Tag: Addiction Recovery

Categories
Addiction Treatment

Why PHP is a Vital Step for Women Healing from Trauma

At Villa Kali Ma, we have a uniquely gentle, compassionate, and effective Partial Hospitalization Program for women recovering from addiction, mental illness and trauma.

Our PHP blends the benefits of yoga and other holistic approaches together with a robust clinical regime, delivering medically effective psychological and neurobiological trauma treatment.

Through our signature approach that addresses the body, the mind, and the soul in one integrated course of therapies, we help women who have struggled with addiction, mental illness, and trauma recover lives of deep meaning, connection and purpose.

Why Partial Hospitalization is Key for Women’s Trauma Recovery

PHP is for women who need a nourishing, highly structured level of care, but aren’t able, for whatever reason, to attend a residential program.

By definition, PHPs are medically- and psychiatrically-supervised settings that offer six hours of treatment a day, five days a week, in a day treatment program format. Day programs take place at a treatment facility during core hours. Participants go home at the end of the day to stay in their own homes.

Nestled between the residential and Intensive Outpatient levels of care, PHP can be a transitional stage after completing residential. Alternatively, PHP can be a high-intensity treatment option in its own right, for women who qualify for residential, but aren’t in a position to live away from home.

Women receiving treatment at Villa Kali Ma’s holistic outpatient facility, the Office, may participate in our Partial Hospitalization Program. Some women choose to join our PHP as a safe step-down process after residential, and before transitioning to Intensive Outpatient (IOP). Other clients in our community of recovering women start their treatment journey with PHP right at the outset, following up with IOP.

PHP is the level care which is the most like inpatient treatment, while still being delivered in the day program format. Whereas the more flexibly-scheduled Intensive Outpatient Program level of care allow women to maintain some level of job responsibility while seeking treatment, PHP requires a greater time commitment.

PHP is key for women’s trauma recovery. Women with trauma very often struggle with addictions of some kind, as well as significant mental health symptoms. For women who are struggling to cope with daily living because of the overwhelming burdens associated with the legacy of trauma, the right kind of structured care is needed. As the highest level of structure available outside of residential, PHP is an important offering for women with trauma, mental illness, and addiction.

Intensive Care Without Full Residential Commitment

PHPs have many advantages for women who need a high intensity of services to address trauma and mental health needs alongside their addiction treatment, but who can’t find their way to committing to the whole enchilada of residential treatment.

As we shared in our post on How Being a Woman Affects Addiction, Mental Illness, and Trauma, there are special considerations when it comes to providing gender-specific care. Women have a lot of valid reasons why committing to residential treatment may be more challenging for them, including a few specific barriers to entering treatment that tend to be gendered.

Women’s reasons for not entering treatment can stem from being financially less prosperous than men typically are, or otherwise connect back to the fact that women are frequently positioned in social and job roles that involve caring for other people. Women who have families, who need to work to provide for their children, who are responsible for the care of elders in their home, and/or who have job responsibilities that involve caring for other vulnerables (such as nurses, social workers, therapists or teachers), often feel that they could not take the time away that they genuinely would need to heal, without letting people who are counting on them down. This situation tends, very broadly speaking, to be even more true for women of the global majority, and for women situated in less economically privileged positions (depending of course on the individual woman and her life circumstances).

All in all, PHPs may be considered a good way to combine medically necessary intensity of treatment, with minimal disruption to home life responsibilities. PHPs are also frequently used as a way to transition from higher levels of care to living independently in the community again.

Who Benefits Most from a Trauma-Focused PHP?

Women are especially well-served by trauma-focused treatment at any level of care. The more is learned, collectively, about how addiction and mental illness are healed, the more the role of trauma is highlighted, especially for women.

An estimated 75% of women seeking treatment for addiction report a history of traumatization, the most of which is classified as sexual trauma and/or trauma from childhood neglect and abuse.

Trauma is also linked to several mental health diagnoses. The most gendered diagnoses, such as borderline personality disorder, are periodically questioned because of the challenges associated with differentiating them from trauma.

Women are statistically more likely than men to present with a co-occurring disorder in addition to substance addiction, including additional behavioral health diagnoses (eating disorders, self-harm, relationship addiction, codependency, etc).

All in all, it can be said that there are strong links between trauma, mental illness, and addiction in all directions, and that these links are stronger for women than for men. This suggests that women require a more sophisticated, refined and personalized approach to treatment, such as the approach we have developed in our programs at Villa Kali Ma.

Whether or not you are aware of having a trauma history (many women struggle with memory, and may only have the symptoms), it is highly recommended that women receive support in a trauma-informed treatment environment for a variety of reasons. One reason is that trauma-focused treatment works well to disarm resistance, since it is gentler, more non-judgmental, and proceeds at a pace which is most respectful of women’s needs. Women’s needs for boundaries, to feel safe, and for all aspects of treatment to be fully consensual are honored in trauma-informed approaches.

Given the high chance that trauma has some role to play in why a woman is presenting with mental health symptoms and addiction patterning in the first place, healing in a trauma-informed context is strongly recommended.

Explore Healing at Villa Kali Ma’s Women’s PHP 

The Partial Hospitalization Program we developed at Villa Kali Ma is designed specifically for substance-addicted women struggling with their mental health needs and trauma history to find their way back to health, happiness and wholeness.

The three-part burden of trauma, addiction, and mental-emotional dysfunction is very familiar to us, from our own personal histories as wounded healers, and from the many women we have helped heal in the past.

When we say we work with women to heal mind, body, and spirit, we mean it. Our programs embrace somatic (body-based) healing modalities, bio-psycho-spiritual approaches like yoga, creative healing approaches like expressive arts therapy, nutritional healing, gold standard trauma treatments like EMDR, and more. We also offer women nurturing therapeutic support, individually and in community, in which to form safe bonds of trust with safe others.

We know that when women are seen in the totality of who they are, not only for their pain and mistakes, but also for their brilliance, resilience, love, and infinite capacity to recover, they do indeed recover.

If this gently effective approach to healing women’s pain intrigues you, we invite you to come find out more about how we might co-create your recovery together.

Categories
Depression Mental Health Ptsd in Women Women's Mental Health

How Being a Woman Affects Addiction, Mental Illness and Trauma

Are you grateful to be female? Is femininity a gift or a curse to you?

If you’re like a lot of women, you may have mixed feelings about it. In particular, it can be hard to separate out what you yourself feel about your own femaleness, from all that has been said to you, in so many words, about what being a woman means.

