonely (though we may have numbed this awareness away with drugs, alcohol, eating disorders, self harm, destructive relationships, etc). It’s more that we aren’t sure if we really know how to connect with each other in authentic, harmonious, inclusive ways. Have we ever seen that modeled? Were our families, our schools, our churches and universities like that? We have this longing, to be loved for who we actually are, without so much faking, hiding, conforming and effort. Could that ever be fulfilled?

What if we take a risk, and then are rejected? What if someone wants something from us that we don’t want to give them, and we have to reject them, or else violate our own needs? What if people see all the things about us that are so unacceptable in our own eyes – our inadequacies and insufficiencies, our vanities and blatant acts of selfishness, all that we dishonor and disrespect inside ourselves? What if people hurt us like we were hurt before? What if we hurt them?

All of these fears are valid. Learning how to be in community takes some up-front work. We have to remember how to be, just as we are, allowing everyone else to be, just as they are. We have to know when the person across from of us is worthy of our efforts at authentic connection, or whether they’re more in a place of inwardness, therefore likely to not be able to meet us in the vulnerable zone. But community can be had. It is possible to restore the ability to relate in a group, and to have the experience of being accepted for who we actually, really are.

Reclaiming a place in community is not a platitude – it is an achievable accomplishment. Restoration of connection in community involves being willing to work on our ability to show up to connect and be connected with other imperfect human beings. Not because we have finally become acceptable enough, but because we understand that all human beings have been hurt. We are in the same boat. We all have burdens, and we are all figuring it out as best we can. Given this existential equality, we have every reason to work together, to forgive in others what we long to forgive in ourselves, to extend grace and compassion, knowing we need grace and compassion too.

The facts cannot be avoided: the state of psychological isolation is a root cause for addiction and other mental illness. The wounds we hold cannot be cured without relating, even if that relating is inward relating to our own Self. One way or another, we must allow relating to take place again, inside of us and also with others out in the world. For those of us with a life-threatening mental health condition or severe addiction, we must find a way to claim our place in community, or we will always be at risk of turning to those substances and behaviors that we used to manage the pain of the wounds we have around our lack of human-to-human connection.

Creating Safe Spaces for Vulnerability and Growth

As everyone knows, women have a lot of valid fears about opening up authentically in community. We didn’t make these experiences up – we really were shamed, bullied, rejected, ostracized in and by communities. The people we relied on let us down – through hurting us directly or through failing to protect us. What is most human in us was banished to the underground of the psyche. If these damaging social experiences didn’t happen directly to us, we inherited these traumas from our parents, observed them in the collective, and recognized deep in our bones that in this very damaged and damaging world, belonging can be highly conditional.

Nevertheless, as the adage goes, what was hurt in relationships can be healed in relationships; in this case – community relationships. Through community witness, acceptance, support, and working through relational topics in appropriately facilitated or peer-led settings, we can be guided through the complex process of healing our ability to connect in community.

To know ourselves as valued, unique individuals within a wider community, wanted and loved just as we are, is profoundly reparative. We discover we can be loved for what unites us with all others, as well as for what makes us different from anyone else. At last, the pain-creating illusion that says we are all alone and unrelated, irrelevant and unimportant, is dissolved. We finally understand our deep, inherent, and unavoidable belonging in the family of life.

At Villa Kali Ma, we are dedicated to creating safe spaces for vulnerability and growth. Through how we hold space, what we model in community, and what we practice together as fellow recovering women, we build community together. Vulnerability is a choice, a choice which is necessary for growth.

Building Lifelong Connections Beyond Treatment 

Many women make friends in treatment, as friendships are forged by shared experience, in the intimacy of our recovery setting.

Many clients also form healing bonds of trust with treatment staff. Our facility itself becomes a place where you are known, recognized, a kind of home. Returning as an alumna, you may feel like you’re going back to see teachers who are still rooting for you, long after you’ve graduated. Many clients form close connections with a specific practitioner who really gets them. That relationship is then internalized, the therapist or healer becoming an “inner wisdom figure” – an ally the graduate can always remember in her mind, long after the work is done. Close, or collegial, (even fruitfully challenging!), the relationships with treatment staff are generally an important part for women going through our programs.

It’s also part of the Villa Kali Ma experience to build long-lasting connections in the recovery community at large. During their treatment time with us, women are supported to learn to use the recovery tools in full. These include the ins and outs of meetings, making outreach calls, sharing stories, being of service, working with a sponsor, and giving back to the community by helping out with newcomers.

Although we support each woman’s choice, we do strongly endorse involvement in 12 Step, or a comparable recovery community. The peer-support model of recovery pioneered by communities like Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous is unmatched in ability to teach people how to belong in community again. Participation dissolves long-held burdens of shame, disconnection and loneliness among people affected by the topic of addiction.

These communities are human, not perfect – they have 100-year old language and ideas that can be triggering to some of us, and that’s a fair critique. These imperfections we acknowledge. Still, in the West, there has been no better model to emerge to address the core problem of addiction. The core problem of addiction being: severe disconnection, alienation, and trouble relating safely and wholeheartedly among members of our species. To solve this particular pain, we help women learn how to rely on the power of 12 Step communities, knowing it to be especially powerful medicine for the wounds of belonging, specifically. 

Find Sisterhood and Support at Villa Kali Ma’s Women’s IOP

There is a popular imported proverb, possibly of Igbo and Yoruba origin, which offers the wisdom that “It takes a village to raise a child”. We here at Villa Kali Ma would extend that notion towards healing mental illness, addiction, and trauma: it takes a village to heal a woman.

As a female-centered treatment community, Villa Kali Ma’s Intensive Outpatient Program is a place to find sisterhood and support among women. With our signature blend of holistic therapies and clinical treatment approaches, we help each woman recover her sense of deserving to belong in community, just as she is now. We are here to be that village for you, and for all women out there who need us.

If you’re looking for support recovering from addiction, mental illness, trauma, or all three, check out our many programs for women. We offer a range of services at several locations in the northern San Diego county area.

Categories
Addiction Treatment Intensive Outpatient Program Trauma Therapy

Therapies That Transform: How IOP Helps Women Heal from Trauma

One of the features that distinguishes Villa Kali Ma’s unique, holistic approach to healing women’s addiction and mental illness is our recognition of the role of trauma.

