Addiction Therapy Offered at A Reprieve for Women

Our intent for all women who come to the Reprieve is to tailor a plan for healthy relations to self, spirituality, and others. Our program includes intensive personal work in the 12 Steps, community and life skills, and therapeutic support, which may include:

The 12 Steps are one of the most powerful recovery tools, providing peer support, principles, and individual action steps for those overcoming addiction. Guided by staff members who have worked through the steps themselves, our 12 Step Immersion program uses experiential, spiritual, and therapeutic methods to emphasize the impact and importance of each step on a deeply personal level.

The most personal type of treatment, individual therapy allows people to work one-on-one with a counselor or specialist, discussing matters they may not be ready to share with a group. Provided in a safe, caring, and confidential environment, these therapeutic sessions may include or combine different treatment styles, like psychoanalysis, CBT, DBT, and EMDR, depending on the person’s diagnosis and needs.

The disease of addiction thrives off isolation. Group therapy encourages people to discuss their problems and circumstances together under the supervision of a therapist. While creating a strong foundation of support and encouraging camaraderie, group therapy also helps individuals to see themselves from an outside perspective and others that share similar stories.

According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), 45% of people with addiction have a co-occurring mental health disorder. At A Reprieve for Women, we believe that only treating one condition will prevent residents from healing the other. Dual-diagnosis treatment approaches both conditions at the same time, applying a variety of therapies and medications if needed.

While you may not be able to change your circumstances, you can change how you react to and think about them. Cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, uses this change in cognition to help people understand how they view themselves. People with substance use disorders often do not recognize how negative or self-defeating thoughts affect their feelings and behavior. This focused treatment approach can help them learn to develop healthy habits, manage emotions that may be painful or triggering, and improve motivation and coping skills.

People with substance use disorders often get “stuck” in traumatic moments of their past, resurfacing negative emotions. Defined as combining opposite ideas, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) focuses on helping people learn to accept their life’s reality and circumstances while teaching skills to replace unhelpful behaviors that influence both. Adapted from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, DBT is effective for those who experience intense or have difficulty managing or regulating emotions. DBT teaches healthy techniques for handling emotions, as well as mindfulness, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness, improving self-awareness and quality of life.

Women suffering from drug or alcohol addiction can often trace their use to a traumatic event or circumstance, turning to substances to escape the negative feelings that the trauma presents. According to SAMSHA, substance abuse also predisposes people to higher rates of trauma and loss. Grief and trauma processing guides a person through the stages of grief or trauma, concentrating on getting in touch with related emotions, thoughts, and conclusions they have drawn about themself and the world. A therapist will help unravel these emotions, and the person’s adaptive behaviors, to help them learn awareness and healthy coping behaviors.

Emotional distress caused by disturbing life experiences is often a significant roadblock to maintaining sobriety. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, or EMDR, is a psychotherapy that enables people to heal from such events quickly. In addiction treatment, this therapy addresses traumatic events that are the root of one’s substance addiction. Studies show an 84% remission of PTSD diagnosis within three sessions of EMDR.