Tag: Addiction Recovery for Women

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Internal family systems model of healing

An Internal Family Systems Take on Addiction, Part 3

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

In this series of posts, we explore addiction and the role of shame in women who use substances, through an Internal Family Systems lens. In the first part of this series we shared an overview of the IFS model. In the second part we explored why making an enemy out substance use is ineffective.

In this third and final post, we’ll talk about befriending, understanding, and appreciating substance-using parts for their true positive intentions.

Making Friends with Substance Using Parts

If you find it hard to imagine making friends with the part within ourselves or another person that uses substances, you’re not alone. The notion of lessening the amount of moralizing, judgment and fear we feel towards substances and the people who abuse them seems counterintuitive to many people. It may even feel threatening or upsetting.

The concerns typically center around the following questions: Are we condoning substance use if we stop calling it bad and wrong? Are we encouraging or indulging substance use if we pause our disapproval long enough to get to know it? Can we really afford to take the time, to get curious about substance using parts? Won’t substance using parts take over, causing havoc right and left, if we don’t keep them on a tight leash? If we stop pointing out the problems that come with addiction, aren’t we somehow enabling it?

According to Cece Sykes, Martha Sweezy, and Richard Schwartz, authors of the treatment manual on the use of IFS for addictions, the opposite is true. Resisting, labeling, judging, worrying and attempting to control substance use generally only makes it worse. Genuinely accepting, understanding, and befriending substance-using parts and their true motivations leads to those parts cooperating with the healing process.

Attempts to eliminate or conquer substance abuse almost always send a shaming message: You’re doing something wrong. This isn’t ok. There’s something wrong with you. We want you to be different. Be like us, don’t be like you. We know better than you do, about what you need. You don’t deserve attention, recognition, understanding.

Instead, we must find ways to get calm and curious, to truly open our hearts to substance-using parts, acknowledging them as beloved parts that are trapped in a very difficult, thankless job. We cannot permit substance-using parts to run the show, that is true (though it wouldn’t hurt to try to understand why they feel they need to run the show). And we must be able to set, hold and adjust firm, kind boundaries with them, for that reason.

Nevertheless, imprisoning and accusing substance using parts is a variation of an ancient and common psychological mistake: shooting the messenger.

Instead, we need to find a way to welcome, understand, and appreciate substance-using parts for what they are doing for the system. If they are extreme and destructive, then it is our job to find out why such extremity and destruction is necessary in the internal system.

Only once we have recognized the true benevolent intentions driving substance use do we have a chance of change. Instead of shaming substance use, we have to meet it with the opposite of shame: love.

Love not Shame for Women with Addiction

As we discussed in previous posts, shame is one of the biggest healing topics for women with addiction. Although women who have addictions and other extreme behaviors are often treated as though they don’t have enough shame (don’t they realize what they’re doing is bad?), this is a misunderstanding. It’s quite the opposite.

Women with addiction do very well realize that what they are doing is considered heavily judged. Most likely, substance-using women are keenly aware of the attitudes others have about their use. It is also highly likely that they condemn themselves even more harshly than anyone else around them would. Such women may very well believe that the use of substances is only one small piece of evidence in the giant pile of evidence that proves their badness, and low value, as people.

It is consciousness of this “fact”, of their supposed moral badness or other kind of inferiority, that, in part, drives many women with addiction to need to keep up a cycle of using. In the soothing arms of a mood-altering substance, women are temporarily free from constant reminders of their badness – and the horrible feelings and sensations that go with that belief. These women need to be loved, not scolded.

IFS adamantly insists there are No Bad Parts. There isn’t anything wrong with any of us, that can’t be understood at the end of the day as attempts to survive overwhelming pain. With this mindset, we can begin to understand where substance-using parts are coming from. Eventually, we may even come to love them, for their extreme loyalty and dedication to helping us survive.

How Substance Using Parts Help Us Deal with Shame

The key to understanding substance-using parts and what they are doing for our inner system lies in the phenomenon of shame. Many mental health conditions are closely tied to shame. For our purposes today, we will look at the connection between trauma and shame to help understand why women with trauma history often end up using substances to cope.