Since the early days of opening our doors, we have placed emphasis on the value of providing women effective treatment options for addressing their traumatization, with and alongside any work we do to address substance use and mental health symptoms. In each of our programs, spanning the range of inpatient to outpatient, we include gold standard trauma treatment approaches like EMDR and Somatic Experiencing, as well as younger approaches which show strong promise in the ever-evolving trauma treatment field (such as Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy and Brainspotting).

According to several studies, women, even more so than men, are especially likely to be using substances as a way to manage the pain they carry from having survived traumatizing events. Of the traumatizing events women have survived, the majority of events can be categorized as sexually violating in nature. Sexual trauma, especially that incurred in childhood sexual abuse, is the most psychologically damaging form of trauma. Of those people affected by childhood sexual abuse and sexual violence, the vast majority are women.

Healing the deep wounds that trauma leaves behind in the body, brain and nervous system of women is key, when the goal is to change patterns of self-destructive behavior. Contrary to popular belief, women don’t use substances because women are irrational, overemotional, selfish, lazy, stupid, or immoral. (Just to rule out a few of the unflattering attributions that have been applied to women who use substances – scratch that, you know what? to women in general – over the centuries!)

Rather, women use substances because they are effective (in the short term, anyway) at reducing the overwhelming pain of unresolved traumatic experiences. Alternatively, substances help women behave in ways that support them to survive in society, in a context of carrying a secret burden of shattering psychological pain.

As the field of trauma treatment gains wider recognition and acceptance over the decades, the need for trauma healing centers of all manner continues to rise. It appears to be the case that for many women, trauma is best treated not in single, once-a-week outpatient sessions following the psychotherapy model, but rather in a more wrap-around approach. This is so that several different approaches to trauma treatment can be applied, working together in concert.

We recommend our Intensive Outpatient Program approach for addressing trauma to any survivors out there. A surprising amount of trauma-related memory content can be resolved in just a few sessions of modalities like EMDR. But complex and chronic traumatization of the type most likely to be driving women’s substance abuse and mental health problems is not a one-and-done affair. Rather, a blend of interventions to heal safety-perception distortions and dysregulated patterns of physiological arousal at neurobiological levels should be used in combination with attachment-informed individual psychotherapy, group work, and peer-based community support.

At Villa Kali Ma, we are very proud to be able to offer a state of the art array of the best of the best trauma therapies out there. We offer these to women who need help healing from what has harmed them most deeply, whether or not that harm has led them to use substances or receive a mental health diagnosis.

How Trauma-Focused Therapies in IOP Empower Women to Heal

The many trauma-focused therapies we offer in Villa Kali Ma’s Intensive Outpatient Program empower women to heal through a few pathways.

We facilitate the resolution of problematic memories through treatments like EMDR and brainspotting, which work with the brain to reprocess memories safely. EMDR and brainspotting are believed to operate by altering where and how traumatic memories are stored in the brain.

Additionally, we empower women to understand themselves, and what they thought were their personality flaws, through the lens of trauma. Prolonged nervous system states become traits, which in turn become identities, to paraphrase the words of trauma educator Linda Thai. Through understanding the real depth of impact trauma has had, we help traumatized women experience something they may never have felt before: self-compassion.

Perhaps most importantly, we show women how they can shift gears naturally when their trauma symptoms are triggered by events in the external world. Gaining a measure of agency over one’s own body states has huge implications, making the need for substances, and many other extreme behaviors, redundant.

This ability to shift states consciously comes in part through restoration of somatic awareness, which in turn leads to the ability to use the practices found in polyvagal theory to downshift or upshift using simple, body-based tools like breath, stretching, and vagus nerve stimulation.

Somatic awareness is a term which refers to the subjective, personal experience of the body from the inside out. One goal of somatic therapies and other trauma-informed approaches is to restore women’s capacity to feel their own embodiment, as a stream of ever-shifting sensations. Women can then use body signals to note the triggered state, decide whether or not they are really in danger now (or rather just experiencing a flashback, or body-memory), and take appropriate action to return to the safety zone.

Women with trauma need help learning to relate to sensations again, because the ordinary operations of the nervous system have been damaged through shock that was too overwhelming to integrate. Traumatized women have been imprinted and impaired in such a way that when something possibly threatening happens (something which resembles or is associated with circumstances in which they were hurt before in serious ways), they go into overdrive, sending the nervous system into high distress.

This trauma-related distress, the kind that happens when a person’s life is in danger, is recreated as though “it’s happening all over again”, even though the current circumstances may not actually perfectly map onto the original traumatizing event. This happens because of over-coupling, or over-associating perceptual cues that may not actually be relevant. An example of an over-coupled perceptual cue could be the scent someone was wearing while they hurt you. Years later, someone harmless wearing the same scent can evoke the same feeling of supreme danger. Tragically, many cues can be over-coupled through traumatization, linked forever together with memories of danger – including fun, play, emotional closeness and love itself.

It is the signature handiwork of trauma to go into high distress, stay there until the body is exhausted, and then drop all the way down into numbness, completely skipping over the part where life feels good, pleasant, and relaxed. The yo-yoing nervous system (amped too far up or numbed too far down) is a sign of trauma, reflecting survival strategies that didn’t get to come to completion. The yo-yo experience is part of why substances that help women calm down or re-energize are useful at first.

Once we get into trauma recovery, it is through the doorway of learning to process sensation again that we heal. Once we find ways to safely experience our nervous system’s beautiful capacity for sensation, without being sucked into high distress or dissociating, we have the keys to (our own) kingdom. Gradually, we restore the capacity to process and release what happened to us, out of the body once and for all.

When women realize that they have natural options inside their own physiology for relaxing and/or reenergizing themselves as needed, the primary problem, to which addiction was an attempted solution, is eliminated in large part.

Evidence-Based Approaches to Trauma and Addiction Recovery

Evidence-based approaches are methodologies – collections of interventions paired with a theory of how healing occurs – that have passed a certain measure of scientific verification of their efficacy. There are several evidence-based approaches that are generally recommended in the treatment of addiction, mental health disorders, and trauma.

Consulting the list of evidence-based therapies is one way to check whether a method in question has been endorsed by authorities in the wider psychology profession. The assembly of a list of approved evidence-based approaches was offered as a protective measure, to ensure that treatment approaches clients commonly receive are indeed valid, as evidenced by peer-reviewed, controlled scientific studies.

At Villa Kali Ma, we offer many approaches that are featured on the list of evidence-based approaches, including Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Internal Family Systems Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. The clinical core of all of our treatment programs is composed primarily of evidence-based approaches. 

Integrating Mind, Body, and Spirit in Outpatient Care

Villa Kali Ma is committed to caring for each woman’s mind, body, and spirit, especially in an age where the latter two components may be regarded with great distrust.

It can be hard to find an outpatient setting that will honor the role of the body’s natural, organic intelligence and gift for self-repair, let alone spirit. We pride ourselves on providing the best of both worlds – East and West, body and mind, holistic and clinical.

If you’re looking for a place that is clinically grounded, providing the top treatment methods that have been scientifically validated, but which is also open to exploring the mind-body connection, we may be the right place for you. For those who appreciate the medical, scientific lens on healing, as well as other, non-dominant perspectives, you will find company in the halls of Villa Kali Ma.

Experience Holistic Healing at Villa Kali Ma’s Women’s IOP

The holistic mindset holds that while mental health symptoms may appear to be separate, unrelated phenomena, they almost never are. Addiction does not exist in a vacuum. Neither does depression, anxiety, boundary problems, or flashbacks. Each of these symptoms exists to address or respond to another condition, existing there alongside it. The inner ecosystem of the human being is delicately balanced, with strengths and challenges co-arising in ways reminiscent of the Buddhist idea of dependent origination.

Like weather systems tipped off by a flap of a butterfly’s wing across the globe, we and our symptoms exist in complex, stunning matrices of natural interdependence. In the context of that reality, what is healing? How can we approach problems, while remembering the totality at hand?

At Villa Kali Ma, in our Intensive Outpatient Program and all of our offerings for women recovering from addiction, mental illness, and trauma, we attempt to show how loving attention to the smallest details of our magnificence can give rise to a healing that transcends the seemingly individual nature of our lives.

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Addiction Treatment Intensive Outpatient Program Trauma Therapy

Why Intensive Outpatient Programs Are Essential for Women Healing from Trauma

The Intensive Outpatient Program model is one of the most effective treatment options for women who need support recovering from substance addiction. This is especially true for women who also need trauma treatment and help overcoming mental health symptoms.

In Villa Kali Ma’s unique integrative program, we address the trifold burdens of addiction, mental illness, and trauma together as one.  Our treatment philosophy arises from recognition of the strong link that exists between addiction, mental illness and trauma.

The correlation of addiction with trauma is especially established in women. For biological and social reasons both, women seeking treatment for substance use are more likely than men to present with co-occurring mental health disorders and trauma.

The more that is learned and confirmed collectively about what works in the field of trauma recovery, the more Intensive Outpatient Programs emerge as a strong model for resolving trauma, mental health symptoms, and addiction.

Why Intensive Outpatient Programs Empower Women Healing from Trauma

Intensive Outpatient Programs empower women healing from trauma in three notable ways.

Intensive Outpatient Programs educate women about addiction, empowering them with the most foundational healing tool, self-awareness. The addictive process, like all illnesses, flourishes in the dark shadows cast by misunderstanding. When women are trained to detect the subtler operations of addictive process, they are less likely to be taken over by it. Instead, they may learn to befriend the parts of them that have sought in the past to survive overwhelming pain, through substance-based ways to access needed experiences like bodily safety, relief from pain, relaxation, and love.

Secondly, IOPs empower women by educating them about traumatization, also fostering deeper self-recognition. Learning to see trauma triggers and how activation weaponizes the nervous system begins the liberation process. As women recover a measure self-mastery over nervous system states, it becomes possible to respond rather than react. Once again, befriending is key. In our IOP, women are supported through treatments that change how memories are accessed in the brain, as well as through somatic therapies that help women complete nervous system responses at the bodily level.

Once a woman recognizes how trauma and substances have worked together in a misguided attempt to protect her from feeling her woundedness, she is just a stone’s throw away from full self-forgiveness. One of the most difficult challenges for women with addiction, trauma and mental illness is shame. Shame is one of the most painful emotions for human beings to endure, and is linked to a deeply-held belief in personal unworthiness. Curing the burden of shame is the third profoundly empowering gift of participation in Villa Kali Ma’s trauma-informed IOP.

Flexibility and Intensive Support for Trauma Recovery

Intensive Outpatient Programs are offered as a best-of-both worlds type of solution – maximum treatment intensiveness (in terms of number of therapeutic hours per week) while still being flexible.

When it comes to addressing trauma, there are several advantages to healing it in a women-only Intensive Outpatient Setting like the one we provide at Villa Kali Ma.

Intensive Outpatient Programs are, by definition, concentrated enough to accomplish a large quotient of trauma resolution and memory reprocessing work – a lot more than is possible in the traditional, once-a-week outpatient model. IOPs provide a minimum of nine treatment hours a week, and may go up to twenty. The number of treatment hours per week usually depends on how much therapeutic contact is beneficial during in certain recovery phases.

Treatment intensiveness starts out high and steps down slowly, as a way to increase the proportion of free hours while a client is still being supported, and her progress and state are still monitored by staff. This gradual reduction in treatment time in tandem with an equivalent increase in freedom and flexibility allows women to make changes, then experiment with applying those changes in the world. New behaviors can be tested out, while still receiving a cushion of support. This model can make it easier to return to ordinary life at a pace which is least disruptive and which allows for integration time.

Integration is an important topic when it comes to trauma. Somatic Experiencing, a pioneering methodology in the world of trauma healing, emphasizes the concept of titration, or a drip-by-drip pace that is necessary in trauma integration work. Titration refers to the necessity to proceed slowly and by degrees, when reintegrating the body sensations (implicit memories), emotions, and disturbed perceptions that have been bound up with traumatic experiences. Little by little, we dissolve and dilute grains of painful experience into the larger ocean of body awareness.

Titration benefits from respite and, ideally, grounding, positively distracting contact with ordinary life. Intensive Outpatient Programs may provide an optimized balance of active trauma processing work against time spent outside of the treatment milieu, making integration easier. This has advantages when it comes to stability, continuity, and ease throughout the treatment experience.

Who Benefits Most from a Trauma-Focused IOP?

Generally, there is a strong likelihood of pre-existing trauma in women with addiction, implied by higher scores of addictedness and prevalence of addiction among the population of traumatized women.

Women who have a history of childhood sexual abuse, neglect, or physical violence, as well women who have survived sexual assault or intimate partner violence as adults, are strongly encouraged to receive support in a women-only, trauma-focused Intensive Outpatient Program like the one we offer at Villa Kali Ma.

