One of the features that distinguishes Villa Kali Ma’s unique, holistic approach to healing women’s addiction and mental illness is our recognition of the role of trauma.
Since the early days of opening our doors, we have placed emphasis on the value of providing women effective treatment options for addressing their traumatization, with and alongside any work we do to address substance use and mental health symptoms. In each of our programs, spanning the range of inpatient to outpatient, we include gold standard trauma treatment approaches like EMDR and Somatic Experiencing, as well as younger approaches which show strong promise in the ever-evolving trauma treatment field (such as Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy and Brainspotting).
According to several studies, women, even more so than men, are especially likely to be using substances as a way to manage the pain they carry from having survived traumatizing events. Of the traumatizing events women have survived, the majority of events can be categorized as sexually violating in nature. Sexual trauma, especially that incurred in childhood sexual abuse, is the most psychologically damaging form of trauma. Of those people affected by childhood sexual abuse and sexual violence, the vast majority are women.
Healing the deep wounds that trauma leaves behind in the body, brain and nervous system of women is key, when the goal is to change patterns of self-destructive behavior. Contrary to popular belief, women don’t use substances because women are irrational, overemotional, selfish, lazy, stupid, or immoral. (Just to rule out a few of the unflattering attributions that have been applied to women who use substances – scratch that, you know what? to women in general – over the centuries!)
Rather, women use substances because they are effective (in the short term, anyway) at reducing the overwhelming pain of unresolved traumatic experiences. Alternatively, substances help women behave in ways that support them to survive in society, in a context of carrying a secret burden of shattering psychological pain.
As the field of trauma treatment gains wider recognition and acceptance over the decades, the need for trauma healing centers of all manner continues to rise. It appears to be the case that for many women, trauma is best treated not in single, once-a-week outpatient sessions following the psychotherapy model, but rather in a more wrap-around approach. This is so that several different approaches to trauma treatment can be applied, working together in concert.
We recommend our Intensive Outpatient Program approach for addressing trauma to any survivors out there. A surprising amount of trauma-related memory content can be resolved in just a few sessions of modalities like EMDR. But complex and chronic traumatization of the type most likely to be driving women’s substance abuse and mental health problems is not a one-and-done affair. Rather, a blend of interventions to heal safety-perception distortions and dysregulated patterns of physiological arousal at neurobiological levels should be used in combination with attachment-informed individual psychotherapy, group work, and peer-based community support.
At Villa Kali Ma, we are very proud to be able to offer a state of the art array of the best of the best trauma therapies out there. We offer these to women who need help healing from what has harmed them most deeply, whether or not that harm has led them to use substances or receive a mental health diagnosis.
How Trauma-Focused Therapies in IOP Empower Women to Heal
The many trauma-focused therapies we offer in Villa Kali Ma’s Intensive Outpatient Program empower women to heal through a few pathways.
We facilitate the resolution of problematic memories through treatments like EMDR and brainspotting, which work with the brain to reprocess memories safely. EMDR and brainspotting are believed to operate by altering where and how traumatic memories are stored in the brain.
Additionally, we empower women to understand themselves, and what they thought were their personality flaws, through the lens of trauma. Prolonged nervous system states become traits, which in turn become identities, to paraphrase the words of trauma educator Linda Thai. Through understanding the real depth of impact trauma has had, we help traumatized women experience something they may never have felt before: self-compassion.
Perhaps most importantly, we show women how they can shift gears naturally when their trauma symptoms are triggered by events in the external world. Gaining a measure of agency over one’s own body states has huge implications, making the need for substances, and many other extreme behaviors, redundant.
This ability to shift states consciously comes in part through restoration of somatic awareness, which in turn leads to the ability to use the practices found in polyvagal theory to downshift or upshift using simple, body-based tools like breath, stretching, and vagus nerve stimulation.
Somatic awareness is a term which refers to the subjective, personal experience of the body from the inside out. One goal of somatic therapies and other trauma-informed approaches is to restore women’s capacity to feel their own embodiment, as a stream of ever-shifting sensations. Women can then use body signals to note the triggered state, decide whether or not they are really in danger now (or rather just experiencing a flashback, or body-memory), and take appropriate action to return to the safety zone.