Trauma burdens survivors with a legacy of chronic shame – shame about what happened to us, about our inability to defend ourselves or others, what it says about us that people treated us this way, and about what we have done to cope.

Shame is defined by popular speaker and researcher Brene Brown as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging—something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection.”

IFS pioneer Mike Elkin, offers a similar definition, stating that shame is the experience of “being witnessed in one’s badness”. Another key figure working on the topic of shame and addiction is legendary pioneer John Bradshaw, someone who has contributed enormously to the world of peer-led recovery. Byron Brown, meanwhile, explores the phenomenon of the inner critic and its connection to shame, through a spiritual lens.

However it is defined, these mental health thought-leaders and many more consider shame to be one of the most psychologically distressing schemas. Shame is often described by clients using phrases like “I want to die”, “I died” or “I want to disappear” or “I want to bury myself” – it is no exaggeration to say that shame is vibrationally close to death. To use Internal Family Systems terms, most, if not all, parts in our system have the job of protecting us from further experiences of shame.

Because shame is so extremely horrible as to be intolerable, our systems need to take on many roles and work very hard to find ways to protect us from contact with it. Shame feels so difficult to endure, that people go to great lengths to behave in ways that limit our vulnerability to it, often at great mental, emotional, and relational cost. When we inevitably encounter our legacy reservoir of shame anyway, in spite of all our attempts to be perfect, we will do almost anything to escape or numb that experience.

Addiction is a strategy used by parts whose job it is to help us tolerate the intense pain of our shame when it gets too much. Substance use blunts, distracts, and soothes us when we have a shame attack.

IFS founder Richard Schwartz has noted on several occasions in trainings and public talks, that if you ask a substance-using part what it is afraid would happen if the client stopped using substances, the answer is often that it fears the client will commit suicide. These examples illustrate that in their own extreme ways, substance-using parts are trying to save the life of the client.

Recognizing that substance using parts work to protect us from experiencing overwhelming shame and feelings of wanting to die is an important step in the direction of forgiving our substance using parts. Maybe someday we can even feel love and gratitude towards our addiction, for trying to help us survive the unsurvivable.

The Inner Shamer

IFS maintains that although substance using parts get a lot of negative attention, they are only half of the story. Equally important to befriending our substance using parts, is to get to know our inner shamers. These parts continue to tell us, over and over again, that we don’t deserve love and belonging.

Inner shamers attack our lovability and worthiness, using unfair standards and comparisons to others. They berate and condemn us, frighten and harass us. They critique and savage us, until we are so broken-spirited and hopeless, we stay safely away from the fray of life. We withdraw from the playing field of life, where, our inner shamers say, we are safer.

What IFS reveals is that the parts doing the inner attacking are doing so for a positive intention, just like substance using parts. In fact, it is very likely to be the same intention: to help us avoid getting overwhelmed by shame.

The inner critic is one such part in the inner system that uses shame, to try to prevent us from experiencing even more shame. How could shaming ourselves help avoid more shame? How could taking on the belief that we are unworthy of love and belonging help us feel less bad?

The answer to these questions is specific and personal. We can only find out by getting to know the inner shamer and asking it why it feels it needs to shame us for us to be safe. Just as with substance using parts, we won’t get anywhere by trying to fight, judge, or marginalize the inner shamer. All we can do is try to understand why the inner shamer believes that it must do what it is doing.

Although personalized answers are best given by asking one’s own inner shamer, there are some general truths that help explain why shame is sometimes believed to be necessary for our survival. As little beings, we all did whatever was required to reduce the amount of harmful inputs from the environment. We did anything that was effective to be less harmed by rage attacks, abuse, violation, withholding of love, abandonment, or whatever else may have been harming us. We also did whatever worked to increase the amount of needed inputs: we learned to perform acts that maximized love, affection, kindness, contact, and help. The more extreme the environment we grew up in was, the more extreme our parts had to be, to get us through safely.

Perhaps shaming ourselves once made us less of a target of anger, sexual violation, or envy. Maybe it helped us expect less out of life, and therefore not feel so much pain, disappointment or rejection, which would have been met with more shaming. It could be that taking on the belief that we deserved what was happening to us made abuse hurt less, helped us make sense of why harm was being done to us, or gave us a sense of greater agency in experiences of severe helplessness.

