Addiction treatment comes in a few different formats. These different formats reflect the different therapeutic environments found to be most effective for patients with varying degrees of need for intensiveness, structure, and medical supervision. The Partial Hospitalization Program level of care is a high intensity, outpatient day program model providing six hours of treatment, five days a week.
In this post, we’ll share a little more about the uniquely compassionate, holistic, and trauma-informed Partial Hospitalization Program we have created for women here at Villa Kali Ma. We’ll speak to the PHP model in general, and how our program supports lasting recovery from addiction, mental illness, and traumatization.
How Partial Hospitalization Helps Women Achieve Lasting Healing
PHPs were invented to treat people who present with acute needs, who require medical and/or psychiatric attention in order to stabilize and achieve basic bodily safety. Traditionally, patients with this level of need would have been treated in inpatient settings.
Over the decades, and in the context of resource conservation, the field of addictions treatment has recognized that day programs can also be equally effective for some patients. Those who require some medical and psychiatric support in order to get through the worst of the stabilization phase, but do not necessarily need to stay overnight in a hospital environment, nor to be supervised 24-7, can do just as well in a PHP.
What’s the difference between someone who should be in residential, and someone who is served well by a PHP? Some patients require 24-7 supervision, or else they may be apt to attempt to address their acute distress through dangerous behavior. Dangerous behavior may include self-harm or returning to substance use (putting them at risk of overdose). Such patients need to be supervised around the clock, as a safety measure. Such women are still best treated in a medically-supervised detox, followed by residential rehab.
Other patients, while still vulnerable and in need of a relatively high intensity of mental and physical health support, would be safe to stay at home during the evenings and weekends, as long as they were receiving a high level of care during daytime hours. For such people, PHPs are a valid alternative to residential.
It is for these women that Villa Kali Ma’s Partial Hospitalization Program exists. Women attending treatment at our outpatient facility in Del Mar, California may elect to participate in our Partial Hospitalization Program, as a higher-intensity version of the Intensive Outpatient Program also offered onsite there.
Our integrative PHP helps women achieve lasting healing by setting a good therapeutic and clinical foundation, including an introduction to the journey of trauma healing. Our PHP installs community relationships, and a faith in self that will carry each woman far into her recovery long after she leaves our program.
Combining Trauma Therapy, Community, and Self-Discovery
Our PHP combines holistic, integrative trauma therapy, community, and self-discovery. This combination is valuable for a few reasons. Trauma therapy is important for women with addiction because some form of traumatization is highly likely to be a root cause for the use of substances in the first place. When underlying traumatization is healed, the need for using substances addictively shrinks considerably or disappears.
Community is important for women recovering from addiction because, as Johann Hari puts it in his Ted talk about addiction, the opposite of addiction isn’t so much sobriety as “human connection”.
Addiction is isolating. The cure is in community. The trauma that most plagues women with addiction is relational in nature – when we undergo traumatization we lose our trust in relationships with others, either because it is people who have hurt us or people who have not protected us when we needed them to. Through the process of developing community relationships, restoring our ability to connect, belong and participate, we heal a major root cause of addiction, eventually making the need for substances redundant.
Finally, self-discovery is important for women with addiction because, through self-discovery, women get the good news that actually, there isn’t anything wrong with them, and there never was.
In the words of Mike Elkin, an author and thought leader in the treatment of families with addiction, the way that other people treated us in the past didn’t mean anything about whether or not we are good, valuable people. Rather, that behavior was about what was going on for that person.
Through self-discovery we realize that all along, just as we are, we have always already deserved love, protection, care, support and kindness.
Preparing for Next Steps After PHP
Recovery isn’t only about deep emotional healing. It is also intensely practical. Women need help planning, knowing what to do next, how to live well, feel their feelings, and still stay sober, no matter where the next bend in the river takes them.
Women recovering from addiction, mental illness and trauma do best with support getting ready for what’s to come. With some preparation, women can leave treatment knowing they won’t be caught completely off guard by what typically arises for women returning to “life after rehab”.
In our PHP for women, participants have a chance to plan, to rehearse responses to known triggers and offenders, consider choices ahead of time and practice strategies for coping. Our PHP helps prepare women for the next steps, by providing a bridge into Intensive Outpatient where appropriate, assistance moving into sober living, and other ways of easing into new ways of being in the world.
Continued Healing with Villa Kali Ma’s Comprehensive Care
PHPs are considered to be an important element in the landscape of addiction recovery. In particular, for people who may not be in a position to attend residential treatment in the classical rehab format, Partial Hospitalization is a good alternative.
Trauma-informed PHPs like ours at Villa Kali Ma are potent interventions for women looking to find lasting recovery and long-term healing from addiction and the underlying reasons that women have relied on addiction to get through life.
Villa Kali Ma’s PHP represents our commitment to providing comprehensive care for women recovering from addiction, trauma, and mental health struggles. Our program provides ongoing healing by supporting women’s hearts, minds, and bodies to recover in ways that make it possible to return to a positive life.
We help each woman build up community resources, so that she will be nestled in a web of positive relationships when she leaves. And we support each woman who comes through our doors to strengthen inner resources, so that she may come to know about herself what we also know to be true: she is a treasure of infinite potential, infinite lovability, and infinite value.
