Community is one of the most powerful curative factors in the treatment of addiction, mental illness, and trauma. In this post, we here at Villa Kali Ma explore some facets of this most precious of recovery diamonds: community.
We’ll also share more about how Villa Kali Ma’s Intensive Outpatient Program draws on the extraordinary, transformative effects of community work to help women heal from addiction, mental illness and trauma.
Let us begin with the problem that community cures: isolation. Isolation is a contemporary psychological and social burden, one that haunts many women in the so-called first world. It’s easy to recognize that the way we live, as a collective, generates loneliness for all. We may have more than we could ever need of material and virtual products for consumption, but we are undoubtedly impoverished in the realm of wholehearted relating. Loneliness is epidemic.
We can see them plainly enough in the external world, but the forces that subtly separate human heart from human heart also exist inside us. Most of us carry painfully difficult beliefs, reflecting an unresolvable polarity of dependence vs independence.
We think we shouldn’t need other people, or the opposite: that we can’t survive without their total approval of every aspect of us. Many of us are missing the middle place of interdependence, of unity in diversity, of belonging enhancing individuality and individuality enhancing belonging. The prison of imagined separation is inside us as well as outside of us.
This insight is not new, of course. Thousands of years ago, philosophers in the East (to whom we at Villa Kali Ma owe a great debt of gratitude, being a yoga-based program) correctly identified that there is something within each of us that believes in a deeply painful and ultimately incorrect illusion. That illusion is the perception that we are separate beings, rather than parts of a whole, cells in one body of life. This unfortunate habit of perception, passed on and reinforced, tends to shape our ways of considering who we are, and who others are.
All around us, this illusion is arguably disproved, mainly by the simple facts of nature. Our biology dictates that we are social animals. For deeply-wired, mammalian reasons, we cannot help but feel safer in groups, with families, partners, and friends around us. Polyvagal theory emphasizes the importance of co-regulation: in order for our nervous systems to turn off the inner fire alarms of panic and dread, we need to look into safe, available eyes. We need to register smiling faces, hear soothing voices. We need to detect, perhaps without even realizing that we do, the deep slow breaths being drawn by calm, capable others around us. In this age of replacement of the human with the artificial, are we remembering that most of what’s wrong with us, could be cured with some good old fashioned human contact?
Implications of our fancied separation, and the resulting psychological pain, are serious. Addiction, mental illness, and trauma are strengthened by isolation, and they also strengthen isolation. In many ways, they arise as attempted cures for isolation, in answer to the severe distress that appears in the human nervous system whenever there is severing of connection, exclusion from belonging, and withdrawal of human warmth.
The natural need for human contact cannot be made to disappear, only go underground. We may be ashamed of our loneliness, our craving for company, contact, and attention. We may long to be able to depend on people, but deeply believe (for good reason, even) that most people are unsafe to depend on. Perhaps we look down on our needs for securely bonded attachment relationships, thinking that we should be able to, it would be easier to, go it alone. We long to belong, even while we reject and marginalize each other when exposed for trying to belong or expressing the pain of our non-belonging.
In short, our wounds around the topic of belonging versus separation from people, and the very real ways we have been hurt by our separation, present many barriers to coming together in community. And yet, the pain of separation implies its own cure: to heal from the illusion that we are fully separate entities, we must rediscover that, in fact, we are kin. We must remember that we are cells from the larger body of all humanity, rather than far-flung bits of meaningless material, without which the body of humanity would be just fine. That’s not so. When one of us leaves this planet, our passing is grieved in ways we will never even realize. We must find ways to recall what has always been true: we belong. It just is.
So what’s the cure? Well, we at Villa Kali Ma believe that willy nilly, we women who have been wounded must find our way back to organic, home-grown, human community.
How Community Support Strengthens Women’s Trauma Recovery in IOP
In all of the programs we offer at Villa Kali Ma, we place the value of community front and center. We teach each woman who comes through our doors not only that community heals, but also how she can actually “do” community.
After all, being in community takes some skills. For most of us, it’s not so much that we don’t realize we are lonely (though we may have numbed this awareness away with drugs, alcohol, eating disorders, self harm, destructive relationships, etc). It’s more that we aren’t sure if we really know how to connect with each other in authentic, harmonious, inclusive ways. Have we ever seen that modeled? Were our families, our schools, our churches and universities like that? We have this longing, to be loved for who we actually are, without so much faking, hiding, conforming and effort. Could that ever be fulfilled?
What if we take a risk, and then are rejected? What if someone wants something from us that we don’t want to give them, and we have to reject them, or else violate our own needs? What if people see all the things about us that are so unacceptable in our own eyes – our inadequacies and insufficiencies, our vanities and blatant acts of selfishness, all that we dishonor and disrespect inside ourselves? What if people hurt us like we were hurt before? What if we hurt them?
All of these fears are valid. Learning how to be in community takes some up-front work. We have to remember how to be, just as we are, allowing everyone else to be, just as they are. We have to know when the person across from of us is worthy of our efforts at authentic connection, or whether they’re more in a place of inwardness, therefore likely to not be able to meet us in the vulnerable zone. But community can be had. It is possible to restore the ability to relate in a group, and to have the experience of being accepted for who we actually, really are.
