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Understanding Complex PTSD: Signs, Symptoms, and Hope for Healing

Famously, some cultures have more words for snow than we do in English .”Snow on the ground”, “snow in the sky”, and even “drifting snow” were once purported to have different names in Inuit languages.

Accurate or not, the oft-quoted idea of Inuit peoples having seven words for snow illustrates the fact that there can be many ways of naming and conceptualizing the same phenomenon. It also suggests that those who are directly exposed to something, who see it and work with it every day, and who have good reason and opportunity to pay close attention to it, will naturally perceive distinctions significant enough to call by another name entirely. 

Those of us who work with women to recover from addiction and mental illness have our reasons to pay ongoing attention to the heartbreaking, baffling mystery of psychological trauma. It is no wonder then, that collectively we have discovered new names for trauma’s many different faces, forms and phases. 

Once upon a time, trauma wasn’t even a concept, at least not in its modern form – the word, from the Greek, means simply wound. What was originally observed by psychology pioneers like Jean Martin Charcot and Sigmund Freud, a phenomenon that eventually earned the name “shell shock” around the time of the first world wars, was known of, but only very imprecisely understood. Fortunately for the traumatized among us, as the field of psychology evolved , the term and its subcategories have become more delineated, astute and refined. 

In 2026, we now have more names for trauma than ever before. Acute trauma, complex trauma (C-PTSD), developmental trauma, intrauterine and pre-verbal trauma, trans-generational trauma, vicarious trauma, collective trauma, and religious trauma are categories meriting distinct therapeutic approaches, according to the International Trauma Professionals Association  for one. Professionals in the trauma field today generally concur that there are many different variants of the phenomenon that Freud long ago referred to as an “hysterical attack”, in keeping with conceptualizations forged by his mentor Charcot .

There is one form of trauma which is very important to be aware of, especially for women. This type of trauma is called complex post traumatic stress disorder, or C-PTSD. C-PTSD first entered the collective awareness through the truly pioneering work of Judith Hermann. Hermann discovered that PTSD was not the only kind of trauma, and that trauma originating from chronic exposure to abusive and neglectful circumstances was widespread. Since then, collective awareness and understanding of this less obvious, but in many ways equally insidious type of trauma and its impacts on human development has grown. 

We at Villa Kali Ma hold that C-PTSD is exceptionally important to be aware of, as women. Many of the women we encounter struggle with C-PTSD symptoms, without knowing that there is a name for the pervasive negative experiences they are enduring. C-PTSD treatment can be a life-changing form of trauma recovery for women. So much so, that we feel every woman should know about the disorder and about the options which are available to her for healing it. In this piece, we share a little bit more about C-PTSD and how it affects women, to that end

Understanding Complex PTSD and How It Affects Women

Complex post traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) is more subtle, as well as more integrated into personality. This means that it feels like “me”. For that reason, it is usually harder to detect than traditional PTSD. C-PTSD feels like water to the fish, meaning that the symptoms have been with a person for so long, that she wouldn’t know that it is always there in the background, informing and affecting her experience. 

Many chronic mental and physical health conditions, such as ADHD, depression, anxiety, and physical health problems like migraines, autoimmune problems, and inflammation, may actually be manifestations of traumatization. Because trauma affects the brain and the nervous system, in turn impacting hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, it affects every aspect of the human experience.

C-PTSD pervades women by impacting their brains and neurology, their very perception of events, influencing cognition and interpretation of what is going on in the moment. Whether we are in a state of high nervous system arousal (irritable, anxious, edgy and on guard), or on the other hand in a kind of nervous collapse (numb, fatigued, spacey and drained), either way our sense of who we are, as well as our read on what is taking place in the moment, is highly skewed. Specifically, our experience is flavored by social or physical survival fear, and deep dread. 

This constant state of low-grade social and/or physical survival fear has widespread influence on our work and relationship lives. Whatever women with C-PTSD encounter in love, family and career, tends to be at least slightly tinged with a background sense of terror and dread. Additionally, acute episodes of severe emotional distress commonly interrupt daily life and make it hard to participate at the same level of capacity as non-traumatized people. 

Recognizing the Signs and Symptoms of Complex Trauma

Here are some common signs of C-PTSD. 

Emotional Flashbacks

For women with C-PTSD, their bodies, minds, and emotions have a tendency to return to bad, scary, dreadful memories on repeat, rather than leaving memories in the past. We aren’t able to process or release those feelings once and for all, and instead are prone to emotional flashbacks. 

An emotional flashback means feeling the old bad feelings even when the old bad situation isn’t actually happening again. For example, no one is actually abandoning us, but we feel just as distressed and fearful as we did back when we really were being abandoned and our lives depended on the person staying with us.  

Flashbacks are often triggered by stimuli in the environment that were coupled with the event itself. For example, a person can be triggered by a certain smell, place, person, or type of situation.

During flashbacks, it feels like a bad thing from the past is happening again, or is still happening. The body perceives danger, and signals this to us with a racing heart, sweating, and shaking. Tunnel vision, muscle tension, and feeling unreal can also be part of the experience. These physical symptoms are signs that the body has mobilized for action, such as running away, fighting off an attacker, or clinging to a protector. It is also common to collapse and go numb after a certain amount of over-activation into stress. Flashbacks are often triggers for relapse in substance abuse, eating disorders, self-harm, and other 

Shame, Guilt, and Low Self-Esteem

Shame is the belief that you are bad, that you don’t deserve love and belonging. Guilt and feelings of worthlessness are close by when there is shame. Women who have C-PTSD may have the classic “doormat” personality style, apologizing for their existence and not consciously aware of their inherent value as beloved members of the family of life. Crippling perfectionism and harsh self-judgment are chronic conditions. For women with C-PTSD, any life event can trigger shame, since the shame is attached to who they believe they are in essence. Shame is one of the tragic legacies of childhood sexual abuse, as well as emotional and physical abuse or neglect. 

Hypervigilance

Hypervigilance means that a person is always on guard, expecting the worst to happen at any moment, and being prepared to take preventative, protective action if needed. The classic example of hypervigilance is a combat veteran with PTSD, who can’t stop seeing danger everywhere, even when the war is over. 

For women with C-PTSD, the danger they’re on guard against may be social or relational rather than physical (though it can also be that). Women with C-PTSD tend to feel like they need to be in control and feel very threatened when facing uncertainty. They also pay close attention to all details in the environment, including facial expressions of their loved ones. Depending what type of danger was experienced – aggression, neglect, abandonment, sexual violation – women will be on the lookout for signs of these interpersonal events at all times, ready to take action to avoid the social or relational danger they are expecting to happen at any moment.   

Substance Abuse, Eating Disorders and Self-Harm

Women with C-PTSD often have a problem with substances, abusing food through overeating or restricting or both, self-harming behaviors like cutting, and suicidal tendencies, feelings and thoughts. This is because the pre-existing condition of chronic stress, fear, dread, and shame is so hard to live with, that it sets a person up for seeking relief through whatever works to block out the feelings, sensations, and thoughts.   

Self-Sabotage

Finally, women with C-PTSD may have a lifelong pattern of self-sabotage. Any time a good thing gets going in their lives, whether it be a loving partner, a good job, or another positive life event, they may be triggered to subconsciously take negative action or act out in such a way that destroys progress made, burns bridges, and returns them to life circumstances that are smaller in scope, less lovely, and more shut down. 

The reason for this is that women with C-PTSD are on the search for basic safety, and are still trying to solve the puzzle, on some level, of what went wrong in the past that so deeply destroyed their intactness. To open up into higher vibrations of love and purposeful life is enormously threatening to the traumatized parts of the personality, that would rather lock a woman up in her own fear prison than risk exposure to new forms of danger (or to risk having to encounter the old forms of danger again).

For more in-depth information about C-PTSD, we highly recommend the work of Dr. Arielle Schwartz. 

Evidence-Based Treatments for C-PTSD at Villa Kali Ma

C-PTSD responds to several forms of treatment. At Villa Kali Ma, we offer many  forms of trauma treatment in parallel, to help women heal their PTSD in the most holistic and global way. 

EMDR and Brainspotting 

EMDR and Brainspotting are believed to change the way that the brain recalls a memory. Not erasing memories, but changing the amount of activation in the nervous system that takes place when thinking of certain memories. Before this type of trauma treatment, it may be impossible to think of a certain event without re-experiencing the emotions, thoughts and physical sensations of the event, as if they are happening now. EMDR and Brainspotting help the brain to differentiate the present from the past, at least in terms of how it feels to the body and emotions. 

Body Work and Somatic Therapies

There are several wonderful modalities that help women with C-PTSD build feelings of basic safety in the body, improve their here and now orientation, and complete trauma responses. Trauma Tension and Release Exercises (TRE) , Somatic Experiencing , massage and trauma-informed Yoga are some of modalities we offer that help women allow their bodies, brains, and nervous systems to process unfinished business at the level of physiology. 

Internal Family Systems Therapy and Mindfulness and Self-Compassion

Internal Family Systems Therapy  (IFS) is a highly transformational psychodynamic therapy that helps a person to heal all the traumatized inner children that live inside the soul of a person who has C-PTSD. IFS changes a woman’s subjective sense of herself, shifting her from a state of chronic shame and low self-worth, to an accurate recognition of her own inherent and unconditional marvelousness. Symptoms like rage and fear transform into more balanced and helpful forms, like boundaries and appropriate caution. 

Mindful Self-Compassion, likewise, is a popular modality that helps women accustomed to treating themselves with severity, harshness and coldness, to activate their inner fountain of self-love and kindness. Both of these powerful approaches are offered at Villa Kali Ma because they are so good at restoring a foundation of softness, love, and self-support. 

Begin Your Healing Journey with Trauma-Informed Care

It’s important for women to receive trauma-informed care. Trauma-informed care means that emphasis is placed on subjective experiences as well as objective measures for safety, control, and empowerment, placing each woman in charge of her own choices in recovery. 

Trauma-informed care insists on respect for all parts of a woman, understanding that each symptom has a role which has, at its origins, a positive intention of helping a woman to cope in challenging circumstances. Rather than viewing negative and even self-destructive behaviors as a problem, trauma-informed care understands that every feature in the ecosystem of the psyche needs to be understood in full, before any changes are suggested. Finally, trauma-informed care means that women are given the body and nervous-system support they need to gradually shift gears out of a mode of perception that feels dangerous, to a perception which feels safe, before they are encouraged to be “positive” or “look on the bright side”. 

