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Recovery Doesn’t have to be complicated. Keep it simple.
We have developed a unique, three step treatment approach to guide our staff to meet the needs of our clients, and give our clients a memorable way to think about their recovery.
The first thing that anyone with a substance misuse problem must do, is stop taking the substance (s). Even moderate drug or alcohol use can significantly affect cognitive function, impair memory, and stifle emotional awareness. For most of the people accessing our service, they will have been taking large quantities of alcohol and or/ substances, the cumulative effect of which can be enormously debilitating.
One of the reasons that addiction is such a vicious cycle, is that when people wake up the morning after a heavy drinking session, or a night using cocaine, they feel groggy, anxious, paranoid, vacant…the list of negative adjectives to describe that feeling is endless (N.B There is a group workshop in the making right there!) This negative feeling stunts our motivation to do anything, so we don’t achieve even the most simple tasks. More often than not, that feeling and the thoughts that go with it, often lead to using or drinking again, to mask them.
So, in order for any psychological therapy to work, the person receiving it must be free from substances, not only so that they can verbalise their true thoughts and feelings, but to also reflect without cognitive disturbance, remember the session and what they learned from it. Being substance free enhances motivation to change which leads to more willingness to participate and gain from the experiences of being in rehab. Becoming more physically well, improves our mental health and emotional wellbeing, which gives us the strength and hope that we can achieve our goals.
The first part of our treatment programme is Abstain. Most of our clients are physically dependent on a substance, so we provide this first part of the programme via our Medical Detox Programme. For most people, we envisage them being in the ‘Abstain’ part of the programme for 7 days, to ensure that they are fully detoxed, and both physically and emotionally ready to enter Phase 2 of the treatment process.
The second stage of the treatment programme is ‘Believe’
For many of our clients, one of the biggest barriers to overcoming their addiction is a simple lack of belief. A lack of belief that…..
Without BELIEVING that recovery from addictive behaviours is possible, we would ask our clients…..what are you doing here? If you don’t BELIEVE you can stay clean and sober, why are you in a rehab, getting clean and sober!
To achieve absolutely anything in life, you must have a positive mindset and an underlying belief that you can do that thing. If you are questioning whether you believe that you can do something, then the response is simple…….why not? To ask someone to believe that they can be a Formula 1 driver, is very unrealistic. But, to climb mount Everest? Is it possible? Of course it is! To run a marathon? Learn to play a musical instrument? Why not?
All of these goals are extremely challenging, but for most, entirely achieve-able. What is required to achieve such goals, is a BELIEF that you can do it, meticulous planning and pure hard work. It is our belief that successfully overcoming an addiction in the long term, is as big (if not bigger) an achievement as climbing mount Everest! And to start the climb, we must have the motivation and belief that we can get to the top of the mountain. Equally, this metaphor helps us to remind our clients that overcoming an addiction is SERIOUS business and must be treated with the greatest respect. You don’t get to climb mount Everest, with half-arsed efforts. It requires meticulous planning and daily action in many areas of your life, to ensure that you are in peak physical condition to tackle the task. Which leads us into stage 3 of the programme……
For the many people that fail in their attempts to get clean and sober, they can often pinpoint where it went wrong. They stopped doing the work. They stopped talking to people. Stopped attending recovery meetings.
Achieving long-term recovery requires far more than just a willingness to do it. A strong determination and willingness to stop is just the start. Most of our clients have tried to stop drinking and using, but can’t stay stopped. The reason for this, is that for most people with a severe addiction problem, there are underlying reasons as to why they are behaving in the way they do. Often related to past trauma, relating to grief and loss, childhood abuse and troublesome relationships to name just a few, our clients thoughts, feelings and actions are driven, sometimes consciously and oftentimes subconsciously by our responses to past experiences. In order for someone to ‘move-on’ from these events, and move forward in their lives, they need to undergo intensive and often long-term therapeutic counselling.
Furthermore, our clients need to implement practical skills, tools and strategies to give them the best possible chance of achieving their goal.
During the Change element of our treatment programme we aim to empower our clients by giving them the best possible chances of recovery. We employ a team of qualified counsellors who, through group and 1-2-1 counselling sessions, help our clients to explore their past and learn how to ‘feel’ again, without blocking out these feelings by taking drugs and alcohol. We can’t change our past, but we can learn to come to a place of acceptance – through our intensive rehab programme we help our clients to achieve emotional freedom, breaking free from the entrenched feelings of guilt, shame and remorse. We do this through both talking therapies, and creative work such as Art Therapy, Music Therapy as well as modalities such as EMDR and Hypnotherapy.
We also teach our clients practical, everyday tools and techniques that they can implement in their lives on a daily basis. We aim to guide our clients to look after mind, body and spirit and for this the list of tools is almost endless. Daily meditation, breathing exercises, journalling, reading, exercise, and good nutrition sit alongside recovery specific activities such as going to self-help meetings, online recovery forums / apps, and listening to recovery based podcasts.
Our clients enter the Change part of our programme as soon as they walk through our doors, as we encourage people, even whilst physically suffering and going through a detox, to engage in as much of the recovery programme as possible. By just being in rehab, talking to our counsellors and talking to the other residents of the service, from a very early stage our clients start to pick up small ‘nuggets’ of wisdom, inspiration and advice that we hope will give them the confidence that RECOVERY IS POSSIBLE.
If we were to look at addiction in simple terms, it could be rightly argued that people with an addiction are people who have simply developed ‘bad habits’. Someone with a stressful job, starts to have a drink when they get home from work to ‘de-stress’. That one drink turns into a bottle of wine a night. Then, rather than waiting to get home to have that drink, that person has a quick drink down the pub before jumping on the train, and the one drink at home turns into a bottle of wine. Once we get into these habits, they can become very difficult to break.
It is without doubt that like anything in life, the crucial step to maintaining change is consistency. For our clients to achieve long term recovery, they need to continue with the daily things that we do in rehab (meditation, journaling, talking to people) and turn these, and other actions, into new habits. We teach our clients that rehab is the easy bit. The real work starts the moