Tag: Women’s Addiction Recovery

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Addiction Treatment Self Care Self-care Strategies

Self-Care Isn’t Selfish: Essential Practices for Women in Recovery

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At Villa Kali Ma, it is our strong belief that women are precious. Every single one of us matters. This statement bears repeating, and often! Because for the many women we encounter in the course of our work healing addiction, mental illness, and trauma, the idea of being valuable just because we exist is often a foreign one. 

Most of the women we encounter suffer from extreme self-hatred, self-neglect, and self-misunderstanding. Rather than seeing that we are extraordinary and unrepeatable expressions of the one life force of which we all partake, most of us have the habit of seeing only flaws, failures, and deficits.

We here at Villa Kali Ma insist, though. Not only are women exceedingly precious, that preciousness needs care and boundaries to be preserved and nourished. While women are exceptionally resilient – able to endure a range of abuses and neglects ranging from the material to the spiritual – we are not unscathed by all the forms of mistreatment of women and girls that the world has heaped on us. Instead, we exist in a state of severe woundedness, carrying on not because of, but in spite of the ways that society has taught us to regard ourselves. 

In our daily work with women of all backgrounds here at Villa Kali Ma, we focus on the vital component of self-care for recovery, coaching skills of mental health maintenance and other forms of wellness practices that help women flourish and thrive. The vast majority of the women we get to know through this work need help learning to stop treating themselves the way they have been treated since birth – as something to be critiqued, told, rejected, abandoned, abused, ignored, or used. 

Women in recovery must learn self-care. Self-care isn’t selfish. It is an essential practice for all women, especially those of us learning to live in a new way after decades of struggling with substance addiction, mental health, and trauma. 

In this post, we’ll share thoughts about the most important aspects of self-care for women in recovery. 

Building a Self-Care Foundation That Supports Lasting Recovery

All self-care must begin with the understanding that there are serious consequences to self-neglect and self-mistreatment for any of us who are seeking to recover from addiction, mental health struggles, and trauma. If we treat ourselves the way we have always treated ourselves in the past, we will again experience the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that drove us to need professional help. To stay healthy, we must gradually learn to think very different thoughts, feel different feelings, and take different actions. Only then will we be able to experience and sustain those different life results we deeply deserve and desire.  

It is not a luxury to care for the self, but rather a necessity. Caring for the self includes meeting needs and honoring boundaries in many aspects of life. Not only must we learn to notice and care for the physical form we inhabit, by feeding ourselves healthy food, resting enough, exercising appropriately, and spending time outside in the great outdoors. We must also learn to notice and care for the emotional, mental, spiritual, relational, creative, and career (or purpose fulfillment) aspects of our lives. Because we are complex, multidimensional beings. Self-care is a living, breathing practice, a whole ecosystem of loving intentions. We learn to tune in, to get creative, to ask.   

Building a self-care foundation that supports lasting recovery begins with taking stock of the facts: where do our current self-care practices need work? Where do we try to go without our needs being met, where do we violate our own boundaries? In each of those areas, what would we rather have? 

Physical, Emotional, and Spiritual Self-Care Strategies

The body is the foundation of our entire experience in the world. It is the vessel inside of which we voyage on the seas of life, and the body must be strong, intact, and comfortable to inhabit. Therefore, by focusing on improving the physical body’s health, we accomplish a lot towards being able to care also for the other aspects of life, like emotions, thoughts, and love relationships. If the body isn’t well, then many other aspects of life suffer too, so it makes sense to always look to, and strengthen, the state of the body as a priority.

Here are the most important strategies for physical body self-care: 

Improve Your Diet 

Many women live with severe nutrient deficiencies, chemical imbalances, and toxic loads that have been delivered to the body from a variety of sources. Substance abuse leaves a chemical legacy in the body, but there are many other possible sources of toxins that interfere with nearly every aspect of the body’s ability to create states of health and happiness. 

Environmental toxicity, the many impacts of industrialization, manufacturing, & large scale agriculture, GMOs, preservatives, dyes, dental work, other medical procedures, beauty products, cleansing agents and pharmaceuticals can all contribute to the body being out of balance and ill. Hormones and neurotransmitters often need support to be replenished, as do important minerals and vitamins. 

Fortunately, all of these concerns can be assessed and addressed through the professional attention of a nutritionist or doctor of functional medicine. We here at Villa Kali Ma strongly believe in the power of healing the body with food and other lifestyle changes, and we help all the women we meet to consider this angle of their recovery.  