At Villa Kali Ma, trauma-informed care is integrated into all of our services, in our several facilities in northern San Diego County. We also offer a stand-alone, trauma treatment facility  that administers cutting edge treatments which can be difficult to access outside of such a licensed facility. 

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General

The Unburdening Process in Internal Family Systems Therapy

Women recovering from addiction, mental illness and trauma can find relief and improve their lives through learning to use the healing tools of Internal Family Systems Therapy. That’s why Internal Family Systems Therapy is one of the many trauma-informed approaches we offer at Villa Kali Ma. We use IFS tools to help women who are reclaiming lives of purpose, beauty and meaning. In this post, we’ll dive in to the topic of unburdening, a key component of the IFS approach to healing trauma. 

What are Exiles in Internal Family Systems Therapy? 

Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS) is a parts-work model, which holds that all of us have many different sides of our nature, sometimes called sub-personalities in other psychotherapy approaches. Figures like the inner child and the inner critic are examples of parts, but IFS shows that there are a surprising number of parts inside of each person’s system, and that parts can be very unique and personal. By learning to relate kindly to each of our parts, we dramatically improve our inner world, learning to meet our own needs assertively, and eventually behaving very differently in the outer world as a result.

IFS divides parts into two categories, protectors and exiles, based on their role within the inner system. Protectors act defensively and reactively to try to shield us from overwhelming amounts of pain. Protectors are recognizable within the concept of psychological defenses, where behaviors like rationalizing or denial serve a protective function 

IFS holds that the parts of us that try, preventatively and reactively, to block us from feeling too much pain all at once are well-intentioned, misunderstood heroes. They have been helping us get through what otherwise might have completely blown us to smithereens, psychologically speaking. Protectors are the parts of us tasked with meeting expectations and maintaining relationships deemed necessary for our survival, such as making sure loved ones don’t abandon us and that we keep our jobs. Protectors can be quite extreme, but IFS says the extreme roles our protectors take on reflect accurately just how extreme our childhood circumstances were.  

Exiles, on the other hand, rather than taking strategic action or trying to manage pain, are the ones that feel the feelings. These are the parts of us that have been burdened with extreme beliefs, thoughts, feelings and behaviors. An example of an extreme belief could be “I am a bad person” or “I don’t deserve love”. These beliefs are considered burdensome and extreme by IFS, because it is impossible to hold such a core belief and function well in the world for long. As long as a part of us continues to believe that about ourselves, the way that we perceive our lives, and how we feel about being alive, will be painful and dysfunctional. Burdens ultimately create suffering and problems in our lives. For us to get better, it is suggested that burdens be cleared from our system and fully healed, so that we can operate in a healthier way. Once these burdens are removed, we can expect that our parts become naturally free, happy and high-functioning, turning from burdened parts into wonderful versions of themselves! 

Other common burdens include shame, guilt, fear, rage, abandonment, betrayal, and powerlessness. Those of you who are familiar with the effects of trauma will notice that the feelings, thoughts, sensations and beliefs that exiles hold as burdens match the unresolved emotions and stresses of traumatization. The exiles are the parts within us, in fact, who are traumatized. 

Recognizing Parts as Helpful

Because of the way that trauma works in the psyche, most of us found a way to divide our inner world into parts that can function well in the world, perhaps even carrying on with normal life. It was necessary to carry on with daily life tasks without excessive pain, shame, guilt, fear and anger. The way that this is possible is through a kind of compartmentalization, which means that the trauma-generated beliefs, thoughts, feelings and sensations are stored separately, sometimes in a completely different part of the brain.

This capacity of separating out parts internally is not pathological, but rather an ingenious mechanism invented by a psyche facing life-threatening circumstances. It is a way to temporarily not process what would otherwise be overwhelming to be consciously aware of in that moment. 

In IFS, the parts that were stored away, who are holding the trauma experience, are in need of a process called unburdening. Although we have hidden traumatized parts away, their thoughts, feelings, emotions, and sensations still have influence on us. These wounded parts hold baggage that is weighing us down, and they keep trying to release it. 

Their feelings and needs erupt to the surface at inopportune times. If you’ve ever overreacted to something, that suggests hidden parts inside, to whom that big reaction rightfully belongs. For example, we sometimes react “childishly” to something. In such cases, rather than calling ourselves immature, it is probably more accurate to say that a child part within us has surfaced. That child part’s way of looking at the world, the feelings she’s having, her very immaturity, are actually completely developmentally appropriate for a child her age. 

The IFS Unburdening Process

IFS therapy calls the process of healing exiles “unburdening”, in honor of the fact that the goal of the process is to allow exiles to lay their burdens down once and for all. The heavy trauma baggage that these exiles have been carrying can, more often than not, be transmuted and transformed into something positive for the individual.

The unburdening process requires relating very differently to the parts within that are still carrying the beliefs, feelings, and sensations of our traumatic past. Rather than shutting them up and pushing them aside, we learn to support them by giving them what they didn’t have the chance to receive back then when the bad things were happening. By listening to them, believing them, and validating their feelings, we get into a position where we can give them the opportunity to drop the burdens they were forced to take on.    

IFS likes to use symbolic processes inspired by the natural world during the unburdening. These metaphors serve to help young parts intuitively grasp how toxic mental, emotional, and even physical baggage can be utterly transformed into a new state. Burdens can be burned up in fire, faded in sunlight, or liquified in a volcano. They can be dissolved into the ocean, washed away in the rain, or pounded to bits by a giant waterfall. Old beliefs and emotions can be buried and digested by the earth, whisked away by the wind and evaporated in fresh air. 

Once a part has told her story, and all the aspects of the burdens have been identified, the part is asked whether she would like to get rid of her burden using one of the natural world elements. There is no pre-defined way to use the elements – the burdened parts get to choose how they want to dispose of the material they have been carrying. Unburdening is, therefore, a creative, spontaneous, and unscripted process, drawing on images that arise naturally in the mind’s eye of the person who is healing. Intuition, instinct, and imagery are important parts of the unburdening process. 

When in the Therapeutic Process Does IFS Unburdening happen?

Unburdening generally takes place at certain spontaneous openings in the healing journey, quite a bit later on in the overall arc of the IFS process. It is not at all unusual for most of the IFS session work to be centered on working with protector parts, rather than exiles. As with all trauma work, a certain degree of safety and stability must be established first.  

This is because it is not possible to safely unburden exiles without the full permission and cooperation of our protector parts. Protector parts, like the inner critic and the addict, are powerful forces. If they do not feel it is safe to access our pain, or are afraid that healing this pain would somehow lead to consequences that wouldn’t be safe for us in the outer world, these parts easily sabotage or derail our attempts to heal. Sometimes the desire to heal runs directly counter to a protector part’s mandate. 

If we try to heal our exiles without the express consent of our protectors, we wll fail and experience backlash. Symptoms that are present in our inner system as the result of the operations of one of our protectors will increase rather than decrease. For example, if we have a substance-using part in our system, we must have the trust and cooperation of that substance-using part before trying to access an exile that substance-using part is protecting. If we do not first gain permission, the substance-using part could very likely increase the substance use as a way to defend against conscious contact with the traumatized exile.

If and only if we have first befriended protectors, understood their concerns in full, and come to a friendly agreement about unburdening some of the exiles’ load of pain, is it a good idea to try unburdening an exile. 

Gaining consent from our protectors can be a long process. We must honor the wisdom and experience of our protectors, proceeding very slowly and with utmost respect. 

For all of these reasons, it is not recommended to try to undergo the unburdening process in full without an IFS practitioner to facilitate. At the same time, learning about the unburdening process can be helpful for anyone, as long as you remember not to venture into dangerous territory without a professional to help you. In that spirit, we offer the following exercise, for you to explore on your own time and authority, as you see fit. 

Journal Exercise to Explore the IFS Concept of Burdens

Please take what you like and leave the rest of the following journal exercise for exploring the concept of burdens and unburdening. If you notice that you are getting activated, take that as a sacred “no” and stop doing the exercise. There is no benefit to pushing through or overriding your boundaries or concerns; that will only result in backlash. 

Please, we mean it. Slower is faster with all healing work! 

This exercise zeros in on one particular part of the unburdening process, which involves asking the question, “What would you have rather experienced?”

  1. Think of a specific, light-to-medium burden that you already have noticed you carry, which you can use to explore this process. The way to detect a burden is you notice that there is constriction, heaviness, resistance, or a sense of unhappiness around a topic.  Please don’t go for an item that has a lot of emotional charge. Instead, pick something that you know you will be able to explore without getting triggered.  For example, perhaps you feel under-confident in your cooking abilities. It’s not enormously triggering to think about, but you know that you have some kind of negativity around it.
  2. Think of a specific time when you encountered this burdened feeling, thought, or sensation in yourself. Recall the scene in which you encountered this burdened energy, and write down the following:
  3. Sensations-What happens in my body when I encounter this burdened topic? Sensations, postures, & movement impulses, etc?
  4. Feelings-What emotions do I feel? What comes up for me? 
  5. Thoughts -What goes through my head?
  6. Behavior Impulses-What do I notice I want to do?
  7. Beliefs-What core beliefs get activated? What negative self-concepts seem to get confirmed?
  8. Do-Over time! For each of the above items you noted, what would you have rather experienced? 

I would have rather experienced…

  1. Sensations
  2. Feelings
  3. Thoughts
  4. Behavior Impulses 
  5. Core Beliefs

Congratulations! You have explored one aspect of the unburdening process – identifying what you would rather have had.

IFS Therapy for Women at Villa Kali Ma

Villa Kali Ma is a licensed provider of integrative mental health services, trauma treatment, and addiction recovery. In all of our programs, we use a combination of clinical and holistic approaches to help women heal from substance abuse, psychological disorders, and trauma. 

Our clinical program is built around evidence-based practices widely recognized within the addictions, mental health and trauma field to work best with women. These effective clinical modalities include Internal Family Systems Therapy , EMDR , Ecotherapy, and several other wonderful approaches, such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Therapy (MSC), and Somatic Experiencing.  

In addition to our clinical core, we administer a comprehensive suite of holistic interventions, in complementary sessions interwoven throughout main treatment hours. Our holistic program includes yoga, breath work, acupuncture, nutritional medicine, spiritual coaching, and more.