Can you find your true Self under the pile of projections that were thrown over you, the many rules of conduct you were taught, the words put in your mouth?How were you mirrored? What explanations were given to you, as a way of helping you understand what you feel, what you want, how you are to find your way in this world? Did the explanation of your own motivations that was given to you match what you really were experiencing on the inside? Did your role models show you what a woman can be in full?

Without knowing you personally, we here at Villa Kali Ma can venture a guess: probably not. The chances that you were seen, and reflected, for what you actually are – a vivid aliveness, a source of powerful agency, a genius creator in your own right – are slim. Because the understanding of how women and men have been wounded, and what they each need to come into more balanced fullness, is still in its infancy.

Writing about women’s rage in Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman’s Body and Soul, Jungian analyst Marion Woodman says:

“There’s personal anger, but underneath there’s often universal rage; and when we are possessed, God help the man who’s on the end of that. Deep rage is not about the man; deep rage is this: Nobody ever saw me. Nobody ever heard me.

As long as I can remember, I’ve had to perform. When I tried to be myself, I was told, That’s not what you think, that’s not what you ought to do. So, just like my mother and her mother, I put on a false face. My life became a lie. That’s deep rage. We have lived our lives behind a mask. Sooner or later —if we are lucky— the mask will be smashed.”

In this age of heightened pressure and deepened pain for all humans, comparisons and distinctions between the male and the female experience can come out in even greater clarity.

At Villa Kali Ma, we uphold the fact that women are special. Men are special too. It’s not a competition, actually. But women have an experience of life that requires special care and tending, a kind of attention that’s distinct from the kind that best nurtures men. We have shared humanity with all humans, but we are not identical and the differences between us need to be honored.

That honoring – of the ways that men and women experience embodiment and socialization differently – informs our unique, holistic treatment programs for women.

Women experience mental illness, trauma, and addiction differently than men. Here are some considerations we keep in mind in all of our treatment programs.

Women, Complex Trauma and PTSD

Women are more vulnerable to traumatization than men. A major source of traumatization for women, in addition to the types of trauma that affect all genders equally (like physical abuse or neglect in childhood), is sexual violence.

Women are more likely to have sexual trauma originating from childhood sexual abuse, intimate partner violence, sexual assault, and sexual harassment. Women are also more vulnerable to traumatization from criminally motivated violence, like mugging or kidnapping. Women who have experienced sexual violence are significantly more likely to attempt suicide and to be given a diagnosis for a severe mental health disorders.

The impact of traumatization in mental health is extensive. Many mental health diagnoses reflect the presence of symptoms and coping styles originally stemming from trauma. In women in particular, it is important to tease apart which symptoms may be healed through resolution of traumatic responses, as opposed to mental illness which may be present for biological or hereditary reasons.

Gendered Diagnoses: Depression, Anxiety, and Borderline Personality

Top among risk factors for development of a mental health diagnosis like depression or anxiety is simply being a woman. Women are statistically more likely to experience mental health symptoms, by a meaningful factor. In the case of anxiety, for example, women are twice as likely as men to be diagnosed.

Given the higher incidence of traumatization among women, this imbalance in distribution of symptoms which could be coming from traumatization isn’t necessarily surprising. At the same time, biological influences, such as the impact of female hormones on mental health, trauma, and addiction have been shown to play a role as well.

Certain mental health diagnoses have a history of being disproportionately assigned to women, such as Borderline Personality Disorder. Borderline Personality Disorder is under review in some areas of the mental health field, due to its high correlation with trauma.

Eating Disorders, Self Harm and Body Image

Women are socialized to identify with their physical appearance to a great degree, and are expected to uphold perfectionistic standards of beauty at great cost to themselves. Beauty standards for women are extremely narrow, favoring not only certain body types and abilities, but also assigning higher or lower value along lines of race and ethnicity.

This socialization factor makes the mental health topic of self-love and self-acceptance very challenging for women. Women have been trained from birth to reject or disdain our physical bodies as inadequate when not perfectly matching given ideals. Women who are considered beautiful by the mainstream standards enjoy privileges of higher social status, but typically suffer from feeling the highly conditional nature of that status. Such women are made aware how much of their good social fortune depends upon maintaining physical desirability, as well as cooperating with the boundary intrusion and open attempts at exploitation by unwholesomely interested parties.

Women are generally encouraged to try to change their bodies to be more appealing to men, in whatever way may be required in order to have a greater chance of fitting into the standard. Extreme behaviors, such as eating disorders, over-exercising, undergoing harsh beauty treatments, and shaming the self when not meeting standards, are topics more commonly affecting women than men.

Women who are given the message that they are less attractive to men than other women in their peer group may suffer low self-esteem and shame related to their appearance, but women who are considered beautiful suffer shame and low self-esteem due to the underscoring of the message that what is lovable about them is limited to their ability to perform in the role of “desirable female”. These issues are installed, experienced, and processed in distinctly gendered ways.

Women’s Boundaries in a context of Sexualization and Objectification

Women are expected to be ok with being objectified, if not overtly sexualized, beginning in puberty or even already in childhood in some contexts. Very often, women face social pressure to tolerate subtle or obvious transgression of their boundaries to greater or lesser degrees. Women are frequently trained out of the ability to detect their boundaries, let alone protect them.

Objectification means being thought more of in terms of usefulness for gratifying another person’s needs, rather than regarded as having personhood and agency in her own right. Women are socialized to expect greater reward and ease in life when tolerating some degree of violation of boundaries, including basic boundaries of safety from intrusive sexual energy or other harm.

In its most benign form, this socialization makes the mental health topic of boundaries very challenging for women. Women are socially reinforced to say yes to what they would like to say no to, to say no what they would like to say yes to. This makes the topic of recovering women’s right to experience anger, and its connection to boundaries, self-protection, and self-care, a core treatment issue for many women.

Emotional Caretaking and Women’s Work

Women are largely socialized to be emotional caretakers of people around them and to perform “invisible work” without being asked or noticed. Women frequently provide emotional support, attention, and encouragement to the men in their lives, including work colleagues and bosses, without explicit recognition or appreciation of this function as requiring energy and skill. For related reasons, many women develop patterns of codependency, which can make treatment more difficult than for men, who may feel less relationally fused and oriented towards survival through the specific strategy of psychological enmeshment with others.

Although some of this has changed, women are generally expected to assume household and child-rearing tasks, as something that “goes without saying”. Women are still unconsciously expected to assume a caretaker role in the workplace, if not for material comforts like getting coffee and making a nice environment for people, then for emotional comforts, such as attending to the psychological atmosphere in the room, helping people to feel at ease, seen, and acknowledged.

