What is Cocaine Addiction?

villa-kali-ma-offers-an-intensive-outpatient-programCocaine addiction is a serious substance use disorder with markedly detrimental effects on physical and mental health. Cocaine addiction is widespread and affects many women.

Villa Kali Ma is committed to assisting women with drug addiction, such as cocaine addiction to remove the destructive influence of this substance from their lives and to be therefore able to restore themselves to health and wholeness.

Cocaine in any form is classed as a highly addictive narcotic; a stimulant with many consequences for the physical body and mental well-being. Regardless of the method of ingestion, which may be snorting in powder form, injecting with a needle, or smoking as crack cocaine, cocaine’s overall popularity as an illegal drug is owed to its strong euphoric effects.

Processed cocaine in any form is designed to deliver a specific chemical payload to the user. This chemical payload is so pleasurable and habit-forming that it sets women up for failure when it comes to resisting and returning to it again, even in the face of the drug’s many negative consequences.

If you or a loved one in your life are affected by cocaine addiction, please understand that this is a serious problem, but also that in the face of this problem, you do not have to be alone. There is a cure, requiring cocaine addiction treatment and timely action. Lifestyle changes will be necessary, as well as willingness and courage to embark on a path of personal healing and self-responsibility.

With the assistance of an integral team of healing professionals such as the team at Villa Kali Ma, and with the support of a community of others walking the path of recovery, cocaine addiction is vanquishable.  Learn how we heal women with substance use issues and begin your recovery today.

Symptoms of Cocaine Addiction

Because of the complex nature of the disease, symptoms of cocaine addiction are found in many channels of a woman’s being. How is cocaine addiction treated? Villa Kali Ma’s integrative approach aims to address and treat cocaine addiction through many pathways of intervention and support.

Symptoms of cocaine addiction are detectable as physiological damages, which change a woman’s functioning at the body level. Some physiological changes include heart attacks, chest pains, heart rhythm disturbances, high blood pressure, strokes, seizures, nosebleeds, respiratory problems, and early death.

Because cocaine is a stimulant, it artificially overdrives systems of the body that would normally be activated only during naturally-earned periods of elevation of energy and mood.

The physiological consequences of chemically forcing body systems to artificially access states of euphoria as a shortcut to feeling better without making the inner changes required to feel better naturally are manifold. Most devastatingly, the neurotransmitter and hormone regulation systems sustain damage, which has long-lasting impacts on these vital pathways.

In the psychological channel, symptoms of cocaine addiction include subjective mental-emotional problems such as depression, irritability, anxiety, anhedonia (inability to experience pleasure), paranoia, and sleep disturbances. In other words, cocaine addiction will severely disrupt the ability to feel happy and at ease in life.

Finally, from the outside, loved ones will likely experience a change in the character and personality of many users who have developed a cocaine addiction. The most typical transformation is to observe the cocaine-addicted woman losing her empathy and morality as cocaine abuse becomes the primary focus of her life. For the same reason, serious life consequences in the realm of relationships, work, and legal trouble are also common.

Cocaine addiction is characterized by progressive usage over time. Cocaine addiction maps onto the general pattern followed by all addictions, also in that it will include physical dependence, tolerance, and withdrawal symptoms. Tolerance is the phenomenon of needing more and more of the substance to achieve the same effect. Withdrawal means that in the absence of a sufficient amount of the substance, the cocaine-addicted woman will go into acute physical, emotional, and mental discomfort, including intense cravings that are very difficult to resist.

Addictive substances have distinct withdrawal symptoms depending on which pathways of the body are accessed by the drug. In general, you can use the principle of opposites to understand what the withdrawals will be – whichever substance created a pleasurable effect, its opposite is experienced intensified during the cocaine withdrawal process.

Since cocaine is a stimulant, experienced as energizing and uplifting, cocaine withdrawal symptoms constitute a severe crash of energy and mood. This drop in energy and mood can be dangerous, leading not only to a strong desire to engage in drug use again but also potentially creating the risk of suicide.