Women with co-occurring mental health symptoms (depression, panic, and so on), behavioral health symptoms (eating disorders, self-harm, impulsivity, destructive relationships, etc), are also recommended to find support in an IOP that has a strong trauma treatment component. Targeted treatment resolving traumatic memories at the neurobiological level helps with these conditions, even when no official trauma diagnosis exists.

Definitions of trauma are no longer limited to the recognizable patterns of symptoms that appear in people who have survived combat, violent crimes and frightening accidents. Rather, there are classifications of trauma including, but not limited to: acute trauma, complex trauma, developmental trauma, relational (attachment) trauma, cultural/institutional trauma, family legacy/inherited trauma, and dissociative trauma, according to trauma specialist Dr. Frank Anderson in Transcending Trauma.

Given the advances being made in the field of trauma, it is important for women to know that in some corners of the psychology field, mental health disorders are being re-examined, as possible expressions of traits developed under extreme duress. What have been historically been thought of as “character flaws” – disordered aspects of personality – may actually be tendencies of attention and strategies of survival-oriented action, per trauma pioneer Dan Siegel.

According to researchers like Dr. Siegel, qualities we have come to identify with, such as our temperament, sensitivity, and reactivity, may be partly or wholly formed as adaptive responses to circumstances. The more chronic and enduring a set of conditions survived, the more likely it is the responses of the nervous system will have congealed into a semi-permanent set of behaviors, reactions, thought patterns, and emotional states.

In the past, such clusterings of extreme thought, emotion, and behavior have been interpreted as evidence of independently arising mental health disorders, with etiology unknown, often postulated as arising from fully genetic or biological origins. An origin in traumatization may explain why mental health disorders also respond positively to trauma interventions, resulting in reduction of symptoms and greater happiness and stability.

Begin Your Healing Journey in Our Women’s IOP at Villa Kali Ma

Wherever you currently are on your healing journey, you are warmly welcome within the halls of Villa Kali Ma’s programs for women recovering from addiction, mental illness, and trauma.

We are an integrative provider of holistic and clinical services in one, offering effective neurobiological trauma treatment as a standalone treatment track at a dedicated facility. We also offer trauma treatment integrated together with our addiction and mental health treatment tracks. Whether you need a course of inpatient treatment at our retreat-like Residential Rehabilitation facility, or are ready to participate in an intensive day program (Partial Hospitalization or Intensive Outpatient), we encourage you to consider Villa Kali Ma as a potential team of allies on your sacred journey to wellness.

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Addiction Treatment Internal family systems model of healing

An Internal Family Systems Take on Addiction: Part 1

In this series of posts, we’ll explore the topic of addiction, using an Internal Family Systems therapy lens.

Internal Family Systems is a non-pathologizing, evidence-based approach (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapy-types/internal-family-systems-therapy) that is changing ideas within the mental health world, about how women with addiction, mental health symptoms, and trauma can recover lives of joy, connection and capacity.

Although it is a treatment model and not a spiritual system, IFS joins the company of several longstanding spiritual traditions and holistic healing modalities, in seeking to spread a specific kind of good news. The good news that IFS wishes to spread, (and we at Villa Kali Ma do too!), is that the answer to all human pain lies within us.

At Villa Kali Ma, we are so pleased to be able to offer Internal Family Systems Therapy among our many other kind, compassionate, and trauma-informed psychotherapies for women recovering from addiction, mental illness, and trauma.

In this series of articles, we’ll explore the highly relevant issue of shame as a core topic in addiction treatment, and how this particular burden might be lifted from the hearts, minds and bodies of women.

To kick off this series, let’s start with an exploration of the basic principles of the Internal Family Systems (IFS) approach.

The Internal Family Systems model: We are Self, we have parts

We all have Self

There is no one alive, IFS asserts, who does not have a wellspring of powerful, capable goodness within. This is Self.

We all have Parts

There is also no one alive who does not have parts – different sides of our personality that have distinct roles within our system, reflective of the ways that family members tend to take roles in a family system. Some parts of how personality have hardworking, ambitious or provider roles, such as the parts that may show up to work or be interested in success and status. Some other parts have nurturing and emotionally connective roles, such as the parts who parent, who notice and care how others feel, and so on.

Some parts hold the feelings, some parts hold the doing. Some parts may come to us in purely somatic form, as sensations and body signals. Some parts are socially acceptable and many are not. Some have entertaining, distracting, or playful roles. And so on!

Inner critics, inner children, inner taskmasters, addicted parts, excelling parts, dissociating parts, risk-taking parts, socially anxious parts, are all examples of possible parts we may have.

Very important to understand is that while the impact of parts can be destructive, all parts have positive intentions. That’s why IFS founder Richard Schwartz insists there are No Bad Parts.

3 Kinds of Parts

The parts we have inside fall into three categories, according to the IFS way of working with parts: preventative, reactive, and vulnerable.

Managers. Of the many parts within each of us, some work preventatively and proactively. IFS calls these “manager” parts.

Manager parts think ahead and try to help us to stay out of trouble. They are concerned that if we don’t behave in particular ways, something bad will happen. Their ultimate fear is that if and when this bad thing happens, our unhealed trauma will get triggered, and we won’t be able to deal with the overwhelming pain.

An example of a manager part many of us have is an inner taskmaster, a part who reminds us what needs to get done and when it’s due. This part often works together with an Inner Critic or judgmental part.

In general, manager parts are worried about things that could happen in the future. The taskmaster part might be concerned we will lose our job if we don’t stay on top of our tasks. The inner critic may be worried we won’t perform perfectly enough.

Underlying managers’ first few fears lies the real concern: what we might feel, that they believe we will get overwhelmed by. For the taskmaster, the first fear might be that we will miss our deadline. The second fear may be that if we miss the deadline, we will lose our job. The ultimate underlying fear could be that, if we were to lose our job, we would be flooded with overwhelming shame.

Therefore, a useful way to relate to manager parts, once we have a kind loving connection with them, is to see if they would be willing to tell us what they are afraid will happen if we don’t keep behaving the way they want us to.

While manager parts tend to be the most socially acceptable of our inner family of parts, they can be harsh, judgy, rigid and tough on the rest of the parts and may rule with an iron fist.

Firefighters. Another group of parts is reactive, responding to pain that is arising in the now. These are parts that numb, distract, and soothe. They are dormant, letting managers run the show, until we get triggered and our unhealed pain rises to the surface of our awareness as thoughts, feelings, and sensations.

