Category: Trauma Therapy

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Trauma Trauma Therapy Treatment

The Mind-Body Connection: Somatic Approaches to Trauma Healing

In the words of pioneering psychiatrist, researcher and educator Bessel van der Kolk, when it comes to trauma, it is the body that keeps the score of what we have lived through, more so than the thinking mind. Trauma arises and lives on embedded into the tissues of the brain, nervous system and physiology. And while the mind may repress or forget memories, the body keeps a faithful record. 

Even when the conscious personality has chosen to minimize difficult aspects of our past, our personal history is legible in posture, breath, muscle tension, levels of nervous system arousal, and habits of movement, orientation and attention. 

According to van der Kolk and other luminaries in the field of trauma recovery, like Dr. Peter Levine and Dr. Pat Ogden, trauma healing needs to begin with the physical body itself. Through working therapeutically with the body, in its own native language of sensation, breath, movement, and impulse, a true repair of traumatic experiences can be achieved.

Enter the field of somatic therapy, realm of body-based trauma healing. Somatic therapies, of which there are several, restore health and sanity through working with nervous system regulation, muscular tension release, progressing interrupted survival movements, and other body-based psychotherapeutic interventions. The premise of somatic therapy is that since it is the body that is the bedrock of experience, shifting at the level of body consciousness has powerful knock-on effects upwards into emotion and personality layers.

How Somatic Therapy Helps Women Heal Trauma Stored in the Body

Somatic therapies are considered a “bottom up” approach, which means that practitioners start with the body, and work “upward” to developmentally later aspects of self, like personality, cognition and emotion. Somatic therapy fills a void left by talk therapy, which shines in the arena of helping a person develop self-awareness, but can also fail in cases where a dysregulated neurobiology is influencing experience heavily. 

Symptoms like anxiety, depression, attention troubles, sleep disorders, psychosomatic illnesses, and dissociation, for example, can in some instances be caused not so much by disease, or even inner conflicts and psychological complexes, so much as unresolved traumatic experiences lying deep in the body’s unconscious memories. Sane decision-making and higher executive functioning are sometimes unavailable, or only intermittently available, when a person hasn’t yet worked out how to feel safe being alive in a body. 

While in reality the interactions of consciousness are enormously complex, the model of “bottom up” (body first) versus “top down” (mental understanding first) approaches to healing can be helpful for understanding the order and priority of treatment for people with trauma. It might not make sense to fix the roof of a building, if there’s work to be done at the foundation. The body is the foundation of human experience.  

The conception of bottom up approaches comes also from the observation that in brain imaging studies, it appears that the brainstem and midbrain, located towards the bottom of the brain as compared with the cortex, have important roles in perception and the assignment of meaning to sensory signals. The cortex, by contrast, which is the upper and outermost part of the brain, is generally accepted to be the area of the brain responsible for “higher” thought, like abstract concepts, planning, and learning. 

In order to be able to use our capacities for higher thought in a sane and grounded way, the responsibilities of the cortex need to be integrated with the other parts of the brain, the ones that handle signal processing, sensation, basic safety, emotional attunement, and relationships. One reason that some of us have a harder time with impulse control and foresight may be that we have unresolved material relating to our basic physiological and relational safety. We may have trauma that needs to be healed, before we can operate our executive levels of the brain in a more helpful and coherent way. 

A significant portion of women who seek out treatment for substance abuse have a history of trauma, often sexual trauma or sexual abuse. Others have a heavy burden of traumatization from adverse childhood environments that contained physical or psychological abuse and/or neglect. For any woman with trauma, with or without addition substance or mental health diagnoses, somatic therapies are going to be an incredible assist. 

Most women with trauma histories did not have the experience of being fully safe – both nurtured and protected from harm – in their physical bodies. This missing element of basic safety has to be corrected before any woman will be able to flourish in other domains of her life. Better said, perhaps – although women can and do survive and thrive against incredible odds all the time, healing can be much, much easier with a bodily foundation of sufficient safety. 

