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 Mas 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 Mas Womens 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.

Categories
Detox Nutrition

The Role of Nutrition and Self-Care in Detox Recovery

 

What we put in our bodies matters. That’s why, once we decide to detox from drugs and alcohol, we can benefit abundantly from a holistic approach to recovery.

Holistic approaches to addiction recovery acknowledge the central role that nutrition plays in rehabilitating the body, including the brain and nervous system. Restoring nutritional deficits caused by substance abuse, as well as addressing biochemical imbalances associated with trauma and mental illness, can powerfully impact well-being.

In this post, we’ll explore the role of nutrition and self-care during detox recovery.

Why Nutrition and Self-Care Are Essential During Detox 

Nutritional healing focuses on restoring essential nutrients, vitamins, and minerals that have become depleted to suboptimal levels in the body, brain, and nervous system. There are many reasons nutritional depletion can happen, including:

  • A diet composed mostly of highly-processed, GMO, non-organic foods, such as the standard American diet. The standard American diet is low in needed nutrients and high in ingredients that harm the body, such as sugar, bad fats, refined carbohydrates, dyes, additives, GMOs, pesticide residue, and preservatives
  • Exposure to toxic chemicals in the environment due to living in cities, close to industrial manufacturing sites, or conventional agriculture
  • Drug and alcohol use, including excessive intake of prescriptions and over the counter medicines
  • Inadequate physical exercise, hydration, and time spent out of doors in green spaces
  • A stressful lifestyle or life circumstances, which require being in a state of high nervous system alert, such as living in poverty, in a war zone, in an unsafe domestic situation, or other kind of ongoing danger in the environment

Given all of these possible nutritional vulnerabilities, the average person entering a drug detox program begins their recovery journey from a starting place of serious depletion. That depletion is partially responsible for the body and nervous system’s poor state of health, but it also has a strong impact on mental state. It is very hard to sustain positive body states, feelings and thoughts, without the proper levels of needed minerals and vitamins.

In addition to addressing malnutrition, nutritional support helps reduce cravings and alleviates the physical and emotional intensity of withdrawals. People who receive nutritional support are better protected against relapse. Personalized nutritional support helps regulate and stabilize each person’s unique neurobiology, based on substance abuse history and other factors.

Replenishing the Body: Nutrients That Support Recovery

There are specific vitamins and minerals which are especially helpful for recovery from the imbalances introduced by drug and alcohol abuse. These powerhouse nutritional aids include:

  • Omega 3s to support restoration of brain functioning. Omega 3s are healthy, nutritious oils found in nuts, seeds and fish. Omega 3 supplementation helps stabilize mood swings. They may also be prescribed to address cognitive decline where brain damage has occurred due to drug and alcohol abuse, as may happen with excessive use of benzodiazepines (Klonopin, Xanax, etc).
  • Vitamin B12 to support nervous system rehabilitation. The class of B-vitamins has positive effects on many body systems, but most of all helps with the operations of the brain and nervous system. Increasing bioavailable B-vitamin levels helps with regulating anxiety and release of excess nervous tension.
  • Zinc, Selenium, and Magnesium for tissue repair and mood regulation, reducing irritability and depression
  • Vitamin C and D to support the immune system and boost overall health
  • Folic Acid to help with mood disorders and habits of emotional dysregulation
  • Probiotics to address gut health and immunity
  • Protein sources to help with neurotransmitter production
  • Carbohydrates and sugar reduction to help with blood sugar stabilization
  • Herbs, extracts and whole foods that support the body’s detoxification processes, such chlorella, dandelion, leafy greens, and burdock root.
  • Adaptogens like ashwaganda, mushrooms, or rhodiola, to help with reorganization of neural pathways affected by addiction

Overall, nutrients help replenish needed neurotransmitters, such as dopamine and serotonin, which play an important role in mental and emotional functioning. For women, nutritional support for hormone restoration is also frequently important, due to the ways that estrogen and progesterone interplay with substance abuse and mood.

Building a Detox-Friendly Daily Self-Care Routine

Nutrition and self-care both affect mood and energy. By developing a daily self-care routine that includes a focus on nutrition, women who are detoxing from drugs and alcohol can significantly improve their recovery experience. Here are some elements of a positive daily self-care routine.