Women and men performing in the same role at work are still sometimes paid quite differently, women being paid less than men on average, even within the same job title and responsibilities. The gap in pay widens further when looking at overall pay, versus comparing people in the same roles, reflecting an “opportunity gap” across higher paid roles. Finally, performance of traditionally masculine work roles is given greater financial reward, while professions centered on more nurturing roles, professions generally dominated by women, like social work, child, elder and dependent adult care, nursing, and teaching, are paid far less.

Setting aside the psychological implications of valuing women less than men, women are strongly socialized to place the emotional and physical nurturance needs of others first, which makes appropriate selfishness difficult. More problematically in the immediate sense, is that due to ongoing problems with pay inequality, many women are financially dependent on their abusers.

Treating Women with Care

At Villa Kali Ma, we understand why it is that women do better in female-only healing environments, for all the reasons outlined above and many, many more.

The focus of treatment for women, in many ways, needs to be the exact opposite of the focus of treatment for men. For instance: where many, many men need to learn to experience feelings of vulnerability safely, to lower their boundaries, and to be allowed to soften, women often need to be able to experience their right to power, independence, strength, and boundaries. While men may fear that they will not be loved and respected if they are “weak”, women often have the opposite question: Will I still be loved if I am vital, strong, a force to be reckoned with?

Similarly, where men sometimes need help understanding how their outward expressions of anger, dominance, or sexuality can impact those around them in destructive ways, many women need help with the reverse – to learn how hiding their anger and their vitality away is a problem for them and others. How have we withheld ourselves from this world, and deprived it of our awareness, wisdom, our heart, kindness? Even our pain, our tears, our sensitivity are gifts that are needed here. The type of strength that women have – the strength to feel a wound from within – is sorely missing in our rigid, fragile world.

It’s not about strong versus soft, tender versus fierce, but about allowing both, inside of all people. Here at Villa Kali Ma, we are devoted to helping the women we meet to activate whatever needs activating – all within that longs to birth into this world, but has not had the encouragement, protection, and nourishment needed to do so. If you’re looking for a place to walk a path of recovery from addiction, mental illness, and/or trauma, we’re here for you.

Categories
Intensive Outpatient Program

How IOP Supports Long-Term Recovery and Reintegration       

The purpose of recovery from addiction, mental illness, and trauma is to return to the world, and to live joyfully and fully there.

We may keep one pinky toe in the waters of the healing realms for the rest of our lives. We may become the deep sea divers of psyche. But we undergo the healing journey in the first place, in order to repair and restore ourselves, to “get back out there”. We also equip ourselves, through the healing process, with what we need – what we have always needed, all along – to be able participate fully in life as our true Selves.

Each of us has a blueprint, a potential we are born with a unique gift to fulfill. As the psychology re-envisioner James Hillman puts it, we are each acorns, “full of oakness”.

The wounds that almost kill us, but actually make us stronger, eventually, require sincere attention, this is true. How long we will need to heal is unknown. Whatever our true and complete healing takes, the hope would be to, at some point, emerge from the deeps, re-empowered to face the fights and overcome the foes that knocked us down last round.

Treatment for addiction is a kind of retreat from the surface world, a phase of the journey of life which requires time in a healing sanctuary. In that sanctuary, with help from benevolent components of life, we meet our wounds and do the work to set things right at deep levels. All the while understanding that there will come a time, when we are released back into life, with new wind under our wings.

At Villa Kali Ma, we created a holistic, compassionate Intensive Outpatient Program specifically to support women to find long term recovery. We know that recovery isn’t a single event that takes place during a stint in rehab. Rather, it is a larger life process, requiring integration into life after treatment. We create programs that lead to long term sobriety and recovery success. We see ourselves in the role of that healing sanctuary described above, a way station for those on the journey of sprouting their unique acorn and becoming their “oakness”.

In this post we’ll illustrate how our Intensive Outpatient Program fosters sustainable recovery. We’ll talk about the importance of community, therapy and integration of recovery into the real world. Read on to find out more about how Villa Kali Ma’s Intensive Outpatient Program creates long term sobriety and recovery success.

How Intensive Outpatient Programs Foster Sustainable Recovery

Intensive Outpatient Programs foster sustainable recovery through gradual integration of changes, through the building up of community-in-place, and through real world skills practice trial runs.

Compared to residential rehabilitation, which follow a full-immersion, inpatient 24-7 care model, Intensive Outpatient Programs unfold at a slower pace, keeping step with the rhythms of ordinary life. Because they are structured as day programs, with participants living at home and maintaining work and other life responsibilities while attending treatment part time, Intensive Outpatient Programs take a longer period of time to deliver the same number of treatment hours.

Provided participants are able to abstain from drugs and alcohol and participate constructively in treatment while living at home, without round the clock supervision, IOPs are a strong option because of this set up. The hybrid model that mixes treatment with regular life supports participants to more gradually introduce, test out, and finalize recovery-supporting lifestyle changes into their pre-existing lives. A slower, more gradual approach tends to create changes that are more well-founded and well-grounded.

Intensive Outpatient Programs also help participants build up recovery community, contacts, and connections in the location where they already live and work. Sometimes, graduates of residential rehabilitation facilities struggle when returning to their home and work lives, as the recovery contacts and sense of community they built up were in the location of the facility. For people who participate in IOPs, contacts and recovery friendships are built up in their home community already, which means that there is more continuity at the end of treatment. This continuity of community is one way that IOPs tend to help make recovery more stable and sustainable.

Finally, IOPs provide opportunities to practice recovery skills out in the real world while still in treatment. Participants can safely experiment with new behaviors at work, in their communities, and at home, while knowing a team of helpers and understanding peers are close by. Whatever happens during a recovery skills trial run, participants know that their treatment community can hold space for feelings and provide advice at the next treatment session.

This “training wheels” approach can be very helpful for making long-term changes more stably, as it means that when and if slip-ups or mistakes happen in early recovery, as they very often do, these are more treated as part of the learning process itself. Small set backs, triggers, and temptations that come up during these real world recovery trial runs are folded into the treatment journey as chances to learn.

Community, Therapy, and Real-World Integration

Intensive Outpatient Programs foster community, success in therapy, and real world integration for a few reasons.

Peers that attend the same Intensive Outpatient Programs tend to come from the same community, since everyone still lives and works at home while attending treatment. Connections that are made in Intensive Outpatient Programs are therefore more easily transferrable to life after treatment for the simple reason that people are less likely to move away to a different location after treatment is over.