While their intentions are positive in nature – to prevent us from getting overwhelmed by pain – firefighters get a bad rap in society because they can be destructive and out of control.

Since their goal is stop the pain no matter what, they are not good at thinking about longer-term consequences. That’s not their purpose. A binge drinking part that takes over when we’re feeling too much intensity internally is an example of a firefighter part.

Exiles. The third type of parts are vulnerable in nature. These parts are the tender, more childlike and wounded parts within us, who carry the burdens of what we have lived through, as thoughts, feelings, sensations and beliefs.

Our exiled parts are stuck in a difficult moment (or series of moments) of our past.  They often believe very negative, extreme, black-and-white things about themselves and the world, such as that they don’t deserve any love at all, people always let you down, or another “rule” of life that is painful to believe. Exiles live, in general, in a painful set of conditions, generally the ones we grew up in or were originally hurt by.

Exiles are the wounded ones within, and though the rest of the system (managers and firefighters) work very hard to keep these parts of us from rising up in our awareness and flooding our system with their pain and unmet yearnings, no amount of self-protection keeps these feelings at bay permanently.

In fact, these wounds are destined, unavoidably, to rise up within us when the time is right – once we are big and strong enough to meet them with the love they have always needed.

Once our wounded, vulnerable parts are healed (through a process which IFS calls “unburdening”), they are able to revert to their original and natural state, which tends to be childlike, loving, and playful. In their original form, these parts of us are lovely and delightful. Exiles often are deeply related to our ability to love, express ourselves freely, and experience joy.

Parts may want different things

Since each part has a role they fulfill, with priorities and concerns related to that purpose, parts of us may want opposite things. For example, you might realize one part of you wants to go on a whitewater rafting trip, and another part wants to stay safe at home and not have to endure any unknowns. These disagreements among parts can make us feel crazy, if we haven’t yet understood that everyone has many parts inside, each with differing and equally valid perspectives, and that they don’t always get along.

All of this is completely normal – inside the psyche, there is not a single personality with fixed qualities, but rather a fluid, changing, shifting, dynamic “inner family” of several different parts with different qualities, personalities and purposes.

In general, systems that carry more wounds, just like families that carry more wounds, have more conflict and what might be broadly called “dysfunction”, although it’s important not to judge or pathologize what inner systems, or indeed outer systems, do in their desperate attempts to manage overwhelming pain.

According to IFS, there’s no moral meaning to any of this. It’s all just about how much unresolved pain a person might be carrying. The more extreme, polarized, rigid, conflict-ridden or self-contradictory a person seems to be, the more overwhelming pain they must be dealing with at some level or another.

We are Self, we have parts

Although we have many, many parts inside, no single part is the totality of who we are. Rather, through walking gentle paths of relating to our parts, we discover that underneath and transcending the inner community of parts, there lies an indwelling, untarnished force, that “I” which IFS calls Self.

Self is a compassionate, calm, courageous living presence, pure aliveness, the seat of our purest consciousness. This is who we actually are in our nature – we have parts, but we are this loving presence.

This presence we are loves our parts unconditionally and is available to help them with the thing they need most: love, acceptance, belonging and inclusion. Getting to know this life energy, this kind presence, who can be found inside all of us and who can restore love to all parts in the inner family, is the key to recovery.

Self-led

Once Self is restored to a sufficient degree, we become Self-led. Being Self-led means that we live life from the center, from the core of who we really are, with calm compassion, curiosity, and a strong penchant for connection.

Becoming Self-led is a gradual and fluid process. Once Self is sufficiently present in a consistent enough way internally, parts feel safe and settle down quite a lot. Extreme parts that once were entrenched in difficult conflicts are willing to soften, as they realize that their protective functions are not quite as necessary as they used to be, now that a loving, wise presence is in charge.

It is core to IFS that only once our protectors really see and trust that enough Self is here, taking care of us and tending to the needs of the vulnerables, can we expect them to stop doing their extreme behaviors.

All it takes to get to know Self is to relate to parts

All we have to do to get in contact with Self, IFS teaches us, is to go through a process of realizing we’re not actually one and the same as the parts that arise in our consciousness. This recognition is called unblending in IFS – when we perceive the truth that a part is only part of us, not all of us, there is a natural kind of differentiation and separating, which is helpful for founding a loving relationship with that part.

When we separate ourselves enough psychologically to have a relationship with the part, instead of thinking we are the part, and we do not conflate ourselves or identify with parts as being “all of us” – they are roles, activities, energies, personalities, but not the totality of our life essence – we gradually realize that though there are many different parts of us, there is only one core, true Self. An “I” who can never be harmed, traumatized, burdened, or disturbed.

In the next post in this series on Internal Family Systems and addiction, we’ll get deeper into what is going on inside women who use substances, and how they might heal from the pain driving that substance use.

Thanks for reading! If you’re curious to find out how IFS and other trauma healing modalities could help you recover your birthright to live freely and wholly, we warmly invite you to check out our many programs for women recovering from mental illness, addiction, and trauma.

Categories
Addiction Treatment Trauma Trauma Therapy

How PHP Supports Lasting Recovery from Addiction and Trauma

Addiction treatment comes in a few different formats. These different formats reflect the different therapeutic environments found to be most effective for patients with varying degrees of need for intensiveness, structure, and medical supervision. The Partial Hospitalization Program level of care is a high intensity, outpatient day program model providing six hours of treatment, five days a week.

In this post, we’ll share a little more about the uniquely compassionate, holistic, and trauma-informed Partial Hospitalization Program we have created for women here at Villa Kali Ma. We’ll speak to the PHP model in general, and how our program supports lasting recovery from addiction, mental illness, and traumatization.

How Partial Hospitalization Helps Women Achieve Lasting Healing

PHPs were invented to treat people who present with acute needs, who require medical and/or psychiatric attention in order to stabilize and achieve basic bodily safety. Traditionally, patients with this level of need would have been treated in inpatient settings.

Over the decades, and in the context of resource conservation, the field of addictions treatment has recognized that day programs can also be equally effective for some patients. Those who require some medical and psychiatric support in order to get through the worst of the stabilization phase, but do not necessarily need to stay overnight in a hospital environment, nor to be supervised 24-7, can do just as well in a PHP.

What’s the difference between someone who should be in residential, and someone who is served well by a PHP? Some patients require 24-7 supervision, or else they may be apt to attempt to address their acute distress through dangerous behavior. Dangerous behavior may include self-harm or returning to substance use (putting them at risk of overdose). Such patients need to be supervised around the clock, as a safety measure. Such women are still best treated in a medically-supervised detox, followed by residential rehab.