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General

How Childhood Trauma Impacts Adult Mental Health and Relationships

Childhood trauma has far-reaching effects, shaping the course of our lives in significant ways. Depending on several factors, including genetic predisposition, temperament, position in the family, and how young we were when encountering adverse childhood events, we may be burdened with a variety of symptoms.

For women recovering from addiction and mental health disorders, it’s important to recognize childhood trauma effects when they show up within our own personalities and patterns of relating. We will want to invest some amount of personal work healing our inner child, and undergo trauma therapy, in order to restore our true selves and regain control of how we show up in the world with others.

It is not necessary to fight darkness, but rather to turn on a light, the saying goes. It is very similar with traumatization. By restoring the flow of life force within the body, psyche, and spirit, trauma blockages will eventually dissolve, allowing psychological development that was once arrested to proceed. 

The first step is to recognize trauma’s presence by its signature energetics and impacts. In this post, we take a look at how trauma affects adult mental health and relationships.    

The Lasting Impact of Childhood Trauma on Women’s Lives

In order to complete the most basic developmental tasks involved with growing up physically, emotionally, and mentally into a healthy, high-functioning adult, a degree of physical and psychological safety is required. Safety means both that we are nurtured and that we are protected. All humans have needs and boundaries. Children cannot thrive when developmental needs are unmet, nor when boundaries are violated. 

Provided we are sufficiently nurtured and protected, we naturally grow up, learning in a self-directed fashion through exploratory play and interactions with people, animals, and nature. In addition to safety, we need a high amount of autonomy – the chance, permission, and support to grow into our own unique self, in our own unique way. 

For a variety of reasons, many families are not able to provide the right mix of safety and autonomy that is required for children to have a healthy sense of self. In fact, our families may have done very poorly in one or more requirements of meeting needs, protecting boundaries, and supporting autonomy. If our families did a good job of this, that still doesn’t mean that our peers and teachers were able to.  

It’s important to understand that trauma is not in the events themselves, but in the way that a human nervous system responds to certain events. Many relatively common childhood experiences are identified by trauma experts as being traumatogenic, which means that children who are exposed to such adverse events tend to develop recognizable symptoms of trauma and even patterns of personality. Examples of traumatizing childhood events include physical, sexual and emotional abuse, physical and emotional neglect, having a parent who uses substances, witnessing domestic violence in the home, and separation, death of a parent, or divorce.   

What this means is that if you survived such circumstances in your childhood, chances are high that this impacted you in ways that are so ingrained into your personality and way of perceiving the world, that the effect might be invisible to you. Common signs of having been traumatized in childhood include sleep disorders, substance abuse, relationship troubles, intense emotions including fear and anger, spacing out, fatigue, illness, inability to relax, and shame. 

Understanding How Early Experiences Shape Adult Patterns

The key to understanding how untreated trauma from childhood affects life as an adult lies in recognizing trauma’s presence underneath cognitive, emotional, and behavioral patterns. Many mental and behavioral health symptoms can be unmasked as ingenious adaptations to trauma. Symptoms are likely to be mechanisms for coping with stress from being exposed to too many threats in the past. An excess of fear and anger indicates unintegrated experiences of being exposed to impacts which were life-threatening and violating. 

Keep in mind that events can be traumatizing to the human nervous system, brain and body, even when the people who affected us didn’t mean to hurt us. Remember also that many aspects of our culture which the majority of people consider to be normal are considered by some experts in the field to be lightly or even heavily traumatizing.   

We can begin to recognize trauma by getting curious about ourselves. Specifically, we must ditch the idea that we are sick, and ask instead how a symptom is helping us. What is the purpose of our depression? How does our irritability help us? What is anxiety good for?

When we get to know our anxiety, irritability, anger, and depression, as well as our seemingly counterproductive behaviors like substance use, self-sabotage, and low self-compassion, we may come to see that in actual fact, these legacy symptoms once helped us adapt to an environment that was trauma-generating. If we have symptoms of excess fear (anxiety, insomnia, dissociation) and excess anger (depression, irritability, self-harm, etc), that almost certainly means that we have spent some time in an environment that failed to meet our developmental and nurturance needs, violated our natural boundaries, or both. 

Breaking Free from Trauma Bonds and Unhealthy Relationships

It isn’t easy to heal trauma, but it is absolutely possible and certainly worth it. One area of life which can improve significantly through trauma healing is relationships with loved ones. 

If you experienced physical or emotional neglect, physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, or any combination of those in your early years, it is very likely that you have had trouble with founding and maintaining healthy relationships as an adult. You probably unconsciously sought out partners with whom you would experience a bond that resembles the bond you had with the same people who neglected or abused you. 

This may mean that you accept a low level of nurturance, a high level of boundary violation, or both. You may have an enmeshed, codependent relationship, in which you give your partner the love that you actually always needed to receive. You may prefer partners that treat you in a way that matches your own low self-esteem – with some level of neglect, misunderstanding, or disregard.

All of this is terribly common among women, and please hear us that this isn’t your fault. Rather, fraught relationships are unavoidable until trauma is addressed. Until we have healed our trauma, we likely wouldn’t know healthy love if it walked right up to us. Rather, we will tend to fall intensely in love with people who have similar patterns of relating as the people who hurt us the most. 

Nevertheless, each relationship attempt, even when it clearly mimics certain patterns of our childhood, is also a sign that deep inside, we have not given up on trying to get the genuine and appropriate love that we have always wanted and needed. And the good news is that, through trauma healing, we get one very important bonus: a chance at experiencing that love. We get this love when we activate our inner Self, becoming a source of the parenting, kindness, and even adoration that we always needed. We become the loving person we have always needed to have in our lives.

Learning to love ourselves, to recognize our own value, we attract a higher quality of emotional intelligence in partners, and interact differently with existing love relationships than we used to. Overall, we can expect that we gradually learn to behave with dignity and self-compassion, requiring that others treat us the same.   

Reclaim Your Story with Compassionate Trauma Treatment

If you have a trauma history, you have probably had moments in your life when you wanted to give up on trying to be yourself. Trying to be here in your best potential, in this world, in your skin, has felt too much at times – too painful and too difficult. 

To live openheartedly and authentically in this world, amid the interference of loud and often self-conflicting trauma symptoms; amid emotional instability, self-attack, and demoralizing outcomes; amid escalating substance abuse, relationship problems, and career struggles; it has undoubtedly been a lot for you at times. 

But hear this: trauma healing is possible. The work that it takes is worth it. The path of healing is emotionally intense, it’s true – but nothing you haven’t already been living with every day since the trauma started. There will be psychological pain at times, yes – but no more intense than the pain you already cope with. There is nothing to lose by healing trauma, and a lot to gain. In facing trauma, you risk short term triggering – having to re-experience what you already have experienced, and most likely still re-experience on repeat – for the potential reward of at last healing the wounds in a permanent way. 

You might be surprised, furthermore, to find out how sweet, rewarding, deepening, and meaningful the trauma healing journey. You might feel silly for not starting the journey earlier, and have to remind yourself that you needed all the time you did, to get to the point of facing it. You might be happy with every aspect of your history, in the end, recognizing how each wounding poison also brought its own magnificent antidote into your life. You just might.

Villa Kali Ma offers trauma-informed treatment for women struggling with substance addiction and mental health disorders. We also run a state-of-the-art trauma treatment center , offering several forms of cutting-edge treatments for helping women address their trauma.   

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General Recovery

A Day in the Life at a Residential Treatment Center for Women

 You might be wondering, “What’s a typical day like at Villa Kali Ma?” Let us give you a tour – in blog post form!

Here at the Villa – our residential treatment center for women recovering from addiction, mental illness and trauma – we have highly structured days designed to optimize healing. Our rehab routine is perfectly balanced to bring deep health and restoration to women’s bodies, minds, and spirits.

Read on to find out more about how our residential care program helps women create healing from deep within, using holistic, clinical, intuitive, and spiritual approaches that honor each woman’s unique life story.

A Day in the Life at Villa Kali Ma’s Women’s Residential Center 

Wake Up & Greet The Day

Mornings are a treasured, beloved part of the day at Villa Kali Ma. The first moments of wakefulness are sacred time, during which we gather our spirits and stir our bodies to return to the healing path for another day. Mornings at Villa Kali Ma include time for personal care, a nourishing breakfast, and daily journaling.

Mornings in Community

We open the treatment day by coming together in community at Villa Kali Ma, with our first yoga practice, meditation, or morning circle. Consciously releasing yesterday, we ground into the gifts of a new, present moment, through various mindfulness practices designed to wake us up in mind, body and soul. Morning groups are for coming together, co-creating the day ahead, connecting heart to heart, and preparing for a day of deep healing.

Morning and Afternoon Treatment Groups

During the week, core treatment groups take place every morning and afternoon. Treatment groups are based on a specific clinical modality of psychotherapy known to be effective for women recovering from addiction, mental illness and trauma, like Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Mindfulness and Self-Compassion, or Expressive Arts Therapy. Some groups focus on a theme, such as Love and Relationships. Each group teaches deep wisdom and centers on practical recovery skills. They also provide chances to share our truth safely with peers, facilitating bonds of connection.

Individual Sessions

Time is allotted in every woman’s schedule for individual psychotherapy, doctor’s appointments, and holistic modalities. Appointments usually take place at dedicated times in the mornings and afternoons during core treatment hours. Depending on your personalized treatment plan, you may receive sessions with an EMDR practitioner to address your trauma, individual therapy with your primary therapist to work on your goals, family therapy working on your relationships with loved ones, massage therapy, energy work, or nutritional counseling. Just to name a few of the many possibilities for individual sessions!

Meal Times, Breaks, and Down Time

There are several restorative breaks in the daily treatment schedule. These include time for shared meals, short respites between groups and individual sessions, and longer slots of free time. Most days you will spend your mealtimes together with your Villa Kali Ma peers, eating something healthy and delicious from Villa Kali Ma’s vegan kitchen. The rest of your free time can be spent in the manner that feels right for you: in quiet contemplation, journaling or reading, walking in the garden, talking with a new treatment friend, working on art therapy projects, or working out.

Evenings and Weekends

Evenings and weekends at Villa Kali Ma feature different kinds of treatment programming and activities, such as special nature outings, recovery meetings in the community, guest lectures, and unique healing events with the wider consciousness community, such as sound healings, breathwork, or shamanic journey experiences. Evenings and weekends also include quiet time, as well as space for hanging out with treatment peers, participating in fun therapeutic activities like gardening, going to the beach, or cooking together.