Likewise, since people attend treatment while living at home, the 12 Step meetings and other recovery community contacts are also local to the area. Participants can keep attending their home meetings and see most of the same faces once treatment is over. This continuity of peers is a powerful aid, since the isolation of addiction is something every woman in recovery needs to learn how to counteract.

Due to the treatment intensiveness of IOPs – IOPs provide the highest number of treatment hours possible while still allowing for living at home and working – they have a strong therapeutic focus. Participants are thoroughly introduced to the practicalities and best practices of “inner work” which are generally necessary to live a life free of addiction over time.

Through a high frequency and density of therapeutic groups, individual sessions, and activities, IOPs provide chances to bring real world experiences into the therapy space, as the events, triggers, and opportunities to try new skills unfold in real time. Participants can share and process what happened earlier that day, or what happened during a fight with their partner over the weekend, for instance, learning lessons while in a current process taking place in the now. This is real-world integration in action.

Creating a Bridge to Independent, Sober Living

Intensive Outpatient Programs like ours at Villa Kali Ma create a bridge to independent sober living after treatment. Graduates are supported to grow towards increasing autonomy, agency, and empowerment.

An environment of unconditional support that believes in our potential to grow up and live our own true lives without governance once we’re fully ready, may be thought of as a kind of ersatz “childhood we never fully had”. Women in recovery need a place that provides support, shelter and guidance until we are all healed and more fully able to handle things on our own authority.

Finding we are able to make it on our own (with support of community) raises self-esteem and repairs trust in own Selves and life journeys immeasurably. It is an enormous relief to learn we do have the power within us to stand on our own two feet, to sprout our unique acorn and pursue our path of becoming. IOPs create such bridges to independent sober life in a few ways.

One way is practical – by providing referrals and connections to sober living facilities, helping with any job application processes, if needed, and helping out with contacts and connections.

The second, more profound way is by supporting unfolding psychological and spiritual growth processes, modeling how it works, and teaching sobriety skills.              

Ongoing Support with Villa Kali Ma’s Women’s IOP

Villa Kali Ma’s Intensive Outpatient Program is a holistic, compassionate approach to recovery from addiction, mental illness and trauma, created especially for women. Addressing the unique essence of each woman we meet, our program is made to connect gently and kindly to mind, body, and spirit.

We know that the women we meet have been deeply, deeply hurt. Often in unspeakable ways. Often by people who were supposed to protect and care for them. We know such wounds can injure women within an inch of their lives.

We also know that the women we get to know in our IOP are more than what happened to them. In fact, they are tough, strong, resilient and capable – powerful survivors, every last one of them.

The women we meet, treat, and grow to love have good reasons for behaving the way they do, no matter how destructive those behaviors seemed at first. They also have good reasons, to now come forth and claim their rights to live freely as their true Selves in this world. Every woman is meant to be loved and accepted for who she really is, to claim her rightful role and take her seat at the table of life. We know that with support she can do this, no matter how much abuse, exploitation, betrayal, or neglect her uniquely vital life force has faced until now.

If you’re a woman wrestling with addiction, mental illness, or trauma, looking for ongoing support on your recovery path, we hope you will please consider one of our many programs. We’re here just for you, and all the people you will touch with your recovery.

Categories
Intensive Outpatient Program

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

xr:d:DAFVbtiVa1c:4,j:795506074,t:22122123

What must it be like to wake up in the morning knowing for certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you are walking the road of becoming your full-flowered Self?

Imagine knowing for sure that the “hopeless case” image, offered to you every morning by your self-doubt, shame, and self-criticism, has nothing to do with you whatsoever.

We’re here to tell you, you’re not that “you” – you are something else, some One else, entirely. But just like billions of other people on this planet, if you’re bogged down in trauma, mental illness, and addiction, your inner light – a native, creative intelligence and beauty surpassing all expression – has not much chance of getting your attention.

This isn’t your fault at all. We’re all in the same boat – us here at Villa Kali Ma too. But one thing we can tell you for sure is that the life within you is waiting eagerly to be lived, and that it will respond to your attention and your courage to change, with a loving readiness that might astound you.

We know, we know. We know all the reasons it’s so so hard. All the yeah buts and the I tried thats. We know.

We know all about how the sameness stays in place. And yet – we also know there comes a day when the desire to change overcomes the fear-bound forces that insist we stay tight, stuck and small. In the words of the writer Anaïs Nin:

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

Is this speaking to you, friend? If so, we rejoice in it. This blooming comes for all of us. Somehow, some way, when the time is right, Self flowers.

The only question for you is – is your time for budding now, or later?

At Villa Kali Ma, we do our imperfect best to provide and ongoingly refine our healing services for women who are ready to bloom and grow. We trust that if you come to us, some budding something within you is ready for it.

One of the programs we offer, our Intensive Outpatient Program for women, is designed to entrain women to a reliable rhythm that supports growth of Self, while allowing her the chance to stay involved in ordinary life to a large degree.

In this article, we walk you through a day in the life at Villa Kali Ma’s Intensive Outpatient Program (IOP) for women. We’ll illustrate how our IOP balances real life with daily healing practices, talk about how consistent care supports growth and resilience, and share more about how you can discover connection and transformation through attending our IOP.

A Day in the Life at Villa Kali Ma’s Women’s Intensive Outpatient Program 

A day in the life at Villa Kali Ma’s Intensive Outpatient Program for women reflects the hybrid, “best of both worlds” structure inherent to IOPs. All IOP programs combine treatment with life in the real world. What distinguishes our program from other IOPs is our signature weave of alternative, holistic modalities addressing mind, body, and spirit, gracefully incorporated into the fabric of our clinical core treatment approach.

Our IOP provides intensive treatment together with flexibility of schedule. Our female-positive, compassionate and holistic IOP is designed to immerse participants into a new, positive lifestream. Women undergo deep transformation while maintaining a measure of continuity with respect to their pre-existing life roles and responsibilities. Through living at home and staying involved in work, women are able to integrate positive changes little by little. Due to the hybrid structure that combines treatment with “life in the real world”,  our IOP provides many chances to practice new skills live in the field.

So while days begin and end at home, ensconced in ordinary life, the hours of the week dedicated to treatment are deep journeys into healing realms. Each treatment hour touches mind, body and spirit. Within the halls of Villa Kali Ma’s IOP facility, recovering women learn new skills, ranging from the physiological to the cognitive to the transpersonal. These skills are then taken away to be practiced and tested live in the world. Learnings, personal challenges and victories are brought back to treatment next session, for celebration, anchoring, and further support.

Balancing Real Life with Daily Healing Practices 

Our IOP for women balances real life with daily healing practices. We accomplish this by administering treatment in modules that are nestled into the rhythms of ordinary life. These modules take place during treatment blocks distributed throughout the week, primarily evenings and weekends, to accommodate most women’s work schedules.