Causes of Cocaine Addiction

How to develop cocaine addiction? Like all addictions, cocaine addiction follows a predictable progressive pattern that begins with infrequent use but ends up as a condition of physical, emotional, and mental dependence on cocaine for coping in everyday life.

Cocaine gains a foothold so easily and enduringly for two main reasons. One is that cocaine is processed and manufactured specifically to enhance its pleasurable, and therefore addictive, properties.

The second reason is that many women are pre-disposed through mental and emotional problems such as trauma and other kinds of inner pain. Women tend to endure trauma, and we offer a trauma informed approach at our residential trauma treatment center, The Retreat for women in need of holistic treatment.

Cocaine addiction originates in inner imbalances of body, mind, and spirit that lead a woman to be especially vulnerable to getting entangled in using mood-altering substances as a misguided attempt to correct these. People who feel well enough in their skin as they are will, generally speaking, not be drawn to the use of cocaine nor will they be as entranced by the effects of cocaine.

Specifically with cocaine, it tends to be addictive for people whose baseline personality may be so formed as to not naturally be experiencing enough mood elevation and well-being. In other words, for people with a tendency to feel low and down about themselves and their lives, cocaine’s ability to artificially induce increased energy, confidence, pleasure, and optimism, including the stereotypical “ego boost” associated with cocaine, can make it especially alluring.

In addition, lifestyle settings and work or party environments that favor a need for overstimulated energy states and being “up” may likewise lead a person to seek out states of artificially induced stimulation.

Finally, it’s important to remember that genetic factors, such as a family history of addiction (to any substance), as well as trans-generational trauma and dysfunctional family struggles contribute to a propensity towards addiction.

Glamorization in the media, association with specific underground scenes, and cocaine’s widespread availability also play a role.

A Journey Within and Beyond Cocaine Addiction

women's cocaine addiction treatmentCocaine is a perilously addictive stimulant derived from the leaves of the coca plant found in South America. Commonly called coke, and once included as a star ingredient in the recipe for Coca-Cola (as the name of the product indicates), cocaine used to be included in common household medicines intended as over the counter “elixirs” (often mixed with opiates for a complete effect) before coca’s real destructive power was wholly recognized.

Although primarily cleared out of the pharmaceutical canon, except for use as a local anesthetic, cocaine enjoyed a revival as an illicit drug in the United States during the 1970s, earning the reputation of being an “upper class” drug the excessive expense of maintaining cocaine addiction. However, since the more affordable version of the substance was created, crack cocaine and cocaine addiction are no longer limited to the high-end market. Cocaine is brought into the United States through an extensive network of smaller and larger drug cartels and is one of the top products trafficked worldwide.

Cocaine can be dissolved and injected intravenously, snorted in powder form, and smoked as a crack or freebase. Through its direct action on the brain, cocaine is highly habit-forming. It results in numerous health problems affecting the heart, mind, and respiratory systems and creates psychological wreckage for users – intense depression, anxiety, and psychosis. In smoked forms, cocaine has an even more direct entry route, and its powers are concentrated, including its addictiveness.

Cocaine originally lures us by appealing to what can be thought of as our more masculine, action, and thought-oriented side (as opposed to feelings and receptivity). The side of us that likes to direct and control environments, be in charge, and experience effectiveness will have more of an increased risk of engaging with cocaine. It is no accident that cocaine is often used in business circles, as it tends to aggravate those qualities already welcome in the business world – competitiveness, narcissism, and extraversion.

Many people “work well” under the influence of cocaine for a short time, as the euphoria and the mental-body stimulation allow them to fly, for a time, on borrowed wings in their social and work worlds. These wings fall off, and the person begins to experience the stunning drop, which involves depression, or ego deflation, where the person’s sense of themselves as well as the energy and ability to have positive thoughts about the self is now impaired and comes to depend on the presence of the substance, also known as cocaine dependence.