  • Regular Meals. For optimal nutrient intake, it’s important to provide the body with predictability. Regular meal times and consistent amounts of food help stabilize energy levels. Energy levels affect mood and physical well-being. Energy spikes and drop offs correlate to mood swings, so keeping energy levels balanced through regular meals helps balance emotion and thoughts as well.
  • Nutrient-Dense Diet. When making food choices, focus on whole, organic clean foods that will source the body with needed vitamins and minerals. If you’re not sure how to choose foods that will replenish the body, nutritional counseling (such as that provided in our program at Villa Kali Ma! https://villakalima.com/sustainable-recovery/life-skills-nutrition/) will be very helpful. Generally speaking, nutrient-dense diets limit sugar, refined carbohydrates, and caffeine. Instead, the aim is to nourish the body with lean proteins, fresh organic vegetables, nutritious oils, and whole grains.
  • Adequate hydration is a necessity for the body, brain, and nervous system to function. When dehydrated, the body will drop into irritability, mood imbalances, and cravings. To help prevent that state, recovering women need to proactively replenish fluid levels with pure water, making sure to drink around eight cups of water per day (give or take, and adjusting per variations in body size and physiology). It is also important to source the body with natural sources of electrolytes, which can be found by drinking coconut water and through consuming electrolyte-rich foods like bananas, avocados, spinach, and nuts.
  • It is highly beneficial for the body, mind, and emotions to have a regular exercise routine, ideally a form of fitness activity which is relatively vigorous. It’s important to find something that will help the body to sweat and to use up available energy levels, such as running, dance, high intensity interval training (HIIT), biking, or aerobics. Whatever a woman’s current fitness level, the goal is to exercise the body to the point of pleasant exhaustion and energization. This can usually be accomplished in around 20 minutes. Exercising a few times a week is ideal.
  • Mindful Movement. In addition to exercise, it is good to schedule mindful movement into the day. Mindful movement is slow, gentle, and serves as a form of meditation in addition to helping the body’s energy flows. Qi gong, yoga, tai chi, and authentic movement are examples of movement practices in this genre.
  • Time Outside. The more green time available, the better support for your recovery. Trees and plants help with oxygenation levels, while earth, soil, and sand help with grounding and harmonizing the body’s electromagnetic field. Sunshine, sea air, and natural aromas carried by plants and flowers are naturally medicinal in their effects, stimulating immunity and relaxation. The beauty and abundant metaphors found in natural environments are not only soothing and relaxing, but help with psychological mechanisms of process and release.
  • Adequate Sleep. Keeping a regular, predictable sleep schedule is a basic self-care practice with extensive benefits for women in recovery. As possible, set a schedule that honors circadian rhythms. To do this, support the body to be awake and active during daylight hours, permitting it to rest and replenish after dark. Keeping the mind stimulated with screen time and consuming excessive entertainment media interferes with adequate sleep, so consider switching to IRL quiet time activities like reading (physical books), journaling, drawing, or crafts in the hours before bedtime.
  • Personal Showering, grooming and taking care of clothes and other aspects of appearance are part of self-care. Regular attendance to the body reflects levels of care for the self. Self-neglect, sometimes visible in neglect of personal appearance, is a signal that adequate levels of care may not be being met. Attending to the body’s cleanliness helps support recovery as a regular practice.
  • Keeping a journal, in which to jot down feelings and discoveries, is a helpful way to provide regular ventilation of built up emotional charge. Journaling also helps strengthen the part of us that can witness our process without over-identification with the contents of the mind. Journaling builds the capacity for self-awareness, a valuable asset on the recovery journey.
  • Short Meditations and Prayers. Meditation helps induce the relaxation response, bringing greater feelings of peace and ease through calming the nervous system. Even short meditations, of around 3-7 minutes, are helpful for strengthening the ability to access inner peace through easing tension. Depending on experiences with spirituality and religion, some women will find praying helpful as well.

How Villa Kali Ma Incorporates Holistic Wellness in Detox

As an innovative, integrative program helping women recover from addiction, mental health disorders, and trauma in the most natural and effective way, Villa Kali Ma brings holistic wellness approaches into our detox program.

From the beginning of the detoxification journey onwards, we provide nutritional support for the recovery process. Our clean, plant-based diet of whole foods and nutrients is designed to optimize provision of vitamins and minerals that women need to detoxify and replenish.

We incorporate yoga, acupuncture, mindful movement, meditation, breath work, massage, and many other beneficial practices into our schedule, to help women learn healthy habits inside and out. Our holistic interventions support regeneration of tissues, pathways, and functioning of each woman’s body, brain, and nervous system. We help prepare women to be ready to tackle the emotional learning work and perspective changes to come in the next stages of the recovery journey.