Each treatment block immerses women in healing practices ranging from yoga to cognitive therapies to mindful self-compassion. Each facet of women’s multidimensional existence is addressed, through a combination of clinical and holistic interventions. The somatic, therapeutic and recovery life skills we introduce empower women to access states of peace, connection, and freedom from misery, and to continue to do that ongoingly once they graduate our program.

During IOP hours, our clients learn to use these skills, as our therapeutic staff and holistic practitioners provide guidance, instruction and chances to rehearse new, positive behaviors safely under supervision. These new healing practices are then further integrated into regular life through trial runs at work and at home.

All in all, attending our intensive, holistic treatment program while continuing with ordinary life teaches the art and practice of balancing real life with practices of daily healing.

How Consistent Care Supports Growth and Resilience

Consistent care supports growth and resilience. This is true in all things, material and spiritual. We women recovering from trauma, mental illness and addiction must expect that what we begin in recovery will require follow up and follow through.

For those of us who fear we can’t do that, we won’t know how to do that, because we haven’t been able to do that before – not to worry. How precisely to become trustworthy stewards who honor our deepest call to full-flowered life is part of what we learn in Villa Kali Ma’s IOP for women. Here we approach the shared ground of life thoughtfully, showing women how they can tend for the patch of life that’s rightfully theirs over the decades of joy, initiation, and vivid living to come.

Recovery is indeed like setting up a garden or planting an orchard – one we intend to visit daily and nurture with ongoing attention for years, if not decades, to come. Like real gardens, patience and regularity are rewarded in recovery from trauma, mental illness and addiction.

Not coincidentally, consistency is a main ingredient in forming strong interpersonal bonds, which are necessary for recovering felt-sense experiences of safety and connection with others. This includes our relationship with ourselves.

What was wounded in relationship can only be repaired in relationship, as the oft-quoted tenet of therapy goes. A good portion of the trauma that underlies women’s addictive and self-destructive behaviors is relational. Wounds that were incurred long ago between ourselves and the people upon whose love we were dependent for survival, hurt us until they are actually repaired. But the person with whom we repair attachment now is our Self, the real source of reliable, regenerative love. The one within we have all been waiting for.

Consistent tending of our healing garden sees us through the many phases of recovery. Villa Kali Ma’s IOP is a place where women can experience how consistent care supports growth and resilience in the inner realms of profound, transformational healing.

Discover Connection and Transformation in Our IOP

Connection and transformation take place in Villa Kali Ma’s Intensive Outpatient Program for women every day. This is because we provide the right conditions for women to unfold safely and authentically. Women who struggle with addiction, mental illness, and trauma do so because they never got to have the supported, healthful life circumstances that would have nurtured confidence, capacity, and resilience.

Luckily, it’s not too late to begin again. At Villa Kali Ma, we help with relational repair, by providing opportunities to bond with healers and with other peers in treatment. The healing of relationships on the outer plane helps significantly with resurrecting the inner relationship with Self that is the primary healing agent.

In addition to these chances to bond with healers, peers, and Self, our program teaches all the necessary skills for ongoing spiritual and psychological work. The fruits of inner tending are lush and nourishing, bringing vitality not only to ourselves but to those loved ones we have longed our whole lives to be able to protect and nurture as well.

Villa Kali Ma’s Intensive Outpatient Program for women is a place to find connection and transformation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories
Intensive Outpatient Program

Why Intensive Outpatient Programs Are a Powerful Step in Recovery          

Why should every woman with addiction consider attending a holistic Intensive Outpatient Program like the one we offer at Villa Kali Ma? Well, read on: We have a few ideas!

Intensive Outpatient Programs (IOPs) are the most empowering option for women in recovery. IOPs allow for flexibility and independence, while still holding strong structure. IOPs create a perfect environment for some women recovering from addiction, mental illness, and trauma to thrive optimally. But which women?

In this post, we’ll share more about Intensive Outpatient Programs and how you can determine whether you’re a woman who would benefit most from IOP.

Why Intensive Outpatient Treatment Empowers Women in Recovery                                   

IOP is the most empowering option for women in recovery. As an outpatient addiction treatment model, IOP supports women to be in charge of their program and participation. IOP also supports women to titrate – to do a little bit of recovery at a time, rather than healing everything all at once. Finally, IOP supports practicing recovery skills in the real world while still learning.

IOP supports women to be fully in charge of their own program and participation. With several options available, women have more influence over the what and the when of their treatment participation than in residential (inpatient programs). While the core of an IOP is relatively firm, being able to customize a program that fits best with life outside of treatment leaves more agency in the hands of women. It is important for women especially to have options and a measure of control.

Since they are less immersive, IOPs support women to titrate their recovery. Titrating means taking the healing in a little at a time, rather than all at once. Doing the inner work for trauma, mental illness, and addiction recovery at a less intensive pace means each piece of healing can be integrated into daily life more easily. Being able to maintain a steady life outside of treatment while digesting the healing work more slowly and stably can empower women to feel more balanced and in command of their recovery experience. The transition can be more gradual and grounded.

Lastly, IOP supports women practicing recovery skills in the real world while still learning them. Due to the IOP model of keeping one foot in daily life, women have many chances to apply what they are learning in treatment in real life scenarios, situations, and challenges. When and if something happens in external life that is overwhelming, triggering, or otherwise difficult to face, a woman can rely on the facilitators, peers, and supportive structure of the IOP program to have her back.

All in all, IOP is the most empowering option for women in recovery, supporting agency, choice and autonomy throughout the healing journey.

Flexibility and Independence with Structured Support

IOP is the option that allows for the most flexibility and independence while still offering highly structured support. IOPs allow women more scheduling flexibility, permit women to maintain more of their work and home life responsibilities, and allow for living at home while attending treatment.

The main benefit of scheduling flexibility is that IOPs are more adaptable to women’s pre-existing lives, including work and childcare responsibilities. While IOP naturally takes up a significant chunk of the week, having more options for when those treatment hours take place means women can usually arrange their work and other responsibilities more easily.

Working at least part time while in being in treatment allows women to have more financial independence, a topic that is very important for women, who are economically more vulnerable to begin with and often have dependents in their care who rely on their ability to provide for them, as well. The flexible scheduling of IOPs tends to work better with barriers to treatment that affect women disproportionately: managing school schedules, transportation, household duties, working in underpaid professions, and more.

Finally, living at home while attending treatment is usually the most practical option, to maintain ongoing life responsibilities outside of treatment and to ensure stability.