Exercise

Some form of daily exercise is necessary. There are many different kinds of exercise, ranging from very high impact to low. Depending on your unique body, you may benefit from changing the amount or kind of physical activity you get every day. If at all possible, it is favorable to combine exercise with increasing the amount of outdoors time you are able to get each week. Gardening, walking in the park, and even a walk around the neighborhood can greatly improve the physical health of the body. 

Sleep 

Sleep is nature’s cure for many conditions. The body restores itself through sleep, but many of us struggle to get the right amount and quality of sleep that we actually need. To prioritize sleep, we may need to develop habits of reducing screen time, going to bed earlier, cutting out caffeine entirely, or make other such changes to encourage the body to rest. Sleep is a complex topic; note that sleep is also greatly improved by dietary changes and exercise. 

Second to physical self-care, we at Villa Kali Ma prioritize emotional self-care. Emotional self-care means attending to how we feel, and what we may be thinking about ourselves throughout the day. Here are our top recommendations for emotional self-care. 

Reflection

It’s important to have time and space to reflect on what we feel. Villa Kali Ma recommends that each woman cultivate the habit of taking time every day for checking in with herself. 

A practice that many women find relatively easy to install is journaling. Set a timer for 15 minutes and free-write all of your thoughts and feelings first thing in the morning or right before bed, and you will gradually build a relationship with yourself in which you are able to vent your emotions to yourself. Recording gratitudes and setting intentions may optionally be part of your reflection time, but it’s important to make room for negative feelings too. By writing negative feelings down, we often don’t have to speak them out loud to people or let them turn into negative actions. 

Support Network

It’s a vital aspect of self-care to make sure that we have enough safe people in our lives, with whom we can be our authentic selves to a reasonable degree. Some of us are fortunate enough to have a pre-existing network of friends and family who help us face our burdens with less loneliness, but most of us experience isolation and chronic disconnection emotionally. If you’re in the latter situation, don’t worry, that is enormously common, and there are solutions. 

The easiest fix for isolation is to join a supportive community, adding in extra meetings and activities on the daily. AA, NA, and other types of self-help community are ideal for adding a support network in quickly and effectively. Alternatively, we can receive support through a therapy group, or through an activities group that meets regularly. Joining a yoga community, spiritual group, or other kind of welcoming community can also help.   

Individual Therapy

It is strongly recommended to be in individual therapy of some kind. There are many different kinds of therapy, ranging from body based, to creative, to relationship-oriented, to cognitive behavioral. It is important to have a dedicated, regular space with a professional for slowly working through the many healing pieces that arise for women who have addiction, mental health struggles, and trauma. 

Finally, we recommend that each woman develop a strategy for spiritual self care. We do not endorse religion at Villa Kali Ma. We mean rather that it’s very helpful for a woman to develop her spiritual nature as a resource for recovery. Activating one’s spiritual capacity helps with a variety of daily challenges, providing guidance, solace, comfort, and inspiration. Every person alive has spirituality of their own, and no one can tell you what that should be like. At Villa Kali Ma, we suggest only that you do work with your spirituality, and use it to your advantage. Here are our tips for developing your spiritual powers further.

Prayer

Broadly speaking, prayer just means talking to spirit, putting your needs, thoughts, intentions, or worries into words. Speaking to a spiritual someone or something, even if it’s your own higher self, has enormous benefits. Most people find that over time, if they continue to “talk to God” or “talk to the universe”, a very practical helpline can be established. Eventually, a trusting relationship is built, in which we learn that if we ask, we do tend to receive.

Mindfulness

Meditation can come in the form of a sit down practice, but since many women with trauma find it hard to “just be still”, it’s important to note that mindfulness comes in many forms, including walking, art and movement. Even if we must start with short sessions of just five minutes, gradually developing our capacity for mindful awareness, whether sitting or doing a physical activity, brings spaciousness, peace, calm, and the capacity to tolerate our suffering with more loving detachment. We encourage every woman to develop her latent potential for peace and equanimity through finding a mindfulness practice that she enjoys enough to pursue.

Nature and Music

Nature and music, especially the great works of classical music or jazz, are two other categories that can be resources for developing spirituality. Both nature and music tend to stimulate spiritual feelings and teach us about what our own spiritual nature is like. Increasing the amount of time listening to music and observing the natural world are both valid ways to develop spiritual self-care.

Overcoming Guilt and Prioritizing Your Wellbeing

Many women need help working through the guilt they feel when they begin to put their own needs and boundaries first. It has been deeply ingrained in us to believe that if we do not attend to other people first, we are bad people, or there will be relational consequences for us. People will be angry or think ill of us.  