Daily Routines That Promote Healing and Growth

We believe strongly in the power of daily routine. We help women build a positive daily routine the easy way, through harnessing the power of habit. The fastest way to form healthy habits is through consistency and repetition: Our daily rehab schedule of recurrent positive activities gradually and gently makes wellness a deeply engrained habit.

Through just a few weeks of regular practice, the body comes to expect and even crave the components of a healthy lifestyle. After a month of clean diet, yoga, nature time, recovery focus, and deep inner work, our program graduates find it much easier to engage with their ongoing healing process even after they leave.

Our daily rehab routine focuses on three core dimensions: body, mind, and spirit.

Healthy Routines for the Body

We help women gently train their bodies to expect clean food, exercise and stretching, relaxation, nervous system regulation, and restorative sleep.

Healthy Routines for the Heart, Mind and Relationships

We help women gently train their minds to reflect and observe, to compassionately inquire within, and to build inner relationships of loving connection among parts of the Self. We teach practices of authentic expression and embodied ways to feel our feelings deeply and safely, so that we can relate to ourselves and others with kindness, courage, and honesty.

Healthy Routines for Spiritual Growth

We help women gently train in practices that welcome spirit into this world in a grounded and unpretentious way. Through variations of mindfulness, insight meditation, shamanic journeying, prayers, contemplation, active imagination, journaling, and nature practices, we help women discover and develop a relationship with spirit that’s truthful, integrated, and right for them.

How Structure and Support Create Safe Recovery Environments

Women need safety to be able to relax fully and let go of our burdens, and to release long-held trauma out of their bodies. Some degree of surrender to the process is necessary to recover, but we can’t surrender if we aren’t in a safe enough setting. Knowing and honoring this principle, we do our best to provide a setting that holds true safety for women. The supportive structure we provide for women in our treatment program is designed to maximize safety.

Safety can’t be faked or forced. The physical and psychological safety of our environment is perceived at neurobiological levels, deep inside pre-conscious layers of body and nervous system. As healers working with women’s tenderest vulnerabilities, we take care to ensure that we are providing a genuinely safe setting.

Our structure protects and safeguards women, not only from substances and environmental triggers, but from fallout from the many kinds of overwhelming inner turmoil that can rise up from within when women have experienced trauma. Our staff are attentive and ready to assist with challenges that may emerge in each woman’s process.

It’s important to us that each woman feels seen and held in high regard, not only by us but also by treatment peers. We also look out to make sure the environment is psychologically safe, so that our clients are protected from social worries and group dynamics that can make a treatment experience turn negative.

Our daily structure, together with the design and stewardship of the space itself, creates a strong, safe container for healing. Our firm, compassionate program holds the boundaries so that women in our care don’t have to.

Real Healing Happens Here: Join Our Residential Program

Villa Kali Ma’s residential treatment program nourishes and protects the needs of women recovering from addiction, mental illness, and trauma in a safe, structured setting.

Through our core clinical treatment schedule, we provide the best psychotherapies and behavioral health treatments available. Alongside these powerful clinical approaches to mental and behavioral health recovery, we support women with a lush bouquet of alternative holistic modalities. These modalities speak to women’s bodies, hearts, and spirits, addressing every facet of the female experience of illness and recovery.

Ayurvedic medicine, massage, reiki, energy work, yoga, acupuncture, breath work, nutrition, shamanic journeying, mindfulness, meditation, creative arts, and nature therapies are just a few of the ways that our integrative method makes the recovery path rich with personal meaning.

If you’re considering embarking on a deep and soulful journey of recovery from addiction, mental illness, or trauma, check out our many programs for women who want to heal mind, body, and soul as one.

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Learning to Be Here Now: A Trauma-Informed Perspective

More than fifty years ago, the spiritual teacher Ram Dass popularized the phrase “Be Here Now”. Distilling the essence of Eastern philosophies and spirituality for the benefit of people raised in the West, the Harvard psychologist-turned-yogi encapsulated an important truth in his 1971 book of the same title: life happens in the present moment.

Although many of us direct our attention regularly to memories of the past, and towards what we imagine will take place in the future, the past and the future are mental constructs. The past and the future are images, stories, and mental representations of life, but not life itself.

Another popular figure of the New Age movement, Eckhart Tolle, is likewise known for his influential book emphasizing “The Power of Now”, published in the late 1990s. Tolle writes “Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be”. Tolle describes in detail how, before awakening, most of us stay caught up with what he calls “psychological time”: memories of the past and predictions of the future.

In 2014, yet another bestselling author espoused the benefits of living in the now, but for clinical rather than spiritual purposes. In his seminal book The Body Keeps the Score, trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk describes the role of trauma treatment as helping clients to be here now – instead, specifically, of staying there and then. The “there and then” to which Van der Kolk refers is the traumatic past. Van der Kolk emphasizes that for trauma survivors, the here and now holds the promise of healing.

Why Being Here Now is Hard for Trauma Survivors

If staying present in the here and now is hard for you, you’re far from alone in that. At a glance, our addicted, distracted, overmedicated society reflects the widespread trouble most Westerners continue to have, to live life as it unfolds in the present rather than primarily through thoughts of past and future.

It may be validating to hear that for people with a trauma background, being present in the here and now is even more challenging than usual. Even people who do not have disruptive trauma symptoms need practice directing their attention to the present moment. But for people with nervous systems that carry what Dr. Janina Fisher calls the “living legacy of trauma”, the present moment can be exceptionally difficult to access.

Difficulty being in the now is due to the ways that trauma symptoms and memories are designed on purpose to keep the past alive. Our symptoms hijack our attention because we continue to perceive, on deep levels of the nervous system, that we are not safe. It is very hard to take our attention away from reliving the past and pre-living the future, because the strategies we developed to deal with real dangers from our past are still with us now. Living in “trauma time”, we are stuck in events that may have happened decades ago, still feeling the same feelings and sensations wherever we go.

The fact is, traumatized people have an even stronger reason than the mythical “normal” people, to learn to live in the present moment. As van der Kolk insists, only in the present moment will people recovering from danger find the experience of safety, that needed element which makes healing possible.

Making Friends with What Keeps Us in the There and Then

There is a way for people with trauma to learn to be more present in the now, the only place where safety and healing are actually available. The way begins, paradoxically, with befriending the parts that keep attention “there and then”, re-experiencing sensations that belong together with the traumatic past.

How do you relate to your mental health, trauma and addiction symptoms? If you’re like most of us, you probably have a range of responses. Sometimes you’re frustrated with yourself for “still” having certain symptoms, like depression or anxiety. Maybe at other times you feel despair and a sense of hopelessness that you’ll ever get better. Quite likely, you take it as a personal flaw – in which case you beat yourself up about having symptoms. If you have a substance addiction, eating disorder, self-harm, or a suicidal side, you almost certainly feel ashamed that you do, more than compassionate towards yourself about it.

What if there were a different way to relate to our mental health, trauma, and addiction symptoms? What if by befriending those symptoms as the survival resources that they actually are (or once were), we could shift our inner landscape, gently and without violence? What if by making friends with our own extreme survival solutions, those extreme parts could soften, allowing us to be in the now, more of the time, where we can at last receive the healing kindness we have always needed?

Just such an approach comes recommended by Frank G. Anderson, MD. Dr. Anderson is a psychiatrist, trauma expert, and Internal Family Systems Institute Lead Trainer who integrates several trauma-informed therapies, including EMDR, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, and IFS, into his work with trauma clients. In his groundbreaking book Transcending Trauma: Healing Complex PTSD with Internal Family Systems Therapy, Anderson explains how radically accepting, understanding, and validating our symptoms as protector parts using survival strategies left over from our traumatic past is the beginning of finding a natural capacity for now-moment presence.

How to Be Present After Trauma

In order to get better, we have to call things by their right names. This is especially true in the field of recovery. We get much better, much faster, when we recognize the signature presence of trauma, underlying our symptoms and our behaviors.

In particular, we need to understand how a symptom is serving in a protective function. According to luminaries in the field of trauma treatment like the above-cited Janina Fisher of Trauma-Informed Stabilization Treatment and Pat Ogden of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, we don’t get far treating surface symptoms like anxiety, depression, or substance abuse, if we can’t see that those symptoms are procedurally learned.

Procedural memory is a type of long-term implicit memory involving recollections which can only be demonstrated through motor action, or performance of physical or cognitive tasks rather than conscious recollection of events. Procedural memory is the memory of skilled actions, such as how to ride a bike, swim, or drive a car. The body remembers how to do something, even if we can’t recall the details of learning to master the sensorimotor activity.

Ogden’s somatic therapy work with trauma survivors helped uncover that what we commonly think of as symptoms of a mental health disorder, may actually be the evidence of our survival adaptations to extreme circumstances, encoded as procedural memory. Habits of posture, movement, eye contact, and nervous system states reflect what we learned in the past to be most adaptive. What this means is that if we are anxious now, we can assume that orienting to the world as full of danger, thinking rapid, fearful thoughts, and maintaining a hyperaroused nervous system helped us survive before.

According to Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS), the radically non-pathologizing model developed by Richard Schwartz, which the above-mentioned Frank Anderson practices as well, we should relate to our symptoms as heroes to be thanked for their service, rather than enemies to be vanquished. Not only should we make friends, we should be grateful for our symptoms!

Honor the Symptoms as Evidence of How We Made It This Far

For women with trauma, it is very likely that they do not have a fully coherent narrative to explain all of their intense emotions, negative thoughts, and extreme behaviors. In the absence of a good explanation, many women fall into the trap of self-blame, which amplifies shame. When well-meaning friends, loved ones, and even therapists try to make extreme symptoms like addiction or self-harm go away without first fully understanding the positive intentions of those symptoms, women can feel even more ashamed and confused, unable to explain why a part of them wants to hang on to destructive behaviors.

When we understand the ways that trauma memories are stored in the brain, as implicit memories – nonverbal sensations, nervous system states, posture, and habits of movement – we may discover that our symptoms are actually procedural memories. The symptoms we experience now shift from being evidence of a mental disorder, to being evidence of how we survived our traumatic past.

Anxiety reveals itself as a survival strategy of maintaining a hyperaroused nervous system, ready to flee at any moment. Chronic anger reveals itself to be a legacy of a frequently-needed fight response. Depression, shame, and self-loathing, on the other end of the vagal spectrum, reflect a learned strategy of collapse-and-submit, indicating that we may have had many experiences in our past wherein dorsal vagal shut down worked best to secure our survival.