Broadly speaking, IOP is the option with the most independence and flexibility while still offering structured support.

Who Thrives Most in an IOP Setting?

IOP is best for women who fit in a certain profile of life circumstances combined with a certain state of mental health. In order to thrive in IOP, women must be able to abstain from substances and self-harming without 24-7 supervision. Women also must be living in a reasonably supportive (sober and mostly trigger-free) home environment. Finally, women must be able to realistically participate in work and life responsibilities without relapsing.

In order to be able to benefit from the flexibility and independence of IOP, women must be able to abstain from alcohol, drugs, and self-harming behaviors without round-the-clock monitoring. This capacity to abstain or not isn’t a moral issue, rather it is a question of how far the disease of addiction has progressed. Some women who have more years of heavy substance use under their belt will only be able to stay sober in a facility that prevents them from accessing substances. These women will fare better in residential.

Other women will be realistically able to make it through unsupervised hours between treatment sessions and operate out in the world for limited periods of time without being hijacked by their addicted part. IOP can be a good fit for these women, since the flexibility and independence won’t work against them.

Women who can maintain a reasonably supportive home environment thrive in IOP because that environment can support them. If there is abuse, chaos, conflict, and/or substances in the home environment, however, those conditions will undermine any gains made in treatment. Women who aren’t currently living in a sobriety-supporting environment, therefore, will generally be better off in residential.

Last but not least, women who can participate in the stressors of the world without relapsing are likely to thrive in IOP because they can get the benefits of practicing recovering skills in the real world. But if the real world setting is too challenging, she again would be better off in residential.

All in all, women who thrive in IOP are those who can abstain from drugs and alcohol between treatment hours even when alone and unsupervised, those who are fortunate enough to be living in a treatment-supportive home, and those who can productively engage with the triggers and challenges of life in the real world without relapsing.

Experience Our Compassionate IOP for Women at Villa Kali Ma

If we may say so ourselves, Villa Kali Ma’s compassionate, holistic Intensive Outpatient Program for women is the best one we know of. For women who will benefit from IOP’s signature combination of flexibility and structure, we are a rich opportunity for deep, transformative growth. Our strong, core clinical program is wrapped in a lush array of alternative healing modalities and practices. We embrace East and West, we address mind body and spirit as one, and we nurture each woman’s life as a unique acorn, full of infinite potential.

 

 

 

 

                                   

 

Categories
Addiction Treatment Sober Living

How Residential Programs Support Long-Term Sobriety

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.

 

 

 

 

Categories
Internal family systems model of healing Self-care Strategies Therapy

Humility and Healing in the Addictions Profession

Any honest psychotherapist will tell you that when genuine healing arrives, it wells up out of a hidden source, dispensed by something (or someone, depending how you look at it) that surpasses our understanding.

What exactly that hidden source is, we can truthfully only speculate. People in the psychology field can (and frequently do!) draw up diagrams and theories of the healing force, but the jury is still out.

The theorizing, of course, has been going on for millennia, since long before modern psychology was a twinkle in Freud’s bespectacled, Austrian eye. Model after model has attempted to explain not only what’s going on when soul illness takes hold, but also what is happening when we heal.

No model, in the end, resolves the mystery to anyone’s permanent satisfaction. And as this blog post will explore, we at Villa Kali Ma are inclined to call that a good thing.

Internal Family Systems Therapy and the Self

Some contemporary psychotherapy models, like Internal Family Systems, have postulated that healing wells up from a kind of independently operating energetic field that is very personable and relatable. Something that’s not the human mind nor the ego personality per se, but nevertheless feels like it’s us.

IFS calls this inner healer Self, in honor of the language that came most naturally to IFS founder Richard Schwartz’s clients as they were articulating its presence in sessions. Because rather than being a theory dreamed up outside of a clinical context, Schwartz says that he first uncovered and then verified Self’s presence and properties through decades of clinical work, helping the most “hopeless cases” recover.

In the final analysis, Schwartz (a self-proclaimed rational pragmatist by training and inclination) proposes that Self is an indwelling, benevolent healing energy found within everyone. Self is available to help with the healing process. Schwartz maintains, in fact, that Self is the probably the best, most reliable guide for healing that we have.

The benefits of working with the model of Self 

Self cannot be dirtied, damaged, or destroyed, Schwartz insists, no matter how much else goes wrong in our lives. Like the sun, Self shines on, untarnished, behind our trauma, addictions, and mental illness. Once we clear the clouds, the Self is revealed, shining gloriously as ever. And Self can be called upon – in fact it is the best source to call upon – for help removing all that blocks Self’s light from reaching us and healing us with its life-giving radiance and warmth.

Far from resolving the mystery that surrounds psychological recovery, however, IFS’s concept of Self raises almost as many questions as it attempts to answer. For some skeptics, the concept of Self sounds like another version of the storied holy grail. A fountain of healing, perhaps, but nothing we can lay our hands on in any satisfying way.

For the pragmatic among us, though, it’s important to acknowledge that embracing this core tenet of the IFS model produces specific results that have eluded other models. IFS is counted as an evidence-based practice which is particularly helpful with some of the toughest areas of the mental health field, including extreme trauma, addictions, eating disorders, self-harm, bipolar disorder, and dissociative identity disorder.

The success of the model is owed, in large part, to IFS’s gift for creating true alignment within, bringing peace to a fractious inner system under the benevolent leadership of the Self. So whether or not we find the IFS picture of a benevolent healing Self latent in all people to be plausible, the results speak for themselves. Navigating the healing journey by consulting a compass magnetized to the concept of Self (or something similar) is undeniably useful in many psychotherapeutic contexts.

Most importantly, IFS has brought hope and healing to desperate cases that have languished or been abandoned altogether elsewhere in the behavioral health field, including the fields of trauma and addiction recovery.

Self-Healing as An Emergent Property of Nature

Setting aside IFS and the notion of Self, some folks may intuitively and rationally relate more to the idea that an indwelling, self-correcting and emergent healing force is available to all of us, simply because we are part of nature.

We are mammals after all, born from nature’s creative genius, the same as the rest of life. Therefore, the reliable property that can be counted upon to cleanse, heal, replenish and restore communities of animals, plants, materials – even whole ecosystems – can be prevailed upon to heal us too.

Nature shows a remarkable ability to bounce back from the extreme burdens placed upon her, as the returning forests of Chernobyl testify. Similarly, nature finds ways to heal the body and spirit, from even from the deadliest of toxic loads.