Cocaine addiction works as a pump, pumping air into the ego, inflating it into a giant bouncy castle of optimism, but equally deflates when absent. When looking at women who are drawn to cocaine, we may be seeing people who for whatever reason look for and enjoy a boost to their masculine pole, to the part that likes to be “large and in charge,” the claim that wants to be gregarious, productive, and high energy. This is the side within us most valued by our culture, whether born biologically male or female.

Cocaine boosts the part of us that can succeed in society. The spirit of cocaine addiction has to do with ego inflation – or what might be called feeling “up.” Not just energetically, but specifically in terms of self-perception. Under the influence of cocaine, people become more confident, verbal, and assertive, and perceive themselves as powerful and capable in ways they would not feel without it. In short, a cocaine trip is an ego trip. However, cocaine addiction will destroy many users’ personalities, including the ego, which becomes ever more brittle and fragile, disordered, and dysfunctional.

The organic infrastructure of character is converted into a house for the spirit of addiction. So although cocaine temporarily loans feelings of direction, focus, high energy, and self-esteem, it also directly destroys our ability to get there naturally, leaving us, as all drugs do, less able to focus and feel emotionally enormously weakened. Whatever the root cause of addiction is, prolonged cocaine use and cocaine abuse foster a negative, entitled, violent type of masculine principle energy pattern to live inside a woman instead of her real soul.

Over time, the woman that this malicious parasitic spirit of addiction rules is subject to ever more fractious, abusive thoughts, including psychosis and paranoia, and of course, the increasing drive to use the substance, not infrequently to the point of death. Cocaine often appeals to those who need to feel that their self are a winner, not just inferior but superior, a real contender. As such, it will always be an enormously addictive substance if humans are born with the “ego program” pre-installed in us.

women on a cocaine addiction treatment in CaliforniaThe ego will always like something that increases its reign of influence. We are all wounded in our self-esteem, and something that seems to take away that pain will be intriguing to us. Ego inflation is not true self-esteem, however, feeling that one is above others, more successful, more of a winner than they, however much the ego likes it, is isolating and does not create happiness. Instead, it makes a drive to fly higher and higher, to become more and more selfish, competitive, and self-centered, and to push more and more loved ones out to the periphery, until all are kicked underneath into the “less than” position, just for the poor ego-possessed person to feel safe. Because of this cycle, family therapy sessions are an effective cocaine addiction treatment factor to have a successful recovery for cocaine users.

Having a massive, over-inflated, healthy ego is enormously lonely, as it walls us off from those we long to be loved by. That is why even though people with a narcissistic personality structure seem to have an enviable amount of self-approval, their heart-shattering loneliness makes them deserving of our most profound compassion. Thus, cocaine makes a narcissist of anyone. Most of us are afraid of our depression, our low self-esteem, and the deflated pole, and the way that we conquer that within is to be in an adversarial relationship with it, to try to subjugate that within us which is vulnerable, weaker, what might be called the more feminine or yin qualities of receptivity.

Typically, we have a good reason for this pattern, often due to trauma from our lives when we had less power (as a child, for example). Finally, we do not want to spend any more time feeling powerless, less-than, and ego-deflated any longer in charge of our own lives. But what we resist persists. Women dependent on the substance and in desperate need of cocaine addiction treatment go into withdrawals when unable to use. Those withdrawals of cocaine addiction treatment are, as all withdrawals are, the equal and opposite effect of the drug itself. However far high up the drug took us above our baseline, we will swing, like a pendulum, precisely that far down below our original baseline, to the absolute nadir.

More profoundly depressed than when we started, more decimated in self-esteem, and more powerless, vulnerable, frightened, and traumatized. If you have fallen victim to the chains of substance abuse, please know that you have the right, at any time, to cancel that bargain and sincerely come back to your sovereignty through cocaine addiction treatment at our cocaine addiction rehab. With the proper cocaine addiction treatment and help, you have the right and the power to stop using the substance completely and gradually regrow natural, life-sustaining pathways in your brain and body.