If you’re looking for a safe drug detox that will help you replenish your body naturally, consider our unique program for women!

Categories
Addiction Treatment Detox Mental Health

How to Prepare Mentally and Physically for Detox

Have you made the courageous decision to recover from substance addiction? Sincere congratulations, from our hearts to yours!

You might be wondering what comes next. Well, every recovery journey begins the same way, with detoxification. Drugs and alcohol have to be purged from the body in order to get a fresh start – physically, mentally and emotionally.

In this post, we here at Villa Kali Ma will share some thoughts on how you can prepare for this all-important first step of the journey.

Preparing for Detox: A Mental and Physical Wellness Guide 

Detoxification is the beginning of recovery. For safety and effectiveness of this  important purification process, we highly recommend a medically supervised detox facility, such as Villa Kali Ma’s Detox Program for Women.

The key reason to enter a medically supervised detox program is to reduce dangerous complications which can arise due to severe withdrawal symptoms. Some substances, including alcohol, have potentially life-threatening withdrawal symptoms, like seizures, heart attack or delirium. Whenever alcohol has been used in combination with other substances, including prescription medications, for your own safety it’s not wise to try to detoxify without medical monitoring.

In addition to the potential danger linked to withdrawal from certain substances, and especially substances used in combination, detoxification can be psychologically distressing and physically uncomfortable. Medically supervised detoxification is designed to minimize the difficulty of going through withdrawals.

Withdrawals can be physically painful, and it is also normal to experience intense cravings to return to drug or alcohol use as withdrawals peak. Medical personnel and a contained setting help safeguard you during this especially vulnerable stage, during which many women are tempted to return to using, just to treat the physical and emotional discomfort that surfaces during detox itself.

Finally, medical detox is really the start of treatment, and helps prepare for successful participation in a substance abuse program down the road.

Steps to Take Before Entering a Detox Program 

It’s a good idea to prepare the body and mind for detoxification before you enter a program. Detoxification is physically demanding. Every part of the body will be working hard to help eliminate the substance out of the system.

Detoxification is likely to activate painful emotions and mental processes as well. There are some emotional and mental preparation steps which can help to ensure readiness for the experience.

Here are a few simple ways you can prepare for entering a detox program.

Exercise

In the days or weeks before entering detox, support the body with gentle exercise. High-intensity workouts are not advised – you don’t want to tax the body.  Rather, try stretching, yoga, or qi gong. These practices help circulation and lymphatic drainage, both important during detox. Low-impact activities like walking, cycling, and easy aerobics in moderation can also be used to promote relaxation and release stress.

Reduce Screen Time

As soon as possible, reduce exposure to screen time. Whenever not strictly necessary, stay away from computers and phones. The body’s health is affected negatively by exposure to artificially-generated electromagnetic fields (EMF), including from devices. To help reduce the toxic load, you can give the body a break and help it attune to healing rhythms simply through avoiding artificially-sourced EMF wherever possible.

Other Ways to Prepare for a Detox Program

Increase Green Time

To actively support the body to tune to healthy EMF, let the body have time outside in nature, or a park or garden. The benefits of natural elements, including plants, animals, and exposure to the open air, are extensive. The body will be grateful for any fortification of immunity that can be had. If possible, arrange for skin-to-nature contact, for example through lying on the beach, walking barefoot, swimming, or even just touching nature materials like grass or leaves. There are many immune and psychological benefits to nature-bathing in any form.

Drink Water and Eat Clean

You can already begin gently flushing your system through increasing hydration and eating clean food. Drink plenty of pure water, and start consuming simple, nutrient-dense meals based on whole ingredients, fresh vegetables and lean proteins. Ideally, slowly reduce or eliminate sugar, caffeine, and junk food, as these stimulants deplete the body’s resources.

Sleep and Relaxation

Get as much good sleep and down time as you can. If the body wants to rest, let it rest and do not place unnecessary demands upon yourself at this time. You may also want to begin practicing breathing and other relaxation exercises, which can come in handy during the detoxification process. Below are some tips on breath work for beginners.

Breath Work

There are many simple, helpful breath work tools to choose from. The most basic way to practice breath work is to just notice it without changing it, perhaps saying to yourself “I am breathing in” while you breathe in, and “I am breathing out” while you are breathing out. It is normal to become distracted relatively quickly – that’s part of the practice. When you notice you got distracted, celebrate that you noticed, and start again.