Women with trauma need help learning to relate to sensations again, because the ordinary operations of the nervous system have been damaged through shock that was too overwhelming to integrate. Traumatized women have been imprinted and impaired in such a way that when something possibly threatening happens (something which resembles or is associated with circumstances in which they were hurt before in serious ways), they go into overdrive, sending the nervous system into high distress.
This trauma-related distress, the kind that happens when a person’s life is in danger, is recreated as though “it’s happening all over again”, even though the current circumstances may not actually perfectly map onto the original traumatizing event. This happens because of over-coupling, or over-associating perceptual cues that may not actually be relevant. An example of an over-coupled perceptual cue could be the scent someone was wearing while they hurt you. Years later, someone harmless wearing the same scent can evoke the same feeling of supreme danger. Tragically, many cues can be over-coupled through traumatization, linked forever together with memories of danger – including fun, play, emotional closeness and love itself.
It is the signature handiwork of trauma to go into high distress, stay there until the body is exhausted, and then drop all the way down into numbness, completely skipping over the part where life feels good, pleasant, and relaxed. The yo-yoing nervous system (amped too far up or numbed too far down) is a sign of trauma, reflecting survival strategies that didn’t get to come to completion. The yo-yo experience is part of why substances that help women calm down or re-energize are useful at first.
Once we get into trauma recovery, it is through the doorway of learning to process sensation again that we heal. Once we find ways to safely experience our nervous system’s beautiful capacity for sensation, without being sucked into high distress or dissociating, we have the keys to (our own) kingdom. Gradually, we restore the capacity to process and release what happened to us, out of the body once and for all.
When women realize that they have natural options inside their own physiology for relaxing and/or reenergizing themselves as needed, the primary problem, to which addiction was an attempted solution, is eliminated in large part.
Evidence-Based Approaches to Trauma and Addiction Recovery
Evidence-based approaches are methodologies – collections of interventions paired with a theory of how healing occurs – that have passed a certain measure of scientific verification of their efficacy. There are several evidence-based approaches that are generally recommended in the treatment of addiction, mental health disorders, and trauma.
Consulting the list of evidence-based therapies is one way to check whether a method in question has been endorsed by authorities in the wider psychology profession. The assembly of a list of approved evidence-based approaches was offered as a protective measure, to ensure that treatment approaches clients commonly receive are indeed valid, as evidenced by peer-reviewed, controlled scientific studies.
At Villa Kali Ma, we offer many approaches that are featured on the list of evidence-based approaches, including Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Internal Family Systems Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. The clinical core of all of our treatment programs is composed primarily of evidence-based approaches.
Integrating Mind, Body, and Spirit in Outpatient Care
Villa Kali Ma is committed to caring for each woman’s mind, body, and spirit, especially in an age where the latter two components may be regarded with great distrust.
It can be hard to find an outpatient setting that will honor the role of the body’s natural, organic intelligence and gift for self-repair, let alone spirit. We pride ourselves on providing the best of both worlds – East and West, body and mind, holistic and clinical.
If you’re looking for a place that is clinically grounded, providing the top treatment methods that have been scientifically validated, but which is also open to exploring the mind-body connection, we may be the right place for you. For those who appreciate the medical, scientific lens on healing, as well as other, non-dominant perspectives, you will find company in the halls of Villa Kali Ma.
Experience Holistic Healing at Villa Kali Ma’s Women’s IOP
The holistic mindset holds that while mental health symptoms may appear to be separate, unrelated phenomena, they almost never are. Addiction does not exist in a vacuum. Neither does depression, anxiety, boundary problems, or flashbacks. Each of these symptoms exists to address or respond to another condition, existing there alongside it. The inner ecosystem of the human being is delicately balanced, with strengths and challenges co-arising in ways reminiscent of the Buddhist idea of dependent origination.
Like weather systems tipped off by a flap of a butterfly’s wing across the globe, we and our symptoms exist in complex, stunning matrices of natural interdependence. In the context of that reality, what is healing? How can we approach problems, while remembering the totality at hand?
At Villa Kali Ma, in our Intensive Outpatient Program and all of our offerings for women recovering from addiction, mental illness, and trauma, we attempt to show how loving attention to the smallest details of our magnificence can give rise to a healing that transcends the seemingly individual nature of our lives.