You can grow your inner world back to the point where you can sustain positive, humble feelings of your worth in connection with others. You can make your inner world a place where it is safe for you to feel your vulnerability without fear of exploitation, enjoy your influxes of energy as they come, and experience your deep-bodied, more relaxed natural cycles of lower stamina. When you decide to seek cocaine addiction treatment and remove the substance and collapse the “house” that addiction has been living in, it cannot continue to live in you. You oversee this; only you can say what spirits you permit to live in you.

An Integrative Approach to Cocaine Addiction Treatment for Women

If you are ready to commit to cocaine addiction treatment and get back to substance-free yourself, come to Villa Kali Ma. In time, you will not need any substance to experience your natural heights. Instead, you will discover your birthright-given abilities to rise, ascending with all the support of the universe under your wings. To learn more about our cocaine addiction treatment program, contact us today. We are here to help.

Treatment for Cocaine Addiction

The first step in treating cocaine addiction is to safely detoxify and heal the body. Women should receive support from healing professionals where possible for restoring the body at the physical level, as the body must be assisted to completely release the substance altogether and safely pass through the stages of acute withdrawal.

Assisted cocaine detox in a dedicated facility is advised in the case of cocaine addiction due to the very high risk of relapse during this time of immediate physical detoxification. The high risk of relapse at this stage is caused mainly by the strong physical craving to use and the mood crash associated with removing cocaine’s stimulating effects from the body.

Treatment for cocaine addiction also requires stabilizing within the safety of a sober environment that will not only keep the addicted woman from using but also support other significant changes in patterns of behavior. Treatment for cocaine addiction is designed to imprint a new pattern of behavior through cognitive behavioral therapy, laying the foundations of a new lifestyle that will heal how you socialize, spend your time, and approach the management of stress and emotional triggers.

Treatment for cocaine addiction also includes learning more about cocaine addiction and how it works to best be able to recognize its impacts at play going forward. Women with addiction need cocaine addiction help learning to look out for the traps, patterns, and pitfalls that addiction lays for the recovering woman during cocaine recovery and make a relapse prevention plan that extends beyond treatment. For young women undergoing their recovery process to refrain from using cocaine, the follow up treatment is also as important.

Cocaine Addiction Treatment Options

cocaine addiction treatment for women

Cocaine addiction treatment options include checking into a rehabilitation facility, completing the course of treatment and education, and joining a 12-step recovery community.

It is generally wise to do both so that you or your loved one can benefit from the safe, structured environment and surrounding treatment team during vulnerable stages, as well as make deep and lasting changes, before attempting to make it in the real world again. During treatment, connection with a recovering community will begin, and this recovering community will offer ongoing protection and support after leaving the safer environment of treatment.

Villa Kali Ma’s holistic cocaine addiction treatment options include our detoxification program, our residential treatment program, and our intensive outpatient program.

Treatment at Villa Kali Ma is special in that it takes care to incorporate the body-mind connection in your healing process, so that you can benefit from wisdom teachings and holistic care such as yoga, shamanic breathwork, and ayurveda, in addition to a solid core of effective talk, behavioral, and creative therapies.

Cocaine addiction does not need to be the end of your story. With support from compassionate healers guidance from informed professionals, and a watertight community of fellow recovering women familiar with the terrain of recovery, you can make the needed changes to experience miraculous shifts in your life and overcome substance use disorders from other drugs as well.

I don't believe it to be an exaggeration to say that Villa Kali Ma saved my life.
I couldn't have asked for a better environment to heal and redirect onto a path towards true living.

KRISTEN B.

This place completely changed my life. I needed a drastic change from the typical recovery environment in order to stay sober long-term. I can honestly say that I love who I am today and I am forever grateful for Villa Kali Ma!

CYNTHIA B.

I am so grateful I found Villa Kali Ma, it has truly changed my life. Kay is awesome and the entire team who works there is absolutely amazing. If you need treatment, I highly recommend making this the start to your recovery.

SUZIE H.

Villa Kali Ma is an in-network provider with Anthem BCBS, Multiplan, First Health, Healthnet, and currently accepts most
PPO plans with out-of-network benefits. Call (760) 350-3131 for information on cost and payment options.