The second-most useful breath work tip is to experiment with lengthening the out-breath. Making the out-breath longer than the in-breath will automatically induce a natural, gentle relaxation response in the body and stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system.

To try this approach, experiment to see if you can make your out-breath a few seconds longer than your in-breath. Begin with just counting the natural length of your in-breath (one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi…). Regardless of the length of the in-breath, try lengthening the out-breath by just a few counts longer. For example, if the in-breath naturally has a count of 6 seconds, then you may aim for an out-breath of 8 counts.

Do this for a short cycle of around 6 – 10 breaths total, then take a break and notice if anything shifted for you. Just observe, there is no other objective than to see if it works for you.

If the out-breath lengthening experiment doesn’t seem to work for you, don’t worry, there are many other breath work techniques. Choose one of the breath work exercises found here or try pairing breath work with visualization.

Pack Your Bag With Essential Detox Preparation

Some essential items can come with you into the detox facility. You will want to bring the following items:

What to bring:

-pajamas

-slippers or indoor shoes

-comfortable, loose-fitting clothes

-work out clothes

-options for layering, like sweatshirts and long sleeves

-personal hygiene items: toothpaste, deodorant, shampoo, soap and hairbrush

-wallet, including ID and insurance cards

-list of any current medications

-a journal and pen

What not to bring:

-Scented products or perfume

-Electronics and devices

-Valuable items

-Jewelry

-Weapons or items that could be used as weapons (sharp objects)

-Drugs and alcohol

Managing Anxiety for Healing (Steps 1 and 2)

You can prepare mentally for detox by setting conscious intentions for your detox stay and practicing anxiety management techniques.

Intentions

Intentions are a powerful tool for any change process. Here is a brief process you can complete in your journal as a way to prepare.

Step 1: Set Intentions

Begin with tuning into your personal reasons and motivations for change. What do you sincerely intend?

I want to detox because…

I intend to be sober so that…

I will clear drugs and alcohol from my body in order to…

My goal is…

My heartfelt desire is…

If I didn’t have to know how, but could just focus on what I wish, I would wish that…

Step 2: Air Doubts and Concerns

The next step is to ask yourself if there are any parts of you inside who have doubts, fears, or concerns about the detox process. Name these worries.

I’m afraid I’ll mess this up and fail…

I’m doubting if I really have the willpower to follow through…

I’m concerned I’ll feel overwhelming cravings…

Setting Intentions for Healing (Steps 3 and 4)

Step 3: Surrender Your Fears

For each of the above-identified fears, reframe it using the phrase “I choose to surrender this [doubt/fear/concern] because…”

I choose to surrender this fear that I will fail because… all I can do is do my best

I choose to surrender this doubt about willpower because… I deserve a chance to try again

I choose to surrender my concerns about overwhelming cravings to use because… that’s why the medical staff are there, to help with that

Step 4: Give Kindness to Yourself

Finally, write out a few positive, sincere messages towards yourself. It can be hard to kind to ourselves, so if it helps, imagine what you would say to a very lovable friend going through a similar thing.

You are so brave, I love you

I’m so proud of you

I love you for who you are

I know who you are on the inside, you are not your addiction

All around the world, women just like me are suffering in the same way, and just like me, they deserve so so much compassion, help, and protection 

If this step of self-kindness is hard, you’re not alone! You may find some inspiration in Kristin Neff’s Self-Compassion practices.

Anxiety Management Strategies

Anxiety is a common experience during detox. Here are three anxiety management strategies you can practice ahead of time.

Three Easy Techniques for Managing Anxiety

  • Tune into your feet. Wiggle your toes, and notice sensations down there. Spread, lift, and press your toes into the floor, with no goal other than to observe any physical feelings you can detect. For many people, the feet are a safe part of the body, absent of feelings of stress or danger. Is that true for you?

See if you can notice any differences in sensation between distinct parts of the feet: heel, ball of the foot, arches, toes, top of the foot, sole of the foot, sides of the foot. If you’re not able to notice much sensation, use your hands to gently massage, stroke, or tap your feet. Ask yourself: is there any sensation of danger or discomfort in your feet, or do they feel like they could be a neutral zone? If neutral, then remember that you can always check back in with sensations in your feet when you need a non-stimulating part of your experience to focus into.