Other patients, while still vulnerable and in need of a relatively high intensity of mental and physical health support, would be safe to stay at home during the evenings and weekends, as long as they were receiving a high level of care during daytime hours. For such people, PHPs are a valid alternative to residential.

It is for these women that Villa Kali Ma’s Partial Hospitalization Program exists. Women attending treatment at our outpatient facility in Del Mar, California may elect to participate in our Partial Hospitalization Program, as a higher-intensity version of the Intensive Outpatient Program also offered onsite there.

Our integrative PHP helps women achieve lasting healing by setting a good therapeutic and clinical foundation, including an introduction to the journey of trauma healing. Our PHP installs community relationships, and a faith in self that will carry each woman far into her recovery long after she leaves our program.

Combining Trauma Therapy, Community, and Self-Discovery

Our PHP combines holistic, integrative trauma therapy, community, and self-discovery. This combination is valuable for a few reasons. Trauma therapy is important for women with addiction because some form of traumatization is highly likely to be a root cause for the use of substances in the first place. When underlying traumatization is healed, the need for using substances addictively shrinks considerably or disappears.

Community is important for women recovering from addiction because, as Johann Hari puts it in his Ted talk about addiction, the opposite of addiction isn’t so much sobriety as “human connection”.

Addiction is isolating. The cure is in community. The trauma that most plagues women with addiction is relational in nature – when we undergo traumatization we lose our trust in relationships with others, either because it is people who have hurt us or people who have not protected us when we needed them to. Through the process of developing community relationships, restoring our ability to connect, belong and participate, we heal a major root cause of addiction, eventually making the need for substances redundant.

Finally, self-discovery is important for women with addiction because, through self-discovery, women get the good news that actually, there isn’t anything wrong with them, and there never was.

In the words of Mike Elkin, an author and thought leader in the treatment of families with addiction, the way that other people treated us in the past didn’t mean anything about whether or not we are good, valuable people. Rather, that behavior was about what was going on for that person.

Through self-discovery we realize that all along, just as we are, we have always already deserved love, protection, care, support and kindness.

Preparing for Next Steps After PHP

Recovery isn’t only about deep emotional healing. It is also intensely practical. Women need help planning, knowing what to do next, how to live well, feel their feelings, and still stay sober, no matter where the next bend in the river takes them.

Women recovering from addiction, mental illness and trauma do best with support getting ready for what’s to come. With some preparation, women can leave treatment knowing they won’t be caught completely off guard by what typically arises for women returning to “life after rehab”.

In our PHP for women, participants have a chance to plan, to rehearse responses to known triggers and offenders, consider choices ahead of time and practice strategies for coping. Our PHP helps prepare women for the next steps, by providing a bridge into Intensive Outpatient where appropriate, assistance moving into sober living, and other ways of easing into new ways of being in the world.

Continued Healing with Villa Kali Ma’s Comprehensive Care

PHPs are considered to be an important element in the landscape of addiction recovery. In particular, for people who may not be in a position to attend residential treatment in the classical rehab format, Partial Hospitalization is a good alternative.

Trauma-informed PHPs like ours at Villa Kali Ma are potent interventions for women looking to find lasting recovery and long-term healing from addiction and the underlying reasons that women have relied on addiction to get through life.

Villa Kali Ma’s PHP represents our commitment to providing comprehensive care for women recovering from addiction, trauma, and mental health struggles. Our program provides ongoing healing by supporting women’s hearts, minds, and bodies to recover in ways that make it possible to return to a positive life.

We help each woman build up community resources, so that she will be nestled in a web of positive relationships when she leaves. And we support each woman who comes through our doors to strengthen inner resources, so that she may come to know about herself what we also know to be true: she is a treasure of infinite potential, infinite lovability, and infinite value.

Categories
Addiction Treatment

A Day in the Life at a Women’s PHP for Trauma Recovery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Family Legacy Trauma – trauma inherited from family or lineage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Therapeutic Structure to Rebuild Safety and Trust

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

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

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

How Intensive Daytime Care Promotes Deep Healing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Deep physiological experiences of safety, restoration, and repair

Begin Your Trauma Recovery Journey with Our PHP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
Addiction Treatment

Why PHP is a Vital Step for Women Healing from Trauma

At Villa Kali Ma, we have a uniquely gentle, compassionate, and effective Partial Hospitalization Program for women recovering from addiction, mental illness and trauma.

Our PHP blends the benefits of yoga and other holistic approaches together with a robust clinical regime, delivering medically effective psychological and neurobiological trauma treatment.

Through our signature approach that addresses the body, the mind, and the soul in one integrated course of therapies, we help women who have struggled with addiction, mental illness, and trauma recover lives of deep meaning, connection and purpose.

Why Partial Hospitalization is Key for Women’s Trauma Recovery

PHP is for women who need a nourishing, highly structured level of care, but aren’t able, for whatever reason, to attend a residential program.

By definition, PHPs are medically- and psychiatrically-supervised settings that offer six hours of treatment a day, five days a week, in a day treatment program format. Day programs take place at a treatment facility during core hours. Participants go home at the end of the day to stay in their own homes.

Nestled between the residential and Intensive Outpatient levels of care, PHP can be a transitional stage after completing residential. Alternatively, PHP can be a high-intensity treatment option in its own right, for women who qualify for residential, but aren’t in a position to live away from home.

Women receiving treatment at Villa Kali Ma’s holistic outpatient facility, the Office, may participate in our Partial Hospitalization Program. Some women choose to join our PHP as a safe step-down process after residential, and before transitioning to Intensive Outpatient (IOP). Other clients in our community of recovering women start their treatment journey with PHP right at the outset, following up with IOP.

PHP is the level care which is the most like inpatient treatment, while still being delivered in the day program format. Whereas the more flexibly-scheduled Intensive Outpatient Program level of care allow women to maintain some level of job responsibility while seeking treatment, PHP requires a greater time commitment.

PHP is key for women’s trauma recovery. Women with trauma very often struggle with addictions of some kind, as well as significant mental health symptoms. For women who are struggling to cope with daily living because of the overwhelming burdens associated with the legacy of trauma, the right kind of structured care is needed. As the highest level of structure available outside of residential, PHP is an important offering for women with trauma, mental illness, and addiction.