Because our symptoms represent parts of us that figured out ingenious ways to survive, these symptoms aren’t going to change easily. What we can do is ask our symptoms to tell us when, where, and why we learned to do that. How did depression help us survive? How did shame, anxiety, or cutting help us in the past? What is the really good reason that we began to use substances to cope? What would have happened to us, if we had not had those strategies available to us?

Distinguishing There and Then from Here and Now

Slowly, through honoring our symptoms as carrying our survival strategies, we may learn to distinguish between then and there, and here and now.

If it feels like we are in danger, but there is no danger present now, then the sensation of danger is an implicit memory rather than a truth about now.

For instance, if we tend to avoid eye contact with people, that may be because we learned procedurally that it wasn’t safe to make full eye contact. Perhaps the eyes of our primary caregivers were frightening. Perhaps making eye contact made us a target for our abuser, or attracted mean-girl bullying at school.

Recognizing how our behaviors helped us, we can start to wonder whether the strategy is always necessary now that we’re grown up, away from many of the dangers that once threatened our chances of survival. We may discover that in this moment, with this person, it is ok to meet eyes. Once we learn that any number of behavioral habits we thought were part of who we are, including symptoms like a tendency to stay depressed, to fear social interactions, or to overeat, are records of solutions we found long ago, we can begin to ask ourselves questions which will help us adjust to a now moment that is almost certainly safer than our past (if only because we are bigger and more developed now).

In the words of Deb Dana of the Polyvagal Institute, we can learn to ask ourselves the discernment question:

In this moment, in this place, with this person or people, is this level of nervous system response necessary?

In the instant of recognition that it would, in fact, be safe to relax some of our protective stance, whether that protection is coming in the form of anxiety, anger, or despair, we touch into that hallowed, storied, and most sacred dimension, the only place where healing can happen: the here and now.

Thanks for reading!

If you’re curious to see how trauma-informed care could make a difference in your story, consider one of Villa Kali Ma’s many holistic programs for women recovering from trauma, mental illness, and addiction.

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Internal Family Systems Therapy for Women with Addiction

What is Internal Family Systems Therapy?

The Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS) model is a non-pathologizing approach to psychotherapy that applies systems thinking to work on inner relationships among parts inside an individual’s psyche.

IFS holds the perspective that every person’s mind is made up of relatively distinct sub-personalities, a little bit like what was portrayed in the Pixar film Inside Out. IFS also asserts that every person has a core Self, the true natural leader of the inner system. Self is the healing agent, and restoration of relationship between parts and Self is the goal of IFS.

Internal Family Systems is an evidence-based practice. IFS is used effectively to treat mental health disorders, trauma, and addiction. The goal of IFS is to restore inner wholeness, through reconnecting parts with the client’s Self, empowering Self to guide and harmonize the client’s inner world.

No Bad Parts

IFS was developed by a family therapist, Dr. Richard Schwartz, in the 1980s. The model has evolved since the early days, but it retains a core premise reflecting a revolutionary insight.

Schwartz’s insight was that all symptoms and behaviors, even the most destructive and damaging, are manifestations of an internal part that has positive intentions for the client. As the title of Dr. Schwartz’s latest book asserts, there are “No Bad Parts”.

Schwartz asserts that we get further in therapy with an attitude of curiosity and acceptance towards all symptoms, instead of picking sides or battling “bad” behavior. Only once we understand the positive intention of an extreme adaptation can we begin to shift dynamics of the inner system.

How Parts Become Extreme 

In the face of danger or threat, Parts take on extreme roles to help protect the inner system. Extreme roles can save a person’s life, but they carry burdens: painful emotions, somatic postures, and negative beliefs.

The pain of a role is not the same as the part itself. Parts wouldn’t naturally think negative thoughts or behave in self-destructive ways, but if they learn that it’s necessary for survival, they may take on these roles.

A way to understand this piece is to ask the question, “How might believing this painful thought, feeling this painful emotion, or performing this extreme behavior have helped me survive in my original environment?”

For example, as adults we may rail against our habit of eating too many sweets. One concerned or critical Part of us wants us to stop overeating, but we find we can’t, because another Part, different from the Part that wants us to stop, is doing the overeating. We can stay locked in an inner power struggle, one Part pitted against another.

But if we are willing to explore how the behavior of eating too many sweets helped us survive our original life circumstances, we may open up a series of discoveries that leads us to compassion and understanding of why we behave the way we do.

By asking the sweets-eating Part, with genuine curiosity and respect, how she is helping us respond to life adaptively by way of that behavior, she may give us a revealing answer. She might tell us that eating sweets helped us soothe bad feelings when we were small. Perhaps it wasn’t safe to have normal child emotions like sadness, fear, or anger in our home, so using food to numb emotions was adaptive. Or she may say that being a little bit overweight helps us feel safer from unwanted male attention.

We can’t know ahead of time what a Part’s answer will be – we have to ask.

Through open exploration, we may come to recognize that the sweets-eating Part, and other Parts like it, are still trying all these years later to help us be some version of us that was helpful once upon a time, when maximizing survival in our home environment.

Once we connect extreme behavior, beliefs and emotions and to a young Part of us that is doing her best in a difficult role, we tend to soften towards ourselves. That softening is the beginning of being able to heal the inner system.

Resolution comes when we give ourselves the kind of help now, Self-to-Part, that we actually needed then. Healing encounters happen organically in relationship among Self and Parts, once the burdens of false belief and painful emotion are recognized.

Self may spontaneously say to our little Part, Of course you were sad, of course you felt lonely and angry sometimes. You’re just a little girl! Those are normal, natural feelings for a child. For anyone! You don’t have to hide any of your feelings from me. That’s not your fault, you didn’t do anything wrong! Let me put my arms around you, I love you so much!

Through IFS, Parts are given the opportunity to “unburden”, or be released out of extreme roles. Released from a certain role, a Part no longer has to hold extreme beliefs or act in extreme ways. These changes have ripple effects throughout the whole inner system.

Internal Family Systems Therapy and Addiction

In IFS, addiction isn’t considered bad, per se. Addiction is viewed as an extreme behavior, coming from a Part trapped in an extreme role. Although the negative impacts of addiction are acknowledged, IFS makes a distinction between impact and intention. The intention of the Part within that uses substances is actually positive – to stop emotional pain from taking over the client’s inner system.

In IFS, there are different kinds of Parts. Some Parts protect the inner system, and other Parts carry the wounds and feelings of what happened to us. Protector parts act to keep wounded Parts and their pain out of conscious awareness, so that we don’t get overwhelmed and can carry on the tasks of daily life. Protector Parts can be either preventative, or reactive.

Preventative Parts protect us by making sure we behave in ways which reduce the likelihood of the bad things from our past happening to us again. Their motto is “Never again!”

Our Preventative Parts dedicate themselves to getting us to behave in ways that minimize the chances of getting triggered or hurt again. Preventative Parts have many ingenious strategies to keep our vulnerabilities shielded. Some examples of Preventative Parts include Perfectionist, Inner Critic, People Pleaser, Overplanner, Controller, Hypervigilance, Hardworking, or Caretaker Parts.

But no matter how hard our system works to prevent our pain-carrying Parts from getting triggered into conscious awareness, sometimes they do. When that happens, Preventative Protector Parts hand the job off to our Reactive Parts, whose job it is to manage pain once it has been triggered.

Reactive Parts kick into gear once the pain of a wound has gotten too close to the surface, and swift action is needed to soothe or suppress the feelings. Typical Reactive Parts include all the behaviors we might do that numb or modulate feelings: Substance Use, Eating Disorders, Self-Harm, Shopping, Internet/Phone Addiction, Binge Watching, Suicidal, Risk-Taking, Sexually Acting Out Parts, and so on.

How Internal Family Systems Therapy works for Women with Addiction

IFS maintains that we cannot expect our Reactive Parts to stop doing their jobs, until we have shown both the Preventative Parts and the Reactive Parts that the wounded Parts are ok now. And for those wounded Parts to actually be ok, they need to be retrieved from where they have been frozen in scary moments of the past, and brought into relationship with our core Self in the here and now. The Self is one within us who can be loving, kind, and wise.

IFS provides a pathway for Self-Part reunion to become a reality, by providing wounded Parts a chance to tell their stories to us. The healing for those wounded Parts comes through a restored relationship with us, which is a little bit like adopting our own little orphaned inner children from the past, to come live with us now in the present. Once those wounded Parts are healed through a restored relationship with Self, who helps the wounded Parts release their burdens of extreme beliefs and emotional pain, then Reactive Parts are freed from having to resort to extreme behaviors to soothe the wounded Parts’ pain.

While stabilization of destructive addiction behaviors is in progress, therefore, IFS actively pursues the underlying wound healing that will make the Substance Using Part (a Reactive Part), redundant in her role.

Convincing the Substance Using Part that she no longer needs to do her job for the client’s inner system is a process. A big portion of the therapy involves befriending the Substance Using Part as the protector that she really is. Befriending needs to be genuine, from Self-to-Part. The kind-hearted, wise Self within us befriends the Substance Using Part.

Befriending means that rather than shaming, judging, criticizing and blaming the Substance Using Part, we allow Self to fully acknowledge the Part’s adaptive role in helping us survive until now. This process of making friends with the Substance Using Part involves asking Preventative Parts that shame and judge us, such as the Inner Critic Part, to step back, to take a break from their job of trying to control our behavior through judgment.

Once fully thanked and understood, the Substance Using Part reveals which overwhelming experiences of the past she is protecting the client from reliving. When that “target” wounded Part is unburdened through restoration of relationship with Self, the Substance Using Part sees on her own, that her services are no longer necessary for survival.

Internal Family Systems Therapy at Villa Kali Ma

At Villa Kali Ma, we integrate Internal Family Systems Therapy methods and mindsets into our holistic residential and intensive outpatient programs for women healing from trauma, addiction, and mental illness. With its emphasis on each person having a Self, and its insistence on unconditional compassion for all Parts, we find it to be a natural fit with our philosophy!

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.

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Holistic Trauma Healing: Mind, Body, and Spirit Approaches That Work

According to Bessel van der Kolk, MD, trauma treatment pioneer and bestselling author of The Body Keeps the Score, research shows that when it comes to trauma, there is no one-size-fits-all solution.