Collapsing ourselves into a shame-maintaining body posture, according to Dr. Janina Fisher, serves self-preservation in multiple ways in traumatogenic family environments. Shame, although very primitive, works to change behavior quickly even when we’re very small, because it is so painful. It is extremely common for women to have strong self-shaming parts, that they rely upon to help them feel safe in a dangerous world, that have been with them since they were very young. To find out what your inner shamer believes is necessary to keep you safe, you must first befriend that shamer until it is willing to share from the heart with you.

Healing What Lies Beneath

Addiction represents, in part, a desire to escape from the sensations, emotions, and burdensome beliefs of shame, which can be summed up with the following untruth: I am bad. I don’t deserve love. I deserve abuse. People don’t love me, protect me, or care for me, because I am bad. I may as well die. Paradoxically, the self-shaming parts are also trying to protect us from having to re-experience being burdened with a belief in our badness, by getting us to avoid behaving in ways that we associate with having been traumatically shamed before.

The ultimate cure, IFS maintains, is to eventually get in contact with the parts of us that carry the burdens of having been shamed – our exiles. We must heal the shame itself, by removing it from the shoulders of our most tender parts. Once we do free our exiles from that which they never should have had to carry, by completing the IFS unburdening process (or another process for traumatic memory reprocessing, such as EMDR), our substance using parts and our shamers will naturally relent.

Not only will they stop being destructive to us, they will be happy not to have to work so hard and in such extreme, painful ways. They will be relieved and comforted that someone safe and loving (in this case, us!) is at last taking care of us in ways that they never could.

There are vulnerable parts within all of us, and like children, vulnerable parts cannot stand to be without love. When they were told, through words or actions, that we did not deserve the love, protection, contact, belonging, nourishment, that we really needed to feel safe, to grow up, and to be ok in this world, it created a wound. That wound can be healed.

How is the wound healed? Through building a loving relationship with Self – that timeless, shining sun of compassionate, available unconditional love, that is found inside all living beings.

Thank you for reading!

If you’re interested in seeing how IFS and other compassionate approaches to healing women’s trauma, mental illness, and substance use could help you or someone you love, we invite you to check out our integrative programs for women.

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Detox

From Withdrawal to Renewal: What to Expect in Women’s Detox

When a woman chooses to get sober, several positive events are set in motion. The ripple effects of her courageous act will eventually show up as huge waves of renewal, blessing many facets of her life in unforeseeable ways.

Women who choose sobriety and all that it entails are fated to discover dimensions of their own being, and experiences of full-hearted living, which were previously unimaginable. The path of self-reclamation will transform these women from hard, lonely seeds of longing and potential, into deep-rooted, beautiful, flowering trees.

The first wave of positive change comes through the body, mind, and spirit, by way of profound cleansing, through the detoxification process. As addictive substances and other toxins are purged, the body resets to a new baseline of greater vibrance, health, and sensitivity. This is the initiation stage of recovery, during which a woman’s true essence, long hiding and hurt, is gently coaxed back to the surface of life – out to play and love again.

For all women out there who are wondering what happens in detox, especially in a trauma-safe detox designed especially for women, this post is for you. We’ll break it down for you so you know exactly what to expect.

From Withdrawal to Renewal: What to Expect in Women’s Detox

Detox is a process with distinct phases. How long each stage lasts can vary, depending on the substances you have been using, how long you have been using, how old you were when you started using, how frequently you have been using, and how much you have been using.

The length of a stage is also impacted by overall health, and whether you are also struggling with co-occurring conditions like mental illness and trauma. In general, women with a greater number of challenges to address will naturally need more time and support to progress through the stages. All in all, you can trust that just by showing up at the detox facility and checking in, you are doing your part. All that’s necessary to be moved through the healing steps will be provided by the facility, as treatment staff guide you through the phases.

The phases of detoxification happen in the following order: evaluation, stabilization, and preparation to enter substance abuse treatment.

Understanding the Physical and Emotional Stages of Detox 

Each stage of detoxification has typical physical and emotional characteristics. Learn more about what to expect in each stage by reading below.

