Residential treatment is the most promising path for addiction recovery for women with addiction, mental health disorders, and trauma.
In this article, we share some observations and about what works best to help women achieve and sustain sobriety, based on what we know so far and what we have seen in residential settings.
How Residential Treatment Builds a Foundation for Lasting Sobriety
When it comes to long-term addiction recovery, residential rehab is the gold standard. Residential treatment is the most reliable and effective route to establishing sobriety in a way that recovery is most likely to take root, flourish, and last over time.
The benefits of residential rehab, in turn, are most potent when followed up with active involvement in a recovery community, such as AA. But even as a standalone treatment, we at Villa Kali Ma always recommend residential when feasible for a woman’s circumstances.
Immersion in a quality residential rehabilitation program is the mother’s milk of early recovery, providing many important nutrients and lifelong protection that is harder to get other ways. The structured, all-encompassing environment offered by inpatient rehabilitation protects vulnerable people during the most dangerous phases of initial sobriety.
Change of Scenery
Physical and psychological distance from substances and our ordinary reasons for suffering make residential rehabs more effective. Both time and space heal, so every mile of distance and every minute away from the context in which drug use took place, bring exponential benefits.
The bright seed of recovery needs a chance to find fertile soil, sprout, and take root within us. Even with therapy and psychoeducation, groups, and many treatment hours during the day time, the part of us that wants to change can have a harder time gaining a foothold in our life if we stay put physically in our old environment, rooted in the same soil as before.
Design, Purpose and Dedication of Residential Rehabilitation
The other reason that the stay-away model helps (besides giving us a change of scenery), has to do with the design and purpose of residential rehab facilities.
Residential rehab facilities are specifically designed to serve one purpose: to help women recover from addiction.
Every location is influenced by its functionality, and it makes sense to go to certain places to get certain experiences. We wouldn’t go to our nearest Costco to help us find a sense of beauty, purpose, and meaning in life. That’s not the purpose of Costco. We don’t go to a tiny village to get in touch with the pulse of contemporary culture. We need to go where we can credibly find what we’re looking for.
Residential rehab facilities like Villa Kali Ma are here in this world for one purpose: to help women recover from addiction, mental health disorders, and trauma. This purpose informs everything about us. The environment is safe, quiet, and conducive to the needs of the recovering women. From the daily schedule to the menu, to the healing modalities offered in groups and individual therapy sessions, everything is tailored to this core purpose.
The Role of Community, Accountability, and Therapy
One promise that residential delivers on, is to entrain habits that will sustain recovery long term. The intensity of a typical residential rehabilitation schedule reflects the size of the change that is generally required to recover, at least in the very beginning. While of course no one would be expected to keep up the level of self-work that is facilitated during the residential stay, there are several practices which are necessary to sustain over time, in order to stay sober long term. These “best practices for long term recovery” include community, accountability, and ongoing psychological healing work with a therapist or other practitioner.
Community
Addiction thrives in a context of psychological isolation. It is usually necessary, therefore, to learn to proactively counteract the tendency to isolate into one’s own fortress of (misguided) strategies. These almost always tend to lead back to the same “solution” we came to before – using substances. In order to not end up back in a situation, in which addiction feels like the only answer for dealing with our pain, we have to learn to do the radical act of opening up our inner world and sharing the contents there, honestly and transparently.
Fortunately, it is not required that we share our inner psychological contents everywhere, in fact most places we won’t. But there is one context, inside of which we will need to open up and be honest about all that’s taking place inside of us, good bad and ugly: in a recovery community. The simple, courageous act of telling the truth – what we’re really actually thinking, feeling, and grappling with internally – is the single most protective factor for recovery.
In a residential rehabilitation facility, we begin to practice honesty in community. This practice has two components: learning to accurately identify what we are feeling, and then sharing it. While it can feel awkward at first to learn to tell the truth about what we notice taking place within us, residential rehabilitation is the perfect setting to get used to this necessity of recovery.
Accountability
Accountability is connected to taking responsibility for ourselves. Community helps with accountability, because when we say out loud in front of a group of kind attentive people what we truthfully notice within ourselves, it is harder to act out of congruence with that truth. Truth dispels the cloak of semi-darkness that addiction relies upon, and this helps us, in turn, make good on our promises to ourselves and each other. When we can say, without fear of judgment by another, that we made a promise to ourselves, but then we broke that same promise, we are one step closer to understanding what within us couldn’t say yes to that promise, what we feared about that change, or what within us we haven’t yet encountered, which needs our loving attention.