Intensive Care Without Full Residential Commitment

PHPs have many advantages for women who need a high intensity of services to address trauma and mental health needs alongside their addiction treatment, but who can’t find their way to committing to the whole enchilada of residential treatment.

As we shared in our post on How Being a Woman Affects Addiction, Mental Illness, and Trauma, there are special considerations when it comes to providing gender-specific care. Women have a lot of valid reasons why committing to residential treatment may be more challenging for them, including a few specific barriers to entering treatment that tend to be gendered.

Women’s reasons for not entering treatment can stem from being financially less prosperous than men typically are, or otherwise connect back to the fact that women are frequently positioned in social and job roles that involve caring for other people. Women who have families, who need to work to provide for their children, who are responsible for the care of elders in their home, and/or who have job responsibilities that involve caring for other vulnerables (such as nurses, social workers, therapists or teachers), often feel that they could not take the time away that they genuinely would need to heal, without letting people who are counting on them down. This situation tends, very broadly speaking, to be even more true for women of the global majority, and for women situated in less economically privileged positions (depending of course on the individual woman and her life circumstances).

All in all, PHPs may be considered a good way to combine medically necessary intensity of treatment, with minimal disruption to home life responsibilities. PHPs are also frequently used as a way to transition from higher levels of care to living independently in the community again.

Who Benefits Most from a Trauma-Focused PHP?

Women are especially well-served by trauma-focused treatment at any level of care. The more is learned, collectively, about how addiction and mental illness are healed, the more the role of trauma is highlighted, especially for women.

An estimated 75% of women seeking treatment for addiction report a history of traumatization, the most of which is classified as sexual trauma and/or trauma from childhood neglect and abuse.

Trauma is also linked to several mental health diagnoses. The most gendered diagnoses, such as borderline personality disorder, are periodically questioned because of the challenges associated with differentiating them from trauma.

Women are statistically more likely than men to present with a co-occurring disorder in addition to substance addiction, including additional behavioral health diagnoses (eating disorders, self-harm, relationship addiction, codependency, etc).

All in all, it can be said that there are strong links between trauma, mental illness, and addiction in all directions, and that these links are stronger for women than for men. This suggests that women require a more sophisticated, refined and personalized approach to treatment, such as the approach we have developed in our programs at Villa Kali Ma.

Whether or not you are aware of having a trauma history (many women struggle with memory, and may only have the symptoms), it is highly recommended that women receive support in a trauma-informed treatment environment for a variety of reasons. One reason is that trauma-focused treatment works well to disarm resistance, since it is gentler, more non-judgmental, and proceeds at a pace which is most respectful of women’s needs. Women’s needs for boundaries, to feel safe, and for all aspects of treatment to be fully consensual are honored in trauma-informed approaches.

Given the high chance that trauma has some role to play in why a woman is presenting with mental health symptoms and addiction patterning in the first place, healing in a trauma-informed context is strongly recommended.

Explore Healing at Villa Kali Ma’s Women’s PHP 

The Partial Hospitalization Program we developed at Villa Kali Ma is designed specifically for substance-addicted women struggling with their mental health needs and trauma history to find their way back to health, happiness and wholeness.

The three-part burden of trauma, addiction, and mental-emotional dysfunction is very familiar to us, from our own personal histories as wounded healers, and from the many women we have helped heal in the past.

When we say we work with women to heal mind, body, and spirit, we mean it. Our programs embrace somatic (body-based) healing modalities, bio-psycho-spiritual approaches like yoga, creative healing approaches like expressive arts therapy, nutritional healing, gold standard trauma treatments like EMDR, and more. We also offer women nurturing therapeutic support, individually and in community, in which to form safe bonds of trust with safe others.

We know that when women are seen in the totality of who they are, not only for their pain and mistakes, but also for their brilliance, resilience, love, and infinite capacity to recover, they do indeed recover.

If this gently effective approach to healing women’s pain intrigues you, we invite you to come find out more about how we might co-create your recovery together.

Categories
Addiction Treatment Sober Living

How Residential Programs Support Long-Term Sobriety

Residential treatment is the most promising path for addiction recovery for women with addiction, mental health disorders, and trauma.

In this article, we share some observations and about what works best to help women achieve and sustain sobriety, based on what we know so far and what we have seen in residential settings.

How Residential Treatment Builds a Foundation for Lasting Sobriety

When it comes to long-term addiction recovery, residential rehab is the gold standard. Residential treatment is the most reliable and effective route to establishing sobriety in a way that recovery is most likely to take root, flourish, and last over time.

The benefits of residential rehab, in turn, are most potent when followed up with active involvement in a recovery community, such as AA. But even as a standalone treatment, we at Villa Kali Ma always recommend residential when feasible for a woman’s circumstances.

Immersion in a quality residential rehabilitation program is the mother’s milk of early recovery, providing many important nutrients and lifelong protection that is harder to get other ways. The structured, all-encompassing environment offered by inpatient rehabilitation protects vulnerable people during the most dangerous phases of initial sobriety.

Change of Scenery

Physical and psychological distance from substances and our ordinary reasons for suffering make residential rehabs more effective. Both time and space heal, so every mile of distance and every minute away from the context in which drug use took place, bring exponential benefits.

The bright seed of recovery needs a chance to find fertile soil, sprout, and take root within us. Even with therapy and psychoeducation, groups, and many treatment hours during the day time, the part of us that wants to change can have a harder time gaining a foothold in our life if we stay put physically in our old environment, rooted in the same soil as before.

Design, Purpose and Dedication of Residential Rehabilitation

The other reason that the stay-away model helps (besides giving us a change of scenery), has to do with the design and purpose of residential rehab facilities.

Residential rehab facilities are specifically designed to serve one purpose: to help women recover from addiction.

Every location is influenced by its functionality, and it makes sense to go to certain places to get certain experiences. We wouldn’t go to our nearest Costco to help us find a sense of beauty, purpose, and meaning in life. That’s not the purpose of Costco. We don’t go to a tiny village to get in touch with the pulse of contemporary culture. We need to go where we can credibly find what we’re looking for.

Residential rehab facilities like Villa Kali Ma are here in this world for one purpose: to help women recover from addiction, mental health disorders, and trauma. This purpose informs everything about us. The environment is safe, quiet, and conducive to the needs of the recovering women. From the daily schedule to the menu, to the healing modalities offered in groups and individual therapy sessions, everything is tailored to this core purpose.