  • Activate your legs. In whatever way is comfortable and available to you, gently tense, bend, twist, and release the large muscle groups in the bottom half of your body. Focus on muscles in your glutes, quads, and calves. If available to you, try doing some gentle, slow-motion squats, or just crouch in a squatting position. As you’re tensing and releasing these muscles, know that you are helping your body to process and eliminate anxiety out of the body.
  • Send Your Anxiety into the Core of the Earth. Imagine that on your in-breath, you are gathering up all your burdens, worries, and concerns. Gather up the anxiety itself into a big ball of anxiety. Then on the out-breath, picture that you are sending all of the anxiety down through a firehose that goes all the way into the center of the earth. Keep breathing out to dump out all the anxiety into a space at the core of the earth. Leave all anxiety you breathe out there in the center of the earth, where it can do no harm and will easily be composted, processed, or burned up by the earth. Repeat for a few breaths if desired, allowing all anxiety to be moved from inside your body, into the body of the earth, who can hold it for you easily.

Supportive Detox Resources at Villa Kali Ma 

As a holistic facility, Villa Kali Ma approaches detoxification as an honored, important phase of the sacred process of recovery. In our medically supervised detox program, we combine effective, safe medical monitoring of the biological detoxification process with our signature approach of supporting mind, body, and spirit with holistic interventions.

Integrating light and gentle practices from the ancient healing systems of yoga, mindfulness, breath work, acupuncture, massage, and Ayurvedic nutrition, we help women start the journey homewards to what matters most inside.

Detox is where recovery begins. Eventually, we may be lead through our recovery to a more natural and soul-centered path. A path to healing all that once harmed us beyond measure, and to a life beyond that story. Through Villa Kali Ma’s many holistic resources and supports, we guide women who are recovering from drug and alcohol abuse to connect the detoxification process to their highest goals and sincerest heart’s longings for a better life.

Categories
Addiction Treatment

What Happens During a Medically Supervised Detox?

 It’s totally valid to feel nervous before detox. For most of us, starting a detox from drugs and alcohol is a leap into the unknown. Any change is a heroic act, requiring courage and surrender.

Making a decision to enter detox is a beginning and an end in the same moment, a combination of letting go and beginning again. Letting go of what we can no longer control, we begin a course of action that will lead us back into the heart of our lives.

Although a map of the detoxification process is not the same thing as the terrain itself, it helps to have an inkling of what’s to come. With a general idea of what to expect, we can prepare ourselves physically, mentally, and emotionally for the journey.

In this post, your friends at Villa Kali Ma will do our best to map out the general features of medically supervised detox, so that you can make empowered choices when it comes to choosing a facility for your safe drug detox.

What to Expect During a Medically Supervised Detox

The purpose of medically supervised detoxification is to safely clear drugs and alcohol from the body. Some substances, including alcohol, have physiological withdrawal symptoms which can be potentially life-threatening. In a medically supervised detox program, around-the-clock clinical care ensures a fully safe passage through the physical withdrawal process.

The detoxification process typically lasts around five to seven days. During these days, medical personnel monitor your state, providing medical interventions if needed. Medicine that modulates withdrawal symptoms may be administered if it is deemed necessary to help stabilize your system.

As the body purges the addictive substance and its chemical residue, it is typical to experience hallmark symptoms. These withdrawal symptoms will be different based on the substance that is being cleared from the body. Common withdrawal symptoms include tremors and shakes, nausea, headaches and body pain, sleep disturbances, and in some cases, delirium and seizures. Some withdrawal symptoms are experienced primarily as psychological, such as racing thoughts, anxiety, and depression. It’s also part of the withdrawal process to experience intense craving for the substance.

Women who have mental health disorders and/or trauma as well as substance addiction typically experience the withdrawal process more intensely. In the absence of the addictive substance’s painkilling, euphoric, or energizing effects, existing emotional and mental pain is experienced as amplified.

It’s important to understand, finally, that detoxification is the first step to recovering from substance abuse. Detox is not the same as treatment, and it isn’t reasonably likely to be successful as a standalone measure on its own, because getting the drugs and alcohol out of the body is just the beginning. To recover, the underlying mental and emotional pain which made using substances necessary has to be healed. For that reason, medically supervised detoxification is meant to be followed by several weeks of intensive treatment, and/or daily active involvement in a 12 Step program.

The Phases of Detox: From Evaluation to Stabilization 

The phases of detoxification happen in the following sequence: evaluation, stabilization, and preparation for substance abuse treatment.

Evaluation

During the evaluation phase, a comprehensive assessment is administered, to ensure all factors are understood. These factors are substance abuse, mental health needs, physical health history, social context, and personal background.