For some people, working with bilateral stimulation to desensitize traumatic memories through Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) will be the most expedient way to bring a problematic trauma narrative to its end.

When the time comes to heal deep attachment wounding, on the other hand, it may be more powerful to work on restoring inner relationships between burdened parts and the Self, through Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS). During phases when stabilization are front and center, learning to shift polyvagal states or regulate arousal through breath, posture, and movement may be the most direct path to feeling better.

Trauma treatment means addressing multiple distinct systems of a person’s being. At the very least, trauma treatment will need to address the role of thoughts, physiology (the brain, nervous system, and other vital systems), emotions, and behaviors (including substance use).

Holistic Trauma Healing: A Whole-Person Approach to Recovery

At Villa Kali Ma, we also consider the role of spirituality, creativity, and nature. We look at intra-psychic (inner dynamics and relationship to Self), interpersonal (relationship with others), and transpersonal pieces (relationship to God/Source/Universe/Divine) too, when relevant for a woman’s journey.

Each of these systems may respond differently to different treatment approaches, and have different needs. Within any category, many wonderful treatment modalities can serve. Working with the body alone, we consider nutrition, exercise, mindfulness, somatic experiencing, massage, yoga, reiki, acupuncture, ecotherapy…and more!

The purpose of a holistic approach to trauma healing is to integrate. Integrative practitioners take interventions from many healing systems and use them sensitively. At Villa Kali Ma, we aim to adapt mindsets and models to serve the live unfolding healing process, rather than to expect any woman to fit into a pre-existing protocol.

Integrating Mindfulness, Movement, and Meaning

Trauma affects the body in a specific way: it restricts movement. Not only the big, expressive, playful movement we see children and animals, but also the natural fluid flow of aliveness that all bodies have. Even in stillness, bodies are movement, according to Somatic Therapist Manuela Mischke-Reeds, author of Trauma-Sensitive Movement: 96 Somatic Techniques to Support Nervous System Regulation and Embodied Transformation in Therapy. Trauma forces movement into rigid, repetitive conditions, that create pain and hold emotion back from resolution.

Trauma also affects the meaning that we make of our experiences in the now. This happens as we are forced to carry extreme beliefs, which are false conclusions about the self and the world. The meaning trauma compels us towards is distorted, overgeneralized, and self-centered. We believe not only that the world isn’t safe, that bad things can happen at any time, but also that we ourselves, in our worthlessness or inadequacy, are to blame for what happened.

What trauma does to our cognition and to our body is reflected in our attention. Rather than being able to flow our attention freely and organically, our attention gets burdened, stuck, and dysfunctional. We lose capacity to be openly mindful, receptive, exploratory. With our attention hijacked by strategies meant to protect us from re-experiencing unresolved trauma, the benefits of the alpha brainwave flow state are unavailable to us.

The path of healing holistically from trauma removes trauma’s blockages and burdens. Trauma healing takes constraints away, permitting us to slip back into free-flowing movement, meaning, and mindfulness. Rather than efforting, we come to rely on what naturally and organically emerges from our aliveness. Holistic trauma healing approaches all work with how attention, movement, and meaning can be restored back to health.

Evidence-Based Practices for Mind-Body Healing

At Villa Kali Ma, we use many evidence-based practices to help women find recovery.

The key clinical modalities we use are generally considered to be gold-standard approaches for healing trauma and addiction. Evidence-based modalities we offer include:

Individual, family, and group psychotherapy

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)

Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT)

Experiential therapies (Expressive Arts Therapy, Equine Therapy, and Ecotherapy) Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

Motivational Interviewing (MI)

Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS)

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)

12 Step

and more!

In addition to those clinical approaches, we use holistic treatment approaches, some of which stand out in the literature as being especially supported by evidence.

The ancient Indian healing system of yoga is widely acknowledged and accepted as having an important role to play in clinical applications at this point. Randomized control trials and other formal studies have helped remaining skeptics over the hump.

The practices and principles of yoga inform all of our programs. We love yoga, not only as a form of exercise, but for its salubrious effects on the nervous system and its natural enhancement of mindfulness. Yoga alone is an admirably comprehensive path to wholeness.

In addition to yoga, we incorporate mindfulness-based approaches into all of our offerings. In particular, we love Kristin Neff and her Mindfulness and Self Compassion program. Mindfulness-based approaches have benefited from a fair number of formalized studies, which we appreciate for the extra scientific verification of what we experience in ourselves and in our clients.

Explore Holistic Trauma Treatment at Villa Kali Ma

Villa Kali Ma has a dedicated residential trauma treatment program, the Retreat, for those women among us who need trauma treatment primarily. Our residential addiction treatment program, the Villa, helps women who also have substance use disorders recover from their trauma holistically. We offer holistic treatment in our intensive outpatient treatment program, as well.

The essence of holistic trauma recovery is a focus on wholeness. When wholeness is recognized to underlie all symptoms, no matter how severe, distorted or destructive those symptoms seem to be, we get much further. When trauma-generated burdens, beliefs, and behaviors are given the opportunity to resolve out of the body, mind, emotions, and energetic field, women bounce back into a natural state of wholeness on their own.

Are you curious to find out if this could be true for you, too? We believe that it could be. Whatever you decide, and whatever your journey back to wholeness,  we wish you the very best! You can do it!

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The Connection Between Trauma and Addiction: What You Need to Know

At Villa Kali Ma, we work with women recovering from trauma, mental illness, and addiction. These three forms of suffering often go together. When a woman has trauma, she experiences mental and physical health symptoms stemming from that trauma. It is also very likely that she has at least a few addictive or compulsive behaviors.

We can also frame this equation the other way around. When a woman has a substance use disorder, she has mental health symptoms too. And almost always, she has underlying trauma.

Villa Kali Ma’s holistic residential and outpatient programs address these three topics together, because they aren’t easily teased apart. Compassionate understanding of how trauma, mental illness and substance abuse work together is required to gently unravel the complex ways they can interact.

For women who struggle with substance abuse, it can make all the difference in the world for our self-esteem to realize that addiction makes sense in the context of a traumatized body, mind, and spirit. In this article, we’ll look a little closer into the connection between trauma and addiction, so that those of us dealing with addiction can loosen up, and let go of any remaining judgment about the topic. Addiction isn’t a moral issue, it’s a neurobiological one.

Understanding the Link Between Trauma and Addiction

The link between trauma and addiction is especially strong among women, with the majority of women entering substance abuse treatment reporting a history of significant trauma.

Some of the trauma that women with addiction report is clearly generated by a single, overwhelmingly distressing event, like a car crash or sexual assault. For many women, however, the trauma is much older, subtler, and more deeply rooted, reaching all the way back to childhood.

Today, there are several definitions of trauma that go beyond the well-known clinical diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). It behooves us to know about them. We may not recognize our own trauma if we only know about PTSD. Correctly, we may think that PTSD is generally developed in response to one big event that changes a person’s life.

What women may not know enough about is complex trauma, which was first introduced by Judith Herman in the 1990s in her trailblazing book, Trauma and Recovery. While not classed as an official diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders at this time, Herman found evidence in her work for an equally prevalent syndrome now known as complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD).

Like PTSD, C-PTSD generates symptoms of severe anxiety (due to hyperarousal, or feeling always on guard), as well as intrusive thoughts and memories. It can also create depressive patterns and habits of disconnecting from feelings. C-PTSD is responsible for difficulty with soothing and regulating emotion, struggles in interpersonal relationships, and low self-esteem. Like PTSD, C-PTSD is paired with strategies for avoiding people, places, and scenarios that trigger unresolved trauma to re-surface. C-PTSD is an underlying cause for substance addiction, eating disorders, and self-harm.

Why Trauma Often Leads to Substance Abuse

Why do PTSD and C-PTSD tend to lead to substance abuse? One explanation can be found in a basic understanding of the nervous system, and what prolonged exposure to threat does to the nervous system.

Trauma disturbs the nervous system deeply. To understand how, we look at a model of nervous system arousal states pioneered by psychiatrist Dr. Dan J. Siegel. The framework is called “the window of tolerance”.

The window of tolerance refers to a level of nervous system arousal (or wakefulness). When our nervous system is operating within the window of tolerance (not too activated, not too sleepy) life feels good to us. We are pleasantly alert and energized, but not frazzled, agitated or stressed. At the same time, we are pleasantly relaxed, but not numbed out, shut down, or fog-brained.

It’s normal to move in and out of higher or lower states of arousal throughout the day. Sometimes we have more energy and other times we are more relaxed. What happens for people with trauma, though, is that, through repeated exposure to danger, our nervous systems get stuck in extreme states of activation, outside the window of tolerance on both ends of the spectrum.

On the upper end, we are cued by threats in the environment into hyperarousal, or the fight-flight nervous system response. Hyperarousal is a very uncomfortable state. It feels like agitation, aggravation, panic, and distress. Anxiety, fear, dread, and irritability are all signs that we are in hyperarousal.

When our bodies believe it will save our lives, external threats may also prompt us to go into hypoarousal. Hypoarousal is what Dr. Stephen Porges calls “dorsal vagal collapse”. In hypoarousal we may shut down, space out, or go numb. Chronic depression, among other symptoms, is sometimes a signal that chronic hypoarousal helped us survive in the past.

Hypoarousal is also the eventual result of being in hyperarousal for too long. The body “crashes”, bypassing the window of tolerance, all the way down to collapse. The body shuts us down, to create an opportunity to rest and recharge which is still life-protective.

What do you think might happen to a woman whose life circumstances repeatedly cued her nervous system into states of hyperarousal and/or hypoarousal, again and again, over many years? What beliefs, emotions, and action tendencies (to use Dr. Carol Dweck’s BEATS) might she develop, that match a nervous system that only operates in danger mode?

If you thought, she might turn to substances to get some relief…bingo! Women whose nervous systems were trained, through no fault of their own, to overproduce feelings of distress even in non-dangerous situations, have a problem to solve. If they don’t know better, or no other kind of help is available, they often find their way to substances.

Substances are addictive because of the way they affect the nervous system: to relax, soothe, or enliven it, and to bring much-needed sensations of pleasure, safety, and ease. Substances – at least in the beginning – loan us a window of tolerance.

Identifying and Treating Co-Occurring Disorders

Many women who meet diagnostic criteria for a substance use disorder (SUD) also qualify for a mental health diagnosis. For example, a woman can have cocaine addiction and major depression at the same time. A woman can be an alcoholic and also have anxiety.