The Role of Community, Accountability, and Therapy

One promise that residential delivers on, is to entrain habits that will sustain recovery long term. The intensity of a typical residential rehabilitation schedule reflects the size of the change that is generally required to recover, at least in the very beginning. While of course no one would be expected to keep up the level of self-work that is facilitated during the residential stay, there are several practices which are necessary to sustain over time, in order to stay sober long term. These “best practices for long term recovery” include community, accountability, and ongoing psychological healing work with a therapist or other practitioner.

Community

Addiction thrives in a context of psychological isolation. It is usually necessary, therefore, to learn to proactively counteract the tendency to isolate into one’s own fortress of (misguided) strategies. These almost always tend to lead back to the same “solution” we came to before – using substances. In order to not end up back in a situation, in which addiction feels like the only answer for dealing with our pain, we have to learn to do the radical act of opening up our inner world and sharing the contents there, honestly and transparently.

Fortunately, it is not required that we share our inner psychological contents everywhere, in fact most places we won’t. But there is one context, inside of which we will need to open up and be honest about all that’s taking place inside of us, good bad and ugly: in a recovery community. The simple, courageous act of telling the truth – what we’re really actually thinking, feeling, and grappling with internally – is the single most protective factor for recovery.

In a residential rehabilitation facility, we begin to practice honesty in community. This practice has two components: learning to accurately identify what we are feeling, and then sharing it. While it can feel awkward at first to learn to tell the truth about what we notice taking place within us, residential rehabilitation is the perfect setting to get used to this necessity of recovery.

Accountability

Accountability is connected to taking responsibility for ourselves. Community helps with accountability, because when we say out loud in front of a group of kind attentive people what we truthfully notice within ourselves, it is harder to act out of congruence with that truth. Truth dispels the cloak of semi-darkness that addiction relies upon, and this helps us, in turn, make good on our promises to ourselves and each other. When we can say, without fear of judgment by another, that we made a promise to ourselves, but then we broke that same promise, we are one step closer to understanding what within us couldn’t say yes to that promise, what we feared about that change, or what within us we haven’t yet encountered, which needs our loving attention.

Psychotherapy and other Healing Modalities

Whether in individual therapy or in a group setting, ongoing psychological and physiological healing is highly recommended for people in recovery. What type of therapy, and at what frequency may vary by individual, but for people with addiction, we will not make it long if we do not continuously engage in the rather large job of healing and releasing the energetic burdens we received by way of traumatic events and non-secure attachment relationships in our lives.

In residential rehabilitation, we have intensive experiences with different kinds of therapies and healing modalities that kick-start (or restart) our therapeutic journey, in ways that inform and set us up for success in ongoing therapy after treatment.

Post-Treatment Planning: Life After Residential Rehab

Recovery is a lifestyle which will need to be actively nourished, nurtured, and maintained over time.

Here are three pillars of a strong recovery structure, which you may expect to be part of your life after completing residential rehab:

Pillar 1: Consistent participation in 12 Step (or another peer-led recovery community).

12 Step involvement, not only attendance but working the steps with a sponsor, is the number one most effective safeguard against relapse.

Recovery community involvement brings, with time, a level of connection, unity, comradeship, and restoration of spirit that far exceeds what we may have ever hoped for out of life. Community is a powerful antidote to isolation and the many forms of suffering that come with feeling cut off and disconnected from our fellow humans.

12 Step does for us what we needed our addiction to do for us – it helps us dispel psychological burdens. Even with tools learned in rehab, we will need a place where we can dispel our psychological burdens safely. Burdens, tensions, and inner conflicts left uncleared turn into relapse. 12 Step is a place to receive safe support, experience fellowship, and live a life suffused with meaning.

Pillar 2: Aftercare treatment.

Aftercare refers to the treatment services a person receives after finishing an intensive program. Depending on what options are available to you, aftercare may involve attending an intensive outpatient program for some weeks. In general, aftercare is designed to gradually ease people out of an intensive treatment environment, through a slow reduction in frequency of services.

Aftercare will usually start out with a high level of treatment hours per week, then reduce to weekly, monthly, and eventually, occasional alumni events. Aftercare helps support a transition from higher to lower structure. It also sustains positive relationships with treatment staff, and ensures we stay close to people who will look out for us until we don’t need so much looking after anymore.

Pillar 3: Care for the Body

The physical body is an enormous resource for recovery. When the sweet animal body is happy because we have given her appropriate nourishment, rest, play, physical affection, and downtime, the vast majority of psychological troubles cannot find fertile ground in us.

Here are four ways that Villa Kali Ma staff recommend the body be cared for after treatment: diet, exercise, sleep, and nature time.

Clean, nutrient-dense diet

Every body is different and it’s important to pay attention to what’s resonant and nourishing for you. Broadly speaking, most of us do well with a diet that is made up primarily of fresh vegetables, fruit, nuts, legumes, whole grains, and proteins. Specifically we would do well to steer clear of sugar, refined carbs, processed foods, pesticides (eat organic and non-GMO when possible) and chemical ingredients (a shorter ingredients label is generally better).

Exercise

Yoga, qi gong, dance, hiking, walking, running, cycling, swimming, aerobics, HIIT, weights, all have slightly different benefits. Do what works for you to include both gentle and vigorous movement in your daily life.

Sleep

Follow a consistent sleep schedule, going to bed at a consistent time and limiting screen time, especially in the evening.

Nature-Bathing

Get sufficient green time (outdoors in green spaces like parks and gardens, and, as possible, in wilder spaces). Let your whole body, mind, and spirit bathe in nature’s aura, as a protective strategy to stay sober and connected to what matters in life.

Long-Term Support Through Villa Kali Ma’s Continuum of Care 

Rehabilitation is an initiation into a lifestyle. Even an ample, lush amount of time sequestered in a high-quality residential treatment facility should not be considered a kind of “one and done” experience we will never need to look back on. Rather, rehab is more like the first few pages of a rich, deep story, one we will draw creative soul nourishment from for the rest of our lives.

Villa Kali Ma offers a full spectrum of care services, from medically supervised detoxification, to partial hospitalization, to residential treatment, to intensive outpatient, to outpatient, to aftercare. Our goal is to be available at every level of care for when you need us.

If you’re a woman looking to recover from addiction, mental illness, and trauma in a safe, holistic, effective care setting, consider our spectrum of programs and services. They are designed just for you. We’d love to meet you and share what we have found to be helpful for women walking the same path you find yourself on now.

 

 

 

 

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