It is possible that some people in our lives will in fact need some time adjusting to our new focus on caring for ourselves. However, anyone worth keeping close to us will like it that we are caring for ourselves more, for the simple reason that when we are happier, they are happier. We will have more energy, compassion, and love for them, if we are allowed to make sure we are ok first.

Although we have all been trained to believe that other people’s happiness requires that we put them first, this is a misunderstanding. Provided we are talking about two adults, we must care for ourselves first, and then if and only if we have a surplus, we may give away what we choose to share with others. The giving is always optional, and we can only be generous when what we give away isn’t something that we ourselves need. To give what we have away, in exchange for someone giving us what we need in return, is the core misunderstanding of codependency. 

In the short term, some people probably will feel let down or angry when we take care of ourselves before we take care of them. In the longer term, they will be inspired to realize that they are also allowed to care for themselves, and that we want them to do that too. 

If necessary, remind yourself of the consequences of you not putting yourself first. Our loved ones may wish, in their wounded child parts, that we would care for them before taking care of ourselves. They might rightfully have never gotten what they needed, and they had come to rely on us to be kind or to help them. Even so, they do not really want the consequences of us not caring for ourselves first. No one is benefited by us losing our sobriety, mental health, or shutting down or spiraling out in a trauma episode.

Learn Sustainable Self-Care at Villa Kali Ma

Villa Kali Ma is a licensed provider of trauma treatment, as well as mental health and addiction recovery services for women. Located in northern San Diego County, we are blessed to be able to offer a standalone trauma healing center, The Retreat. In all of our serene, comfortable locations, we help women learn the necessary art and practice of self-care. 

Our all-female team of licensed clinicians and certified holistic practitioners provides quality trauma-informed treatment, giving a chance to discover deep bodily and spiritual recovery. Our comprehensive menu of complementary holistic sessions includes massage, Ayurveda, yoga, acupuncture, sound healing, Reiki, breath work, and more. 

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Addiction Treatment Intensive Outpatient Program

The Power of Community: Why Connection Matters in IOP

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.

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Addiction Treatment Intensive Outpatient Program Trauma Therapy

Why Intensive Outpatient Programs Are Essential for Women Healing from Trauma

The Intensive Outpatient Program model is one of the most effective treatment options for women who need support recovering from substance addiction. This is especially true for women who also need trauma treatment and help overcoming mental health symptoms.

In Villa Kali Ma’s unique integrative program, we address the trifold burdens of addiction, mental illness, and trauma together as one.  Our treatment philosophy arises from recognition of the strong link that exists between addiction, mental illness and trauma.

The correlation of addiction with trauma is especially established in women. For biological and social reasons both, women seeking treatment for substance use are more likely than men to present with co-occurring mental health disorders and trauma.

The more that is learned and confirmed collectively about what works in the field of trauma recovery, the more Intensive Outpatient Programs emerge as a strong model for resolving trauma, mental health symptoms, and addiction.

Why Intensive Outpatient Programs Empower Women Healing from Trauma

Intensive Outpatient Programs empower women healing from trauma in three notable ways.

Intensive Outpatient Programs educate women about addiction, empowering them with the most foundational healing tool, self-awareness. The addictive process, like all illnesses, flourishes in the dark shadows cast by misunderstanding. When women are trained to detect the subtler operations of addictive process, they are less likely to be taken over by it. Instead, they may learn to befriend the parts of them that have sought in the past to survive overwhelming pain, through substance-based ways to access needed experiences like bodily safety, relief from pain, relaxation, and love.

Secondly, IOPs empower women by educating them about traumatization, also fostering deeper self-recognition. Learning to see trauma triggers and how activation weaponizes the nervous system begins the liberation process. As women recover a measure self-mastery over nervous system states, it becomes possible to respond rather than react. Once again, befriending is key. In our IOP, women are supported through treatments that change how memories are accessed in the brain, as well as through somatic therapies that help women complete nervous system responses at the bodily level.

Once a woman recognizes how trauma and substances have worked together in a misguided attempt to protect her from feeling her woundedness, she is just a stone’s throw away from full self-forgiveness. One of the most difficult challenges for women with addiction, trauma and mental illness is shame. Shame is one of the most painful emotions for human beings to endure, and is linked to a deeply-held belief in personal unworthiness. Curing the burden of shame is the third profoundly empowering gift of participation in Villa Kali Ma’s trauma-informed IOP.

Flexibility and Intensive Support for Trauma Recovery

Intensive Outpatient Programs are offered as a best-of-both worlds type of solution – maximum treatment intensiveness (in terms of number of therapeutic hours per week) while still being flexible.