Evaluation

During the evaluation stage, you will undergo a comprehensive intake assessment that covers your substance use, physical and mental health needs, and any other factors which may be relevant to your detoxification process.

The goal of the evaluation stage is to create a personalized detoxification plan. Influencing this plan are any co-occurring mental health and trauma diagnoses, as well as preferences and needs.

During the evaluation phase you may already experience some initial withdrawal symptoms, such as anxiety, nausea, or shaking. It is also normal to feel apprehensive or worried about what’s to come, as you might at the start of any medical procedure. However, this stage is usually completed without difficulty.

Stabilization

Most of the detoxification itself happens during the second stage, once you are checked in and situated. This stage is called stabilization. The stabilization phase starts with initial withdrawal symptoms, which are noticeable and somewhat uncomfortable but not exceptionally so.

The withdrawal process peaks around three to five days in, when you enter acute withdrawal. Acute withdrawal is the point at which withdrawal symptoms are the most uncomfortable. You can expect short term pain, nausea, cravings, and feelings of uneasiness and dread.

Stabilization can be highly uncomfortable, and thankfully it is temporary. The stabilization stage comes to an end when the patient’s body systems have stabilized – toxic substances are fully purged and withdrawals are over.

During stabilization, detox patients need to be closely observed. When needed, they may be assisted with medical interventions that reduce physical pain or psychological distress. Stabilization lasts several days, generally peaking around three days in, with some variation depending on a person’s substance use patterns.

In a holistic women’s detox program like ours at Villa Kali Ma, we supply gentle support with natural interventions, such as light movement, for easing psychological and physical pain, that complement any needed medical protocols.

Preparation for Substance Abuse Treatment

Once the stabilization phase is completed, detox staff help prepare you to leave the detox facility and enter a substance abuse treatment program. It’s very important to go into treatment right away, to avoid any temptation to sabotage your progress. This is vulnerable moment in your journey, and the desire to return to substance use will be strong.

Initial and acute withdrawals have finished, but there is a further kind of withdrawal symptom called post-acute. Post-acute withdrawal is characterized by lingering physical and psychological effects which can last for several weeks and even months, depending on the individual. Post-acute withdrawals are not so extreme as to represent an immediate threat to the body, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t painful or disturbing, especially for women with additional mental health conditions or trauma histories. Post-acute withdrawals still need to be addressed with treatment, in order to be healed.

Post-acute withdrawal symptoms include strong cravings to use, feelings of dread and distress, disruptive mental health symptoms, sleep disturbances, and other difficulties that are best handled in the context of a substance abuse treatment program. Options at this stage include residential inpatient treatment, partial hospitalization programs, and intensive outpatient programs.

How Supportive Care Makes the Difference in Early Recovery

In early recovery, the opportunity exists to lay a strong foundation for all that comes after. Ideally, women receive the emotional support they need for the challenging experience of self-surrendering to a change process that affects every aspect of consciousness.

Because thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations are all impacted by the detoxification process and first days in sobriety, this is a delicate and sensitive time. No matter our actual biological age, in terms of our sobriety we are newborns, and may feel just as helpless, sensitive, and needy of comforting contact with safe people. We may feel lost, in need of guidance, or struggle with overwhelming feelings.

For that reason, as soon as women have completed detox and entered one of our treatment programs, we here at Villa Kali Ma begin administering a comprehensive suite of different kinds of gentle care, to get her feeling better quickly.

In between groups and individual psychotherapy sessions, our clients receive healing treatments with our team of holistic practitioners. Through gentle, immersive experiences, we help women create ease and feelings of capacity, through modalities like yoga, mindfulness, acupuncture, massage, Ayurvedic nutrition, nature therapy, reiki, breath work, and more. We take care to meet our clients heart to heart, as the inherently whole, valuable women they are.

Take the First Step Toward Healing in Villa Kali Ma’s Women’s Detox Program

Villa Kali Ma is a licensed provider of integrative addiction, mental health, and trauma treatment services for women. We offer a holistic, women-only detox program that integrates seamlessly into our substance abuse treatment options.

We offer inpatient residential rehabilitation, partial hospitalization, intensive outpatient programs, and trauma healing at different locations across beautiful, coastal Northern San Diego County.