Healing by A Power Greater Than Ourselves

Many psychotherapists and others drawn to the healing professions are actually privately inclined to relate to the healing force as what AA calls “a power greater than ourselves”. For such professionals, the healing force is to be approached with humility, reverence, gratitude, and profound respect. Though to use spiritual language is generally frowned upon in the behavioral health profession (perhaps with good reason), there are many healers who, in the privacy of their own heartspaces, do unwaveringly believe that it is God, Spirit, buddha nature, christ consciousness or something along those lines, that is dispensing the healing, and not the healer themselves (at best an instrument of God’s healing).

If we are willing to believe what gifted healers, including groundbreaking psychotherapy visionaries like C.G. Jung have said about their own experiences with inspiration and discovery, we will find this to be a common theme: healers serve as medium, channeling healing from higher realms, much more like a priest or shaman, than a doctor or machinist repairing a broken mechanism.

Healing as a Property of Physics

Still, some therapists and healers are drawn to more materialistic, rationalist explanations of the healing force. They might be more prone to view healing as the effect of ultimately predictable operations of physics, large or small scale; healing is mysterious only because we don’t yet understand these operations.

For such healers, there is a kind of faith that we may eventually, through scientific experimentation and discovery, crack this mystery once and for all. Then we may at last be able to harness and control the properties of nature’s healing powers, to be at our command. In such a view, it is our ability to finally see into the heart of the mystery which may liberate us.

A Mystery at the Heart of the Profession

We at Villa Kali Ma find something compelling in each of these models. What we like about IFS’s notion of Self is that it feels personal and relatable. What we like about a nature-based understanding of healing is that it feels beautiful and abundant, like nature itself. Many of us feel wonderful acknowledging that healing comes from a power which will always be far greater than ourselves. And what we like about the scientific approach is the encouragement to experiment, and make sure we always favor the facts over our biases.

None of these approaches, to our view, erases the mystery. And that’s ok. That’s good. Because while the mind is an articulate tool for conceptualizing and interpreting data we may gather about the ultimate source of healing, and the heart is good at finding healing waters by feel, there nevertheless remains a mystery at the heart of the art and science of recovery.

This mystery encompasses why exactly it is that some of us who undergo terrible trauma do not end up turning to addiction (or other extreme behaviors) to cope, while others of us do. Or why some of us who fall into domain of addiction or mental illness have it in us to find our way back to the land of the living again, while others of us don’t even start that journey. Why, furthermore, do children growing up in the same family, with similar genes and identical childhood conditions, come up with such different solutions to the same problems? If abuse begets abuse, why don’t all children of abusers become abusers? Pull on this thread, and you may unravel a tapestry shot through with patterns which are far larger than we are prepared to glimpse.

Indigenous and Contemporary Practices for Healing

At Villa Kali Ma, we offer a spectrum of modalities, representing the full scale of what we have found to be practically helpful for helping women recover from trauma, addiction, and mental illness. Sometimes, our holistic approach means integrating indigenous, alternative, Eastern, or just non-mainstream healing systems into the work, and sometimes it means we rely mainly on broadly accepted clinical models. We’re open to all healing systems that bring benefit – we’re interested in what works in the real world. Most often, we combine approaches, because each woman is different and not everything works for everyone.

Answers to the mysteries briefly touched on in this blog post have been offered by indigenous cultures and ancient systems of knowledge for thousands of years. Respectfully, we often lean on these traditions, taking many tools and ideas from these treasure troves.

For example, we rely on the healing powers of posture and breath discovered by yoga to help women regulate their bodies and create peace, safety, strength, and calm. We use the power of imagination to encounter symbolic personal representations of illness and find their energetic medicine – a healing approach akin to what is found in most shamanic cultures (though also used in art therapy, hypnotherapy, and Jung’s active imagination, to name a few Western healing systems that rely on healing imagery too). Throughout our many mindfulness-based approaches to therapy, furthermore, we use insights taken from the science of meditation, originally gifted to the West by way of Eastern cultures.

We run a fully licensed facility and our board-licensed and certified therapists are anchored in the Western model. But we don’t mind acknowledging where the Western scientific model has fallen short. If the mental health crisis facing America is any indicator, the West has, in spite of its resources and special kind of brilliance, not yet solved the problem of how to heal human misery.

Humility in the Healing Profession

Whether you believe that the contemporary Western models of illness provide a better model, or you’re more inclined to acknowledge the wisdom of older indigenous models as potentially superior, is not that important at the end of the day. Either way, whatever model, we here at Villa Kali Ma we believe in the power of humility. No matter which tool we take in hand, a spirit of humility needs to guide that hand.

We know we may very well lose our footing if we reach too far into speculation about the what and the why, and most especially if we ever think that we have settled an issue once and for all. Those of us who work in the field of trauma, mental illness, and addiction recovery cannot afford to be settled.

Instead, we must learn a different art than certainty, dominance, mastery, and generalization. These are dangerous practices for us and our clients. Rather, we learn, with humility, to do all we can to dowse for the waters of a healing spirit inside a client’s system. We do what we can to invite, encourage, and honor that spirit, so that it might feel welcome in the psychotherapy room with us.

When we see the healing force’s promising seed sprouting within ourselves or another, we do what we can to nurture it, careful not to crush it or harvest it too soon. We remember not to assume we know what it is. A lot of the time, doing what we can to nurture it means getting out of the way, trusting the inborn wisdom of that force, to know better than our well-meaning, sometimes-anxious healer personas.

If you find yourself resonating, dear reader, with our conviction that humility as healers protects, you might be interested to peruse our many offerings available for healing women’s suffering. Whatever your situation, we send our heartfelt blessings over to you today, that it may fill you with all that you need to thrive and shine, filled to the brim with health as you define it!

Categories
General Recovery

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

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

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

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

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

Wake Up & Greet The Day

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

Mornings in Community

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

Morning and Afternoon Treatment Groups

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

Individual Sessions

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

Meal Times, Breaks, and Down Time

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

Evenings and Weekends

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

Daily Routines That Promote Healing and Growth

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

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

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

Healthy Routines for the Body

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

Healthy Routines for the Heart, Mind and Relationships

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

Healthy Routines for Spiritual Growth

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

How Structure and Support Create Safe Recovery Environments

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

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

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

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

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

Real Healing Happens Here: Join Our Residential Program

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

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

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

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

Categories
Outpatient vs Inpatient

Why Residential Treatment is Often the Best Choice for Recovery

Addiction treatment is available in different degrees of intensiveness, tapering from in-hospital emergency medical care down to weekly outpatient treatment. Spanning that range are: medically supervised detox, partial hospitalization programs, residential inpatient treatment, intensive outpatient, and aftercare.