Understanding Trauma’s Physical Manifestations

Trauma leaves a significant impact on every aspect of experience. Thought disturbances like dissociation, memory problems, attention disorders, impulse control problems, and even psychosis can be caused by unhealed trauma in the body. Likewise, in the realm of emotion and relationships, traumatized women endure a range of painful subjective experiences, including terror of abandonment, fear of engulfment, enmeshment, codependence, and even intimate partner abuse, in part due to deep unresolved material relating to safety and survival. 

It’s also important to see that many physical symptoms may be coming from, or influenced by, our trauma history. Trauma is one possible source of chronic pain, unexplained aches, and other “mystery” conditions. How the body works with pain is intimately connected to the other body systems which are responsible for processing and releasing trauma. 

Similarly, digestive issues, including irritable bowel syndrome, gut problems, inflammation, and stomach pain, may have an origin in traumatization. The stomach is very sensitive to any form of stress, including post-traumatic stress. 

Another trauma symptom many women will recognize is fatigue. Due to its connection with the nervous system and states of arousal, trauma is responsible for taxing and depleting our existing energy levels. Being tired all the time can also be a sign that the body is using a kind of “dorsal collapse” technique for blunting the edges of extreme overarousal, or mobilization of the fight and flight system. 

Finally, muscle tension, headaches, and jaw clenching can also be signs that the body is holding trauma. Somatic therapies are one way that the body can be gently coaxed to let go of the burdens associated with trauma. Through physical release of tensions and energies of thwarted survival impulses that arose and got trapped in our physiology long ago, we have a chance at restoring not only physical but also mental and emotional health.

Heal your Trauma 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 for women, we use a combination of clinical and holistic approaches to help heal from the following burdens: 

  • Traumatization. Acute & chronic PTSD, complex trauma 
  • Substance abuse and dependence. Addiction to alcohol, street drugs, cannabis, pharmaceuticals, and poly-substance addiction
  • Mental health symptoms. Anxiety, depression, ADHD, obsessions and compulsions, and behavioral disorders

The core of our clinical program features evidence-based practices and other gold standard treatments widely recognized within the trauma field to work best with women facing severe challenges. These effective clinical modalities include Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Therapy (MSC), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFST), Ecotherapy, Expressive Arts Therapy (EXA), and Somatic Experiencing (SE).  

Complementary to our clinical program, we provide an array of holistic interventions, scheduled around core treatment programming hours. Our holistic package includes yoga, breath work, acupuncture, nutritional medicine, mindfulness, and many additional alternative healing modalities. Our purpose is empowering women to recover lives of heartfelt relating, meaning, beauty and purpose. 

Women with trauma who don’t qualify for substance abuse or mental health disorders, may also be interested to know about the Retreat, our state of the art licensed trauma-healing facility. Whoever you are, and whatever your burdens, you are welcome here with us!

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Addiction Treatment Intensive Outpatient Program Trauma Therapy

Therapies That Transform: How IOP Helps Women Heal from Trauma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Trauma-Focused Therapies in IOP Empower Women to Heal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evidence-Based Approaches to Trauma and Addiction Recovery

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

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

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

Integrating Mind, Body, and Spirit in Outpatient Care

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Addiction Treatment Intensive Outpatient Program Trauma Therapy

Why Intensive Outpatient Programs Are Essential for Women Healing from Trauma

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

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

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

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

Why Intensive Outpatient Programs Empower Women Healing from Trauma

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

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

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

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

Flexibility and Intensive Support for Trauma Recovery

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who Benefits Most from a Trauma-Focused IOP?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Addiction Treatment Trauma Trauma Therapy

How PHP Supports Lasting Recovery from Addiction and Trauma

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

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

How Partial Hospitalization Helps Women Achieve Lasting Healing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Combining Trauma Therapy, Community, and Self-Discovery

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

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

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

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

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

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

Preparing for Next Steps After PHP

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

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

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

Continued Healing with Villa Kali Ma’s Comprehensive Care

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

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

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

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

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Trauma Therapy

Women and Trauma: Using Trauma Therapy to Heal

What Is Trauma?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are Women More at Risk of Experiencing More Trauma?

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

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

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

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

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

The Connection of Emotional Distress and Trauma in Young Women

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

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

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

What Does a Trauma-Informed Treatment Approach Look Like?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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