When it comes to addressing trauma, there are several advantages to healing it in a women-only Intensive Outpatient Setting like the one we provide at Villa Kali Ma.

Intensive Outpatient Programs are, by definition, concentrated enough to accomplish a large quotient of trauma resolution and memory reprocessing work – a lot more than is possible in the traditional, once-a-week outpatient model. IOPs provide a minimum of nine treatment hours a week, and may go up to twenty. The number of treatment hours per week usually depends on how much therapeutic contact is beneficial during in certain recovery phases.

Treatment intensiveness starts out high and steps down slowly, as a way to increase the proportion of free hours while a client is still being supported, and her progress and state are still monitored by staff. This gradual reduction in treatment time in tandem with an equivalent increase in freedom and flexibility allows women to make changes, then experiment with applying those changes in the world. New behaviors can be tested out, while still receiving a cushion of support. This model can make it easier to return to ordinary life at a pace which is least disruptive and which allows for integration time.

Integration is an important topic when it comes to trauma. Somatic Experiencing, a pioneering methodology in the world of trauma healing, emphasizes the concept of titration, or a drip-by-drip pace that is necessary in trauma integration work. Titration refers to the necessity to proceed slowly and by degrees, when reintegrating the body sensations (implicit memories), emotions, and disturbed perceptions that have been bound up with traumatic experiences. Little by little, we dissolve and dilute grains of painful experience into the larger ocean of body awareness.

Titration benefits from respite and, ideally, grounding, positively distracting contact with ordinary life. Intensive Outpatient Programs may provide an optimized balance of active trauma processing work against time spent outside of the treatment milieu, making integration easier. This has advantages when it comes to stability, continuity, and ease throughout the treatment experience.

Who Benefits Most from a Trauma-Focused IOP?

Generally, there is a strong likelihood of pre-existing trauma in women with addiction, implied by higher scores of addictedness and prevalence of addiction among the population of traumatized women.

Women who have a history of childhood sexual abuse, neglect, or physical violence, as well women who have survived sexual assault or intimate partner violence as adults, are strongly encouraged to receive support in a women-only, trauma-focused Intensive Outpatient Program like the one we offer at Villa Kali Ma.

Women with co-occurring mental health symptoms (depression, panic, and so on), behavioral health symptoms (eating disorders, self-harm, impulsivity, destructive relationships, etc), are also recommended to find support in an IOP that has a strong trauma treatment component. Targeted treatment resolving traumatic memories at the neurobiological level helps with these conditions, even when no official trauma diagnosis exists.

Definitions of trauma are no longer limited to the recognizable patterns of symptoms that appear in people who have survived combat, violent crimes and frightening accidents. Rather, there are classifications of trauma including, but not limited to: acute trauma, complex trauma, developmental trauma, relational (attachment) trauma, cultural/institutional trauma, family legacy/inherited trauma, and dissociative trauma, according to trauma specialist Dr. Frank Anderson in Transcending Trauma.

Given the advances being made in the field of trauma, it is important for women to know that in some corners of the psychology field, mental health disorders are being re-examined, as possible expressions of traits developed under extreme duress. What have been historically been thought of as “character flaws” – disordered aspects of personality – may actually be tendencies of attention and strategies of survival-oriented action, per trauma pioneer Dan Siegel.

According to researchers like Dr. Siegel, qualities we have come to identify with, such as our temperament, sensitivity, and reactivity, may be partly or wholly formed as adaptive responses to circumstances. The more chronic and enduring a set of conditions survived, the more likely it is the responses of the nervous system will have congealed into a semi-permanent set of behaviors, reactions, thought patterns, and emotional states.

In the past, such clusterings of extreme thought, emotion, and behavior have been interpreted as evidence of independently arising mental health disorders, with etiology unknown, often postulated as arising from fully genetic or biological origins. An origin in traumatization may explain why mental health disorders also respond positively to trauma interventions, resulting in reduction of symptoms and greater happiness and stability.

Begin Your Healing Journey in Our Women’s IOP at Villa Kali Ma

Wherever you currently are on your healing journey, you are warmly welcome within the halls of Villa Kali Ma’s programs for women recovering from addiction, mental illness, and trauma.

We are an integrative provider of holistic and clinical services in one, offering effective neurobiological trauma treatment as a standalone treatment track at a dedicated facility. We also offer trauma treatment integrated together with our addiction and mental health treatment tracks. Whether you need a course of inpatient treatment at our retreat-like Residential Rehabilitation facility, or are ready to participate in an intensive day program (Partial Hospitalization or Intensive Outpatient), we encourage you to consider Villa Kali Ma as a potential team of allies on your sacred journey to wellness.

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