Reclaiming a place in community is not a platitude – it is an achievable accomplishment. Restoration of connection in community involves being willing to work on our ability to show up to connect and be connected with other imperfect human beings. Not because we have finally become acceptable enough, but because we understand that all human beings have been hurt. We are in the same boat. We all have burdens, and we are all figuring it out as best we can. Given this existential equality, we have every reason to work together, to forgive in others what we long to forgive in ourselves, to extend grace and compassion, knowing we need grace and compassion too.
The facts cannot be avoided: the state of psychological isolation is a root cause for addiction and other mental illness. The wounds we hold cannot be cured without relating, even if that relating is inward relating to our own Self. One way or another, we must allow relating to take place again, inside of us and also with others out in the world. For those of us with a life-threatening mental health condition or severe addiction, we must find a way to claim our place in community, or we will always be at risk of turning to those substances and behaviors that we used to manage the pain of the wounds we have around our lack of human-to-human connection.
Creating Safe Spaces for Vulnerability and Growth
As everyone knows, women have a lot of valid fears about opening up authentically in community. We didn’t make these experiences up – we really were shamed, bullied, rejected, ostracized in and by communities. The people we relied on let us down – through hurting us directly or through failing to protect us. What is most human in us was banished to the underground of the psyche. If these damaging social experiences didn’t happen directly to us, we inherited these traumas from our parents, observed them in the collective, and recognized deep in our bones that in this very damaged and damaging world, belonging can be highly conditional.
Nevertheless, as the adage goes, what was hurt in relationships can be healed in relationships; in this case – community relationships. Through community witness, acceptance, support, and working through relational topics in appropriately facilitated or peer-led settings, we can be guided through the complex process of healing our ability to connect in community.
To know ourselves as valued, unique individuals within a wider community, wanted and loved just as we are, is profoundly reparative. We discover we can be loved for what unites us with all others, as well as for what makes us different from anyone else. At last, the pain-creating illusion that says we are all alone and unrelated, irrelevant and unimportant, is dissolved. We finally understand our deep, inherent, and unavoidable belonging in the family of life.
At Villa Kali Ma, we are dedicated to creating safe spaces for vulnerability and growth. Through how we hold space, what we model in community, and what we practice together as fellow recovering women, we build community together. Vulnerability is a choice, a choice which is necessary for growth.
Building Lifelong Connections Beyond Treatment
Many women make friends in treatment, as friendships are forged by shared experience, in the intimacy of our recovery setting.
Many clients also form healing bonds of trust with treatment staff. Our facility itself becomes a place where you are known, recognized, a kind of home. Returning as an alumna, you may feel like you’re going back to see teachers who are still rooting for you, long after you’ve graduated. Many clients form close connections with a specific practitioner who really gets them. That relationship is then internalized, the therapist or healer becoming an “inner wisdom figure” – an ally the graduate can always remember in her mind, long after the work is done. Close, or collegial, (even fruitfully challenging!), the relationships with treatment staff are generally an important part for women going through our programs.
It’s also part of the Villa Kali Ma experience to build long-lasting connections in the recovery community at large. During their treatment time with us, women are supported to learn to use the recovery tools in full. These include the ins and outs of meetings, making outreach calls, sharing stories, being of service, working with a sponsor, and giving back to the community by helping out with newcomers.
Although we support each woman’s choice, we do strongly endorse involvement in 12 Step, or a comparable recovery community. The peer-support model of recovery pioneered by communities like Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous is unmatched in ability to teach people how to belong in community again. Participation dissolves long-held burdens of shame, disconnection and loneliness among people affected by the topic of addiction.
These communities are human, not perfect – they have 100-year old language and ideas that can be triggering to some of us, and that’s a fair critique. These imperfections we acknowledge. Still, in the West, there has been no better model to emerge to address the core problem of addiction. The core problem of addiction being: severe disconnection, alienation, and trouble relating safely and wholeheartedly among members of our species. To solve this particular pain, we help women learn how to rely on the power of 12 Step communities, knowing it to be especially powerful medicine for the wounds of belonging, specifically.
Find Sisterhood and Support at Villa Kali Ma’s Women’s IOP
There is a popular imported proverb, possibly of Igbo and Yoruba origin, which offers the wisdom that “It takes a village to raise a child”. We here at Villa Kali Ma would extend that notion towards healing mental illness, addiction, and trauma: it takes a village to heal a woman.
As a female-centered treatment community, Villa Kali Ma’s Intensive Outpatient Program is a place to find sisterhood and support among women. With our signature blend of holistic therapies and clinical treatment approaches, we help each woman recover her sense of deserving to belong in community, just as she is now. We are here to be that village for you, and for all women out there who need us.
If you’re looking for support recovering from addiction, mental illness, trauma, or all three, check out our many programs for women. We offer a range of services at several locations in the northern San Diego county area.