Villa Kali Ma is a place where you can find connection and belonging among other women who have decided to choose the upward spiral of wholehearted living. Our programs guarantee small group size, a high ratio of staff to clients, a luxurious array of adjunct holistic therapies, and serene settings.

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Detox

Mind, Body & Spirit: The Holistic Approach to Women’s Detox

At Villa Kali Ma, we are known best for our integrative approach to women’s mental health and recovery. We offer the most effective, cutting-edge clinical modalities, hand in hand with an abundant array of complementary holistic therapies.

Our core clinical program incorporates all-star treatments like Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Cognitive Behavior Therapy, Internal Family Systems Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Mindfulness and Self-Compassion, individual psychotherapy, group therapy, family therapy, Expressive Arts Therapy, and Nature Therapy. Our state-of-the-art trauma program for women centers on Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, (EMDR), Brainspotting, Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy, neurofeedback, Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE), and Somatic Experiencing. Our holistic offerings encompass yoga, nutrition, massage, acupuncture, reiki, sound healing, shamanic journeying, mindfulness, energy work, spirituality, and more.

Across our three facilities in northern San Diego County, we cover a full spectrum of addiction recovery services, beginning with medically-supervised detoxification for those who are initiating the journey of sobriety from drugs and alcohol.

You may be wondering how an integrative facility like Villa Kali Ma would approach medical detoxification. What does a holistic approach to detox look like? To answer that question, read on!

Healing the Whole Self: The Holistic Approach to Detox for Women

True to our promise to meet each woman in mind, body, and spirit, Villa Kali Ma’s holistic detox for women heals more than the body alone. Our gentle and effective program is more rightly understood as a mind-body detox, even a spiritual healing detox.

When a woman enters our detox program, the body is certainly where we begin –  women’s bodies have many needs during withdrawal. Physical symptoms and potentially life-threatening adverse reactions are front and center during the initial days of stabilization. To make sure our client is safe and secure during the acute withdrawal stage, our medical supervision team observes closely, ready to step in to administer emergency medical interventions and protocols when necessary. Our goal during this time is to help each woman safely rid the body of all harmful toxins, to stabilize her condition, and to begin restoring needed levels of minerals and hydration.

During this time, we meet each woman’s bodily needs for comfort, calm, and safety as best we can in the given circumstances, so that she can have the least painful, least distressing experience of the bodily stabilization process.

While the body has needs for comfort, safety, and protection from stressors to be able to heal, the mind, emotions and spirit have needs during detox too. Withdrawals notoriously impact thoughts, feelings, and even spiritual perception. Because of the beautifully intricate way that mind, body, emotions, and spirit interlace, each dimension of a woman’s being has its own experience of detox. Fortunately, there are many ultra-gentle, non-invasive holistic interventions, ranging from Reiki with essential oils, to sound healing, to acupuncture, to massage, which can help make the withdrawal experience less frightening and difficult.

Supporting the Body’s Natural Healing Process

At Villa Kali Ma, we acknowledge that it is the body itself who creates health, rather than doctors, medicine, or practitioners. Therapeutic interventions, including pharmaceutical ones, are wonderful aids in some instances, but only as ways to support the body’s innate, self-healing mechanisms. All healers work as assistants to the vital life force inside each woman’s body, rather than experts in charge of the body.

In keeping with that recognition, our holistic detox for women is geared towards supporting natural healing processes to flourish in the body. This means removing toxic chemicals and substances, so that the body can self-repair. Drugs and alcohol disrupt and interfere with the body’s natural systems, with wide-ranging effects on immunity, nervous system regulation, cognition, stress, pain modulation, and more.

Once drugs, alcohol, and other commonplace toxins are purged from the body, all of the body’s natural systems of health can be supported to come back online, through the reintroduction of nutrients, minerals, vitamins, and other beneficial, nourishing natural supports for bodily functioning. Nutritional counseling, acupuncture, and massage can be exceedingly helpful for helping body systems to return to natural vibrance.

Integrating Emotional and Spiritual Recovery During Detox

Restoration of the body’s natural life force, and reactivation of self-healing mechanisms, support holistic emotional and spiritual healing. The life force that heals the body is the same life force that heals matters of the heart, clarifies mental perception, and opens spiritual access to states of peace and unification with the divine.