The level of care a woman receives naturally affects her treatment experience. Level of care determines what type of treatment environment she’ll be in, and how intensively services are administered during her time in the program. Factors like whether she’ll be living at home while participating in a day program, or instead staying at a round-the-clock care facility, may have huge impacts on her ability to participate wholeheartedly.

At the end of the day, recovery is very often about learning to surrender.  But women who present with symptoms of substance addiction, mental illness, and trauma have, more often than not, been disempowered, let down, and hurt by systems and authorities who were supposed to help them, in the past. In order to feel safe letting their guard down enough to heal now, they need to be able to access information about their treatment options and to be able to say yes or no with full understanding of what will be involved.

This requirement for informed consent to treatment includes the determination of which level of care will be best for them. To be able to make informed choices about treatment is necessary for any health care to work, otherwise scared parts within who didn’t fully understand or say yes to implications of treatment can sabotage or run interference, blocking treatment progress as a way to regain some feeling of agency.

In this article, we here at Villa Kali Ma share some perspectives as to why, from our point of view, treatment for addiction is often most effective when administered in a residential facility. As a holistic provider, we favor retreat-like environments that balance the firmness, consistency, and safety of inpatient care, with women’s legitimate needs for softness, comfort, ease, peace, and beauty of environment in order to feel safe and held during the recovery process. Read on to find out more about why we feel this to be the best option for most women in need of treatment.

Why Residential Addiction Treatment Leads to Better Outcomes

One of the most reliable predictors of success in recovery is how long a person stays in a structured, supervised rehab environment in the beginning of their sobriety. The longer a woman sequesters in a safe, healing shelter of residential rehab, the more likely she is to make it out in the world once she  leaves.

In this era of quick fixes, competing health crises and challenged financials, this data point can feel like bad news at first. But it is also common sense; recovery is not, nor should it be, a rush job.

In fact, pushing to make symptoms disappear so we can get back to functioning in “the real world” is often part of the internal environment of distress. Rather than pressuring women to make their trauma, mental-emotional pain and disordered behavior disappear on the surface – driving illness further underground – we need to support women to fully recover at root cause levels.

If you are in a position to take your time in residential rehab, it is in your favor to do so. For financial and practical reasons, many people may choose to participate in an intensive outpatient program (IOP) instead, and there are good reasons to go with that option. Villa Kali Ma has an intensive outpatient program as well, and we know firsthand how beneficial it is for women who are best served by that level of care.

Outcome studies clearly show that residential rehabilitation followed by IOP is more effective than IOP alone, and that the more time spent in residential, the better a woman is likely to fare after treatment.

Key Benefits of Immersive, 24/7 Support

Here are some of the reasons residential rehabilitation is the way to go for most women with serious cases of trauma, addiction, and mental illness.

  1. Residential rehab is associated with deeper and more long-lasting therapeutic outcomes. The retreat-like, sequestered context of residential treatment makes it possible to be fully immersed in the treatment process without any other life concerns and responsibilities breaking focus or triggering a return to old habits. Therefore the potency of treatment is stronger, compared with treatment hours received in outpatient settings.
  2. Residential Rehab works better to form new habits and anchor lifestyle. changes. Due to a 24-7 schedule of activities structuring everything from diet, exercise, and sleep, residential rehab provides a more thorough reset, and anchors that reset more firmly into the brain, body, and nervous system.
  3. Residential Rehab creates stronger interpersonal bonds with peers and staff.

Bonds of connection with peers and treatment staff are very important for getting better. A big part of the reason most women use substances is to deal with intense hurts that happened in early life relationships, with family, friends, teachers, and others who hurt us when we were very young and vulnerable. The key intervention to counteract the relational trauma that most women have is to form and sustain strong, safe, loving, appropriate bonds with others who won’t hurt, exploit, reject, or abandon us. Residential rehab is far superior at creating an environment for deep bonding in this way. Bonding requires time spent not only talking, but doing activities together. Living together, cooking, waking up in the same place – all of these provide opportunities to bond in unforced ways.

Who Benefits Most from Residential Care?

If we could give every woman who needs it the chance to recover in a residential treatment facility like ours, that would make us very happy. That said, it’s true that residential care is only a helpful solution when someone is ready for it, and they are able to participate fully.

Women who clearly fall into the category of benefitting from residential care are:

  1. Women with Co-occurring Mental and Behavioral Health Disorders.

Residential treatment is necessary for women who, in addition to using substances, have another mental health diagnosis. Women who struggle with mental and behavioral health symptoms like depression, emotional volatility, anxiety, cutting, suicidal tendencies, and eating disorders, for example, almost always need residential care to be able to stabilize enough to be able to make progress.

  1. Women with Trauma

Women who survived childhood sexual abuse or sexual assault are especially advised to receive help in a residential facility. Women with attachment trauma, developmental trauma, relational/complex trauma, and/or other PTSD/single-incident trauma, combined with substance use, fare best in residential treatment. The safety, structure, intensiveness, and away-from-home model are helpful when needing to heal wounds that lie far below the surface-level behaviors connected to using substances.

  1. Women who aren’t safe in their home environment. Residential treatment is best whenever a woman won’t realistically be able to secure a substance-free, distress-free and violence-free environment at home. The intensive outpatient treatment model requires that when a woman goes home at the end of a treatment day, she isn’t overly bombarded by danger, crises and chaos. Sadly, as we all know, many women are facing exactly that – part of the reason they were using substances to cope in the first place!

Discover Personalized Residential Programs at Villa Kali Ma

At Villa Kali Ma, we take great care to offer a residential treatment environment that is safe, nurturing, and intensively healing. We offer fertile ground for the seed of recovery within you, the part that wants with all of her heart to find a way to get better and to live right.

Everything about the treatment experience we designed for women is conscious, from the softly pleasant environs in sunny coastal hills, to the highly structured day packed with healing nutrients. We offer a rigorous regime of potently effective clinical modalities in our treatment groups and individual sessions. We also provide several kinds of alternative, eastern, and non-medical healing approaches that gently bring a woman back to her true nature in body, mind, and spirit.

If you’re looking to recover from a substance use disorder, consider our retreat-like residential rehab experience for women!

Categories
General

Learning to Be Here Now: A Trauma-Informed Perspective

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

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

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

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

Why Being Here Now is Hard for Trauma Survivors

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

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

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

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

Making Friends with What Keeps Us in the There and Then

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

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

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

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

How to Be Present After Trauma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Distinguishing There and Then from Here and Now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for reading!

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

Accessibility Toolbar

Exit mobile version