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.