Because of the ways that body and emotion intertwine, an unwell body goes together with emotional challenges, and vice versa. It is not a coincidence that while addiction ravages the body, it simultaneously fills the mind with extreme negative thoughts, fills hearts with emotions of deep suffering, and blocks spiritual resources from being felt as real, loving, and present.

During Villa Kali Ma’s detoxification program, we encourage the self-healing vital life force to return not only to the body, but also to the connected realms of emotion, cognition and spirit. We do this through gentle contact, guidance, and support, meeting each woman in her heart, as well as her thoughts. Each aspect of the detoxification experience is sacred, relational, and in need of supremely gentle attention.

Discover a Holistic Path to Renewal at Villa Kali Ma 

At Villa Kali Ma, we engage women attending our programs as the irreplaceable, beloved, remarkable souls that we recognize them to be. Our multidisciplinary team of holistic and clinical professionals provides services with an attitude of kindness, regard, and curiosity towards each woman’s unique essence.

In our private, safe, women-only milieus, we welcome women from all walks of life to discover a holistic path to renewal.

If you’re looking to start a healing journey that will clear the many pains and burdens of addiction, mental illness, and trauma from all pockets of your being, you may want to consider joining our community of recovering women.

Villa Kali Ma is a nourishing, positive place to find support among other women who have experienced life in ways that you will recognize and resonate with from your own story. Our treatment milieus are characterized by small group size, a high ratio of staff to clients, and peaceful settings. Our unique, integrative program was created specifically for women like you.

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Detox

Gentle Beginnings: Why a Safe, Nurturing Detox Matters for Women

What helps a woman recover from drug and alcohol abuse: Gentleness or harshness? Raising expectations or lowering them? Softening or hardening?

As experts in the field of women’s trauma, mental illness, and addiction, we here at Villa Kali Ma believe that roughness almost never helps. We’ve noticed that being too tough on a woman who’s already in a lot of pain only adds more hurt to the equation.

Instead, Villa Kali Ma prefers a different approach: gentle containment. It is true that people with out of control substance use need to have options taken away from them, in the short term. We just do not believe that boundaries need to be harsh, or administered in a spirit of punishment. Boundaries can be as soft as a child’s playpen and still help create safety.

Containment involves strong, firm, clear boundaries: yeses and nos. Limitations and restrictions. Reducing the amount of space available to a dangerous, harming part of a woman is necessary.

But nowhere along the way is judgment, harshness, moralizing, criticism, withholding of warmth, or any other negative approach useful. The only thing that really works with women’s pain is to find out what that pain is trying to say, what it really needs, and how it wants to heal.

For all the families out there who are at their wits’ end, frustrated, hurt and worried – you’re right too. It can’t go on like this. It is alarming. Substance addicted women are wreaking a path of destruction, moving like a wrecking ball through the hearts and lives of those they love the most. That is all true.

And…still: The only thing that actually helps is to create the time, space, and right conditions to get curious. What’s going on? Why would any woman end up destroying her own precious being, and the lives of people around her?

The answer to this question is a Gordian knot, that needs time, space, kindness, and patience to unravel. But trust us, it all makes sense in the end. Once that woman’s pain has been sufficiently heard and believed, understood and encouraged, it will eventually transform, back into a positive expression of this woman’s vital life force. What was once bound in pain will emerge with a new face – as authenticity, courage, love, and compassion. As pure aliveness of the kind that rises to meet the world with joy.

Why a Safe, Nurturing Detox Experience Matters for Women

The detox experience can be extremely challenging for women. In some cases, it represents a health risk, when withdrawal symptoms may be life-threatening, as with benzodiazepines and alcohol. In other cases, it’s mostly the physiological and psychological nightmare that has to be endured, which is challenging to get through without resorting to using substances again.

A safe, nurturing detox is extremely important for women with trauma, mental illness and addiction. That’s why Villa Kali Ma’s holistic, trauma-informed medical detox facility for women is effective. We take care to combine the ingredients of safe containment with exquisite gentleness, compassion, and kindness.