Psychotherapy and other Healing Modalities
Whether in individual therapy or in a group setting, ongoing psychological and physiological healing is highly recommended for people in recovery. What type of therapy, and at what frequency may vary by individual, but for people with addiction, we will not make it long if we do not continuously engage in the rather large job of healing and releasing the energetic burdens we received by way of traumatic events and non-secure attachment relationships in our lives.
In residential rehabilitation, we have intensive experiences with different kinds of therapies and healing modalities that kick-start (or restart) our therapeutic journey, in ways that inform and set us up for success in ongoing therapy after treatment.
Post-Treatment Planning: Life After Residential Rehab
Recovery is a lifestyle which will need to be actively nourished, nurtured, and maintained over time.
Here are three pillars of a strong recovery structure, which you may expect to be part of your life after completing residential rehab:
Pillar 1: Consistent participation in 12 Step (or another peer-led recovery community).
12 Step involvement, not only attendance but working the steps with a sponsor, is the number one most effective safeguard against relapse.
Recovery community involvement brings, with time, a level of connection, unity, comradeship, and restoration of spirit that far exceeds what we may have ever hoped for out of life. Community is a powerful antidote to isolation and the many forms of suffering that come with feeling cut off and disconnected from our fellow humans.
12 Step does for us what we needed our addiction to do for us – it helps us dispel psychological burdens. Even with tools learned in rehab, we will need a place where we can dispel our psychological burdens safely. Burdens, tensions, and inner conflicts left uncleared turn into relapse. 12 Step is a place to receive safe support, experience fellowship, and live a life suffused with meaning.
Pillar 2: Aftercare treatment.
Aftercare refers to the treatment services a person receives after finishing an intensive program. Depending on what options are available to you, aftercare may involve attending an intensive outpatient program for some weeks. In general, aftercare is designed to gradually ease people out of an intensive treatment environment, through a slow reduction in frequency of services.
Aftercare will usually start out with a high level of treatment hours per week, then reduce to weekly, monthly, and eventually, occasional alumni events. Aftercare helps support a transition from higher to lower structure. It also sustains positive relationships with treatment staff, and ensures we stay close to people who will look out for us until we don’t need so much looking after anymore.
Pillar 3: Care for the Body
The physical body is an enormous resource for recovery. When the sweet animal body is happy because we have given her appropriate nourishment, rest, play, physical affection, and downtime, the vast majority of psychological troubles cannot find fertile ground in us.
Here are four ways that Villa Kali Ma staff recommend the body be cared for after treatment: diet, exercise, sleep, and nature time.
Clean, nutrient-dense diet
Every body is different and it’s important to pay attention to what’s resonant and nourishing for you. Broadly speaking, most of us do well with a diet that is made up primarily of fresh vegetables, fruit, nuts, legumes, whole grains, and proteins. Specifically we would do well to steer clear of sugar, refined carbs, processed foods, pesticides (eat organic and non-GMO when possible) and chemical ingredients (a shorter ingredients label is generally better).
Exercise
Yoga, qi gong, dance, hiking, walking, running, cycling, swimming, aerobics, HIIT, weights, all have slightly different benefits. Do what works for you to include both gentle and vigorous movement in your daily life.
Sleep
Follow a consistent sleep schedule, going to bed at a consistent time and limiting screen time, especially in the evening.
Nature-Bathing
Get sufficient green time (outdoors in green spaces like parks and gardens, and, as possible, in wilder spaces). Let your whole body, mind, and spirit bathe in nature’s aura, as a protective strategy to stay sober and connected to what matters in life.
Long-Term Support Through Villa Kali Ma’s Continuum of Care
Rehabilitation is an initiation into a lifestyle. Even an ample, lush amount of time sequestered in a high-quality residential treatment facility should not be considered a kind of “one and done” experience we will never need to look back on. Rather, rehab is more like the first few pages of a rich, deep story, one we will draw creative soul nourishment from for the rest of our lives.
Villa Kali Ma offers a full spectrum of care services, from medically supervised detoxification, to partial hospitalization, to residential treatment, to intensive outpatient, to outpatient, to aftercare. Our goal is to be available at every level of care for when you need us.
If you’re a woman looking to recover from addiction, mental illness, and trauma in a safe, holistic, effective care setting, consider our spectrum of programs and services. They are designed just for you. We’d love to meet you and share what we have found to be helpful for women walking the same path you find yourself on now.