The interplay between trauma, co-occurring mental health disorders, and addiction is complicated. Trauma, addiction, and other mental health diagnoses share symptoms like anxiety, depression, obsessive thinking and compulsive behaviors. That’s why it’s important to treat all of these conditions in parallel, and to hold all possible hypotheses about what will help a particular woman with an open mind.

In general, our staff feel it is wise to take all levels and layers of a woman’s being into account. We try on different lenses when finding the best course of treatment for each woman. At Villa Kali Ma, we embrace a range of viewpoints, including (but not limited to) a scientific, neurobiological understanding of symptoms. We understand that identifying and treating co-occurring disorders can also involve cognitive, behavioral, relational, somatic, and spiritual ways of understanding a woman’s suffering. All of this depends on who a woman is and how she experiences herself. We are all much, much more than our symptoms.

Broadly speaking, it is helpful to work with a hypothesis of a mental health diagnosis, such as bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, or major depression, even though such diagnoses are sometimes considered controversial in the field. The benefit of using such terms as a trail map for understanding a woman’s experience is that diagnostic categories can be correlated to best practices for treatment.

When we discover during initial assessment that a woman resonates with the diagnostic criteria associated with a particular co-occurring disorder, that gives us some idea of what course of treatment may be especially effective for her. Knowing what has helped other women who experience life in similar ways never hurts.

Trauma-Informed Addiction Care at Villa Kali Ma

At Villa Kali Ma, we have believed for a long time in the power of addressing trauma and co-occurring mental health disorders alongside addiction. From our own experiences, clinical insight, and observations in the field of addiction and trauma treatment, we see the power of this trifold approach.

In our holistic inpatient and outpatient programs for women struggling with addiction, we offer a differentiated, highly customized path through treatment. Each woman receives what really benefits her as a unique and irreplaceable person.

With all that we know about the ways that trauma, addiction, and mental health affect women in predictable ways, we also know that each woman’s recovery is special. Like nurses in a maternity ward, we never get tired of the miracle of new life! In our case, the newborn we hold precious is a recovering woman, taking her first breaths in the light of a new, safer, friendlier world.

If you’re wondering about the connection between your own trauma and substance use, we invite you to check out our suite of holistic recovery programs for women.

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How Unresolved Trauma Manifests in Everyday Life

Signs of unresolved trauma can be tricky to recognize. Many of us live with trauma for years without a clue that life could be any different. For women with a trauma background, we may know that our past was “bad”, but we may not see how thoroughly our environment shaped us.

Trauma affects everything about us, from our work lives, relationships, and conscious emotional experiences, right down to the unconscious operations of our brains and bodies. Trauma molds how we process sense stimuli like sights and sounds, and how we store and recall memories. Trauma explains most of our tendencies: how we make eye contact, move our bodies, and hold ourselves upright.

Trauma is like the proverbial water to the fish. Until we have the opportunity to experience life on land, we won’t even have a word for “water”. The good news is that when we start to heal trauma at the root, we can experience widespread transformation in our lives.

The fact that trauma is so pervasive in its wounding effects is exactly why, when we heal it, we experience a beautiful change that flows into every part of us. In this post, we’ll look closer at some of the ways that unresolved trauma might be showing up.

How Unsettled Trauma Manifests in Everyday Life

Many people have heard by now that trauma has symptoms like flashbacks, nightmares, and severe anxiety. What we may not have heard about are the ways that complex trauma, the kind that begins in childhood or even in the womb, gets woven into our very personalities.

For people who grew up in distressing circumstances, trauma is baked into our beliefs, emotions, and behavioral tendencies. We take it to be part of our identity. Years later, as adults, we may say, “I am insecure”, or “I am a procrastinator” or “I overeat” without really understanding why. We don’t know where these sides of us came from, nor what purpose they serve. It is likely that our inner world is soaked with shame.

People with complex trauma often blame ourselves for our supposed (or real) deficiencies. We do this even though every other traumatized woman in the world has the same symptoms, and the same shame about those symptoms. As Dr. Janina Fisher says in her work on shame and trauma, we wouldn’t be surprised to learn that people with the same flu experience the same symptoms, would we?

It’s important to call things by their right name, and to recognize the true origin of personality traits and behavioral styles, when they actually come from trauma. For any woman with a substance use disorder, for example, you need to know that you have used substances for a good reason. The substance was a way to meet the demands of life…. in the context of a traumatized nervous system.

Here are some other very common, everyday ways that trauma shows up in women’s lives.

Perfectionism

Perfectionism means more than having a high standard. If you have a perfectionist side to your personality, you may feel severe emotional distress when you don’t meet your standard. If you associate achieving or striving for perfection with feeling safe and secure, to the point where it makes you anxious to be seen when you’re being imperfect, you may have a trauma-generated perfectionist part (to use the language of the Internal Family Systems model).

Harsh Inner Critic

Hand in hand with the perfectionist Part, the Inner Critic is another common trauma-generated Part. Almost everyone can relate the description of a voice inside our heads that criticizes us. If you have an exceptionally mean inner critic, who berates you, shames you, and calls you names, you may have an over-empowered inner critic. Over-empowered inner critics are a legacy of trauma.

A Need for Control

Another common Part found in women with trauma is a high need for control. Being controlling may be considered a bad thing (by those affected by our behavior), but the attempt to make our environments more predictable stems from bad experiences with uncertainty in the past. If you have a very hard time letting go of outcomes and “seeing what happens”, this can be a sign of a controlling Part, another trauma-generated personality facet.

People Pleasing, Boundary Struggles, and Conflict Avoidance

Do you absolutely hate it when people are mad at you? Do you struggle to set boundaries (or even know what your boundaries are?) If you avoid conflict and boundary setting because you can’t stand feeling angry or having others be angry at you, you may have developed a submission-oriented Part. This Part typically feels it is her job to make sure you make others happy, no matter what. The “collapse and submit part”, Dr. Janina Fisher explains, represents a survival strategy. It was developed in environments where our maintaining our attachment bonds required us to give up our power.

The Psychology of Trauma: What Happens Beneath the Surface

Trauma begins with a basic premise – that we must “do or die”. In other words, something is required on our end – an action must be taken, to ensure that we make it.

To a certain extent, that’s true of all life, and there’s nothing wrong with developing agency. “Working for a living” – expending physical effort to stay alive – is part of being human the moment we leave the womb, as Dr. Daniel J. Siegel explains in his work on personality development. But in trauma-generating environments, we learn that we have to do extreme, almost impossible things to get our life needs met.

When you remember that as mammals, we will not make it to adulthood unless the adults take care of us, the extremity of our survival adaptations makes a little more sense. As babies we needed a lot from our caregivers: not only physical care but also emotional connection. Caregivers must provide relationally-attuned attention that helps us feel “safe, seen, and soothed” for secure attachment to take root. We all adapted to available attachment conditions in ways that optimized our survival. Women who have trauma had to develop very extreme creative solutions to make it work.

There are many ways a child may take on an extreme burden. She may suppress and hide her needs and emotions, or take the role of parenting her parents. She may perform heroically in school to bring pride to the family, or clown around to make her parents smile. She may have to play nurse or try to control a parent’s drinking. Girls frequently develop strategies based on playing small, acting out, or hurting themselves.

All of these learned behaviors become habits. Double binds turn into permanent compartmentalization. The mental and nervous-system gymnastics we go through to stay safe and attached become personality traits later on. The greater the level of polarization and paradox inside our own psychology, the greater demands our environment must have asked of us.

Everyday Signs You Might Be Living with Unhealed Trauma 

In the Internal Family Systems Therapy model, we look at polarizations between Parts of our personality that have opposing strategies. If a Part of you thinks you should stop drinking, and another Part drives you to drink, that’s a classic polarization between parts. Here are some other examples of polarities that sometimes arise in women who survived trauma-generating childhoods.

Work hard, Party Hard

Many women work to the brink of burnout (and beyond!), driving themselves into the ground trying to follow a strategy of finding relational safety through high performance. If I only achieve perfection, then I will at last be loved, is the logic of this Part.

In response to this, another Part, whose job it is to take away the feelings of exhaustion and anger at the requirement to meet this part’s demands, is likely to kick in with some way of numbing out. For women with substance addiction, this can be the typical “party hard” part. There are other ways to numb out and check out, including behavioral addictions like eating disorders, self-harm, compulsive shopping, and more.

Procrastination and Perfection

Procrastination is an avoidance strategy. It is frequently polarized with perfectionism. When we have extremely high standards and it makes us anxious not to meet those standards, we can develop a pattern of avoiding or delaying projects and daily tasks. We postpone because we don’t want to get sucked into horrible feelings associated with not meeting our standards of perfection. This polarity can keep us paralyzed, unable to move forward.

“Shameless” and Ashamed

Some women experience a polarization between an acting out Part, and another Part that feels deeply ashamed of that behavior. For example, a woman may act out sexually, by cheating on her partner. The survival benefit of that behavior is explained by the short term sensations created by the behavior: a sexual “high”, juicy romance or fantasy. The sensations created by acting out are used by a traumatized nervous system to soothe and distract from pain. Another Part of this woman’s personality then holds the shame, guilt, and regret about this behavior. Because these Parts are locked into a polarization, the end result is inner turmoil.

How Villa Kali Ma Helps Women Heal from Emotional Trauma

Villa Kali Ma is a unique treatment provider. We take a holistic approach to healing women, combining the best approaches from all relevant fields. For women who have trauma, we created a dedicated facility, the Retreat. The Retreat is a licensed residential trauma treatment center.

The Retreat is an in-patient setting providing cutting-edge trauma-treatment modalities like brainspotting and ketamine assisted psychotherapy. We also help women through the most tried and true trauma healing approaches like somatic therapy, Internal Family Systems Therapy, and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing – powerhouse modalities for restoring feelings of capacity, reprocessing traumatic memory, and bringing back joy.

If you’re ready to look deeper into the ways that trauma, mental illness, and addiction can be healed with compassion, we invite you to check out our many programs for women.

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The Role of Hormones in Addiction and Recovery for Women 

In recent decades, more focus has been given to differences between men and women when it comes to substance use disorders. Several gender differences have been observed, in each phase of addiction and recovery.

In terms of raw numbers, more men than women use substances – men are about twice as likely to consume drugs and alcohol as women are.  (The exception to this is prescription painkillers and tranquilizers, where studies suggest women are on equal footing with men). The women who do use drugs and alcohol, a number which is on the rise, are more vulnerable to developing problems stemming from those substances, and to struggle throughout the recovery process.