Co-occurring disorders, including trauma diagnoses, affect the detoxification process, informing the way that each person experiences the journey. The purpose of the initial evaluation is to make a personalized detoxification plan.

Note that you may expect early-onset withdrawal symptoms such as nausea, shakes and anxiety to begin already during the initial evaluation phase.

Stabilization

The stabilization phase is when most of the detoxification process takes place. This stage includes initial withdrawal and acute withdrawal, and ends when the patient’s system is stabilized.

During stabilization, detox patients are closely monitored and may be supported with medical interventions to reduce physical pain or psychological distress. This phase of intensive clinical symptoms lasts several days, generally peaking around three days in, which marks the transition from initial withdrawal to acute.

The initial withdrawal phase, usually up to three days, is when the body rids itself of toxins from the addictive substance. The movement of the chemical out of the body’s channels of elimination, while ultimately very positive for the body, first creates discomfort, such as pain, nausea, cravings, and feelings of intense unease.

The acute withdrawal phase, starting around day three and lasting up to four more days, is when withdrawal symptoms may spike to their highest peak, before gradually winding down.

Preparation for Substance Abuse Treatment

Once the stabilization phase is completed, medical personnel help prepare patients to leave the detox facility and enter a substance abuse treatment program. It’s important to understand that although initial and acute phases have finished, withdrawal symptoms are not done yet. After initial and acute withdrawal phases, there is a long, less acute stage of the detoxification process known as post-acute withdrawal.

Post-acute withdrawal includes persistent, lingering physical and psychological effects which do not destabilize the whole system, but still need to be treated. Post-acute withdrawal symptoms include ongoing dread and unease, sleep problems, mental health symptoms, and cravings to use. It is important to receive substance abuse treatment immediately after leaving a medically supervised detoxification facility for this reason, to protect against relapse in this supremely sensitive phase.

How Medical Teams Ensure Comfort and Safety 

The role of medical supervision in the detoxification process is an important factor in ensuring the safety and comfort for people with substance use disorders, as they begin the journey of recovery.

Medical supervision is there to help manage withdrawal symptoms, which can be life threatening in some cases. Even when not posing a danger to a patient’s life, withdrawal symptoms are physically uncomfortable and emotionally distressing. The presence of medical professionals to observe and oversee the process creates a controlled environment, reducing risk of complications and enhancing safety and effectiveness.

Medication

Where appropriate, healthcare providers in a medically supervised detoxification facility use medically-assisted treatment, (MAT), to ease a patient through the danger and pain of withdrawals. MAT uses medication to reduce symptoms and ease cravings.

The medication used in an MAT intervention depends on which substance is being cleared from the patient’s system. For example, benzodiazepines or phenobarbital may be prescribed during alcohol withdrawal to reduce the risk of seizure. During opioid detox, medical personnel may prescribe an opioid agonist, like methadone, or a partial opioid agonist, like buprenorphine (or Suboxone, a brand name medication which pairs an opioid antagonist called naloxone with buprenorphine).

Activities

The atmosphere in a medically supervised detox facility should be gently supportive of psychological as well as physical healing. A good detox will provide initial counseling and other interventions, like easy, accessible mindfulness training and  opportunities for exercise. These activities are to help soothe emotions, as well as prepare a patient for entering substance abuse treatment after detox.

Begin Your Safe Detox Journey at Villa Kali Ma

Eliminating drugs and alcohol from the body is the first step of the recovery journey. The experience of detox is different for each woman, depending not only on which substance (or combination of substances) she has been using, and for how long, but also on her unique personhood. At Villa Kali Ma, we support each woman’s detoxification process through many adjunct healing modalities that help purify and restore body, mind, and spirit.

As a holistic program, we know that detoxification is about more than just removing chemicals out of the body. Thoughts, emotions, and even spiritual layers of a woman’s life can be poisoned. Not only by drugs, alcohol, chemicals in the environment, personal products, and food, but by the many kinds of toxicity in our culture, including harmful beliefs and attitudes.

Returning to wellness means returning to wholeness, a radical transformation that touches every last hidden pocket of soul within us. Through yoga, massage, acupuncture, nutritional support, and organic, plant-based diet, we help women start recovery off with a strong foundation, cleansing multiple levels of being. If you’re looking for a safe drug detox with a holistic mindset, consider our medically supervised program. We’d love to help you safely and effectively detox, to set you up right for beginning your life anew.

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