We don’t want to lie to you: detox is difficult, no matter where you do it. And, it can also be made a lot safer, less painful, and more tolerable, by choosing to do your detox in a nurturing, woman-friendly program like ours.

The Importance of Compassionate Care During the Detox Process

During detoxification, the body, mind, and emotions become extremely sensitive. During initial phases, small bits of stimulation in the environment, such as the quality of the lights, sounds, and other environmental factors, become very intense to experience. What a person might ordinarily process as an unimportant background noise can be perceived by the detoxing nervous system as loud and large. What would be a very subtle sensation on the skin, or a tolerable amount of light normally, can contribute to pain in an already pained, agitated, and taxed body.

This sensitivity extends to include emotional and relational stimulation, such as may be introduced by interactions with people administering the detoxification protocols. Bedside manner matters a lot. A nurse or doctor who isn’t able to give us full, kind, attention when we are in such a vulnerable situation can unintentionally amplify the amount of pain, fear, and distress we may feel.

Women fare better in environments where caregivers have an understanding for what kind of relational interactions are needed with a sensitized nervous system, especially one that has been traumatized and hurt by people in the past. Women with a background of trauma and mental illness are more able to relax enough to heal when they are relationally safe, sensing themselves to be gently held, seen, witnessed, and cared for by present, emotionally-regulated caregivers.

The reason it’s important that caregivers are regulated as they interact with us, is because only in the relaxed, relationally connected state of being are we able to properly convey compassion, and its many soothing benefits for patients. It is very difficult to heal in the absence of compassion; compassion is a key that opens the door to relaxation, which is part of the healing process, linked to the parasympathetic nervous system response.

How Trauma-Informed Detox Promotes Long-Term Healing

Detox is the very start of a healing journey. What happens during detox can have long-ranging implications for how the rest of the journey is experienced. In particular, where fear and distress can be minimized, through gentle, holistic, and trauma-informed care, the long-term healing process can begin with a stronger foundation.

Several aspects of trauma affect the detox process, including what trauma does to the nervous system’s ability to process and release stimulation. Women with a trauma background are coming in with an extra challenge to detoxification, which is that their nervous systems most likely are not well-versed in the regulated state. Add to that the specific impacts of drug and alcohol withdrawal – the amplification of pain, anxiety, and despair. Drug and alcohol withdrawal makes emotions and thoughts go haywire even in a relatively un-traumatized woman’s nervous system. For women coming in with serious trauma histories, the effects are intensified.

For all these reasons and more, it is highly recommended that women receive detoxification services in a trauma-informed facility, such as that offered by Villa Kali Ma. This is to avoid re-traumatization.

Begin Your Healing in a Peaceful, Supportive Detox Environment at Villa Kali Ma

Villa Kali Ma believes that feeling safe, peaceful, and supported are an important part of creating the combination of gentleness and containment that women genuinely do need to be able to get better.

Our medically supervised detox program integrates holistic treatments, and approaches women’s pain with a feather-light touch, to make the process as smooth as possible.

If you or a loved one are in need of detox services, we invite you to consider our program. We’d love to help you gently rid yourself of toxins that are robbing you of your right to peace, safety, love and longevity.

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Addiction Treatment Internal family systems model of healing

An Internal Family Systems Take on Addiction: Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We all have Self

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

We all have Parts

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

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

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

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

3 Kinds of Parts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Parts may want different things

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

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

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

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

We are Self, we have parts

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

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

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

Self-led

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
Addiction Treatment Trauma Trauma Therapy

How PHP Supports Lasting Recovery from Addiction and Trauma

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

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

How Partial Hospitalization Helps Women Achieve Lasting Healing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Combining Trauma Therapy, Community, and Self-Discovery

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

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

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

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

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

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

Preparing for Next Steps After PHP

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

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

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

Continued Healing with Villa Kali Ma’s Comprehensive Care

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

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

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

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

Categories
Addiction Treatment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Family Legacy Trauma – trauma inherited from family or lineage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Therapeutic Structure to Rebuild Safety and Trust

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

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

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

How Intensive Daytime Care Promotes Deep Healing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Deep physiological experiences of safety, restoration, and repair

Begin Your Trauma Recovery Journey with Our PHP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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