Women move more quickly through the stages of addiction, from initial exposure to a substance to dependence upon it. It takes less of a substance to affect a woman’s physiology, and health impacts are more severe. Women are more sensitive to cravings, experience more vivid mental emotional suffering during withdrawals, and are more prone to relapse.

Although the topic merits a lot more research, one consideration is the role of women’s hormones. As every woman knows, our hormonal systems are complex, such that we experience several hormonal shifts every month. These variations notoriously affect our mood, thoughts, and physical sensations.

It is perhaps no surprise that the hormonal aspect of the female experience interfaces with the topic of addiction. In this blog, we’ll look closer at what is currently known about women’s hormones and addiction.

Understanding hormones and their functions 

Hormones are tiny molecules that travel throughout the systems of the body, serving as chemical messengers. Chemical messengers are substances that communicate commands to activate or inhibit a body part or system.

Hormones are produced by glands, and are part of our endocrine system. They are released into the bloodstream and carried to organs and tissues, where they act upon those organs and tissues to excite or dampen them.

Hormones are responsible for balancing the body’s many systems, including metabolism. They are critical for restoring homeostasis, keeping body systems regulated and in check. Hormones also circulate in the brain, where they are intimately involved in triggering and modulating the stress response.

How do hormones impact addiction? 

Stress is connected to the release of a hormone called cortisol, which generates the uncomfortable feelings of stress, dread and agitation we feel when the body perceives a danger or threat to our survival or belonging to the herd.

High levels of cortisol over a sustained period of time is what leads to chronic stress. Too much cortisol in the body is linked to vulnerability to addiction, and also describes what happens to the body after traumatization.

Serotonin and dopamine are two other hormones which are involved in regulating mood and behavior. Adrenalin, oxytocin (the “love hormone”) and endorphin (the body’s natural painkiller) are hormones, too. Each of these hormones has a job which can be temporarily boosted or reduced through using drugs, alcohol, and prescriptions.

People who fall into the trap of addiction do so because these powerful systems of mood regulation, pain modulation, and reward become dysregulated through the introduction of chemicals which are foreign to the body. The dazzlingly complex operation of hormones in creating the human experience is still only slightly understood, but it has been established that hormones are affected, hijacked and depleted by substance abuse.

Which certain hormone phases are connected with addiction? 

The primary female sex hormones are progesterone and estrogen. These two hormones are important throughout the entire life cycle of women, affecting puberty, menstruation, PMS, pregnancy, menopause, and elderhood.

During reproductive years, estrogen is high during the first two weeks of a woman’s menstrual cycle. In this phase, women are more likely to experience feelings of happiness, positive mood, and to experience less cortisol and adrenalin, two hormones linked to the discomfort of stress and trauma.

Progesterone appears once ovulation occurs. Progesterone is linked to the area of the brain that is responsible for triggering a sense of alarm when perceiving danger, and is believed to be the cause of the moodiness associated with PMS. Progesterone is connected to higher levels of cortisol, which explains why women feel irritable and sensitive to stressors, as well as to triggers of traumatic memory during this phase.

Women who have a predisposition to higher levels of cortisol to begin with, such as happens with trauma, are likely to seek some sort of modulating substance during these two weeks of the cycle, whether it be eating fatty, high calorie foods or turning to drugs and alcohol. Women who are in recovery are more prone to relapse during these two weeks.

The operations of these hormones and the ways that they interact with other hormones like serotonin, dopamine, cortisol, oxytocin, and endorphins is incredibly intricate, subtle, and complex. It is important not to oversimplify, nor to imagine that any of these hormones operates out of a context of supreme interdependence.

It is safe to acknowledge, however, that during phases of the cycle when we experience higher amounts of progesterone, as during PMS, we are more likely to experience the feelings of unease and unhappiness which underly self-medicating behaviors.

What is estrogen’s link to substance abuse?

Estrogen is linked to sensitivity to pleasure. The interactions between addictive substances and estrogen may be such that women’s response to addictive substances is especially powerful during this stage, as one study on the effects of stimulants like cocaine in women has indicated. This suggests that women who have high estrogen levels may be more likely to become addicted to substances, as well as to form a powerful association between getting high and this stage of the menstrual cycle.

How does progesterone lower drug seeking behaviors?

When progesterone levels fall, estrogen becomes the dominant hormone, which may make women more sensitive to the effects of drugs and alcohol. During progesterone-dominant phases, women experience less sensitivity and responsiveness to the same chemical substance.

What are key hormones involved in substance use disorders?

Several hormones have an important role in the body when it comes to substance abuse and recovery. Awareness of these hormones and their relevance to addiction may inform the way that we approach treatment.

Cortisol

Released by the adrenal glands in response to a perception (or memory) of danger or threat, cortisol is often called “the stress hormone”. Cortisol prepares the body to act swiftly, as may be needed to run away from, fight off, or freeze to mitigate the effects of harm.

Cortisol is intended by nature to be a short-term, emergency solution, and it works by spiking blood sugar levels to fill the body with energy, momentarily suppressing the restorative, digestive, and immune systems. The condition of chronically high cortisol levels is also present in people with trauma and people who have high levels of stress as a daily experience.

People who experience chronically high levels of cortisol are at risk to develop substance use disorders. Elevated cortisol levels also increase the risk of relapse once in recovery.

Serotonin

Serotonin is a neurotransmitter influencing mood, sleep, and appetite. Serotonin levels are believed to explain the presence of mood disturbances like depression and anxiety. Drugs and alcohol change the level of available serotonin in the body. This impact on serotonin levels explains why people who are used to chronic mood disturbances tend to turn to drugs and alcohol to try to change serotonin levels. It also explains why, after drugs and alcohol have depleted serotonin levels, people will experience depression and anxiety symptoms.

Dopamine

Dopamine is the neurotransmitter connected to the brain’s reward circuit. Dopamine is released when we are behaving in ways that led to social or physiological rewards in the past. Dopamine feels pleasurable, and it is meant to reinforce behaviors that are good for the physiology’s health and longer term survival. Drugs and alcohol are believed to hijack the reward system, releasing dopamine artificially, even though we are not behaving in life-affirming ways.

Endorphins

Endorphins are produced naturally in the body when we experience pain. Endorphins interact with the brain’s opiate receptors, lessening pain and creating feelings of euphoria. Endorphins are meant to be released only in occasional cases of injury and pain. Opioids and other addictive substances were designed to bind to the same receptors in the brain, to induce euphoria and numbing. They are highly addictive due to the combination of painkilling and euphoria-boosting. Problematically, using substances reduces the body’s ability to produce endorphins naturally.

Norepinephrine

Essential for alertness and focus, norepinephrine is a hormone and neurotransmitter involved in the body’s high arousal system, or fight-flight. Stimulants like cocaine affect norepinephrine levels, temporarily boosting energy and concentration, while also triggering anxiety and leading to severe dependence.

GABA (Gamma-Aminobutyric Acid)

GABA is a neurotransmitter that inhibits nervous system activity, creating feelings of calm and relaxation. It works as a brake, dampening the effects of other hormones and helping the body to move into parasympathetic, or restoration and digestion states. Substances like tranquilizers and alcohol enhance GABA’s effects, initially creating feelings of well-being, and eventually leading to greater feelings of anxiety and cravings to use.

Gender differences in hormonal impact

The differences between men and women due to hormones have implications for treatment. Women can experience greater success in recovery from addiction when armed with the awareness of how their hormones influence mood, motivation, stress, and sensitivity. By tracking their hormonal cycles in tandem with substance abuse treatment, women can be prepared for phases of the month which represent different challenges, and take proactive steps to protect themselves from fluctuations in mood and urges to act destructively.

Hormonal changes across life stages

Fluctuating hormone levels affect women’s responsiveness to substances and vulnerability to relapse. Understanding how hormones feature in different stages of a woman’s life can be helpful for supporting recovery.  Here is an overview of how stages of life imply different hormonal considerations.

Adolescence

During adolescence, girls experience extreme fluctuations in sex hormones, making them more susceptible to risk-taking behaviors such as experimentation with drugs and alcohol. They are also more sensitive to the effects of alcohol and drugs. Exposure to drugs and alcohol during adolescence is highly correlated to long-term problems with neurotransmitter functioning, and vulnerability to addiction.

Pregnancy

During pregnancy, women experience a wash of hormones that can affect urges to use substances. Estrogen and progesterone changes impact stress and mood levels. Using substances during pregnancy can harm mother and fetus significantly.

Menopause

The decrease in estrogen associated with menopause may be experienced as depression, anxiety, and rapid fluctuation between moods. Women who have a history of using substances to cope with their unpleasant sensations and emotions are at a greater risk of relapse during this phase of life.

The role of stress and coping mechanisms

The role of stress is extremely important in addiction. When the stress system is activated, cortisol levels increase and positive feeling hormones and neurotransmitters are inhibited.

When experiencing chronic stress, the body is exposed to toxic levels of cortisol, which has negative health effects, leading to disease. When cortisol is present in the bloodstream, it is experienced subjectively as unease, dread, and agitation. When the nervous system is permanently dysregulated, a person can’t easily reduce cortisol back to normal levels naturally.

Being in a state of frequent cortisol activation, as happens when we grew up in an environment of many survival threats, leads women to self-medicating behaviors. These behaviors occur out of desperation to get a break from over-activation of sensations of dread, fear, and lack of safety.

During recovery, it is important to understand the role of stress, and to find coping mechanisms that heal chronic hyperarousal, such as tools from somatic therapy, yoga, nutrition, and mindfulness based therapies.

Integrating Hormonal Considerations into Treatment Plans

When working with women to recover from substances, hormonal considerations can be incorporated into treatment plans. Hormone levels may be tested, menstrual cycle tracking included as a part of teaching self-care and stress management practices, and stage of life considered in terms of hormonal impacts for women.

Impact of Hormones on Substance Use Disorders

In gender specific addiction treatment, such as that offered by Villa Kali Ma, the role of hormones in creating lasting peace and feelings of wellbeing in recovery can be safely explored. The impacts of hormonal phases and fluctuations can be  acknowledged and incorporated into healing work, to support women to understand their experiences and needs more compassionately. Each woman is unique and deserves to be met where she is at, hormonally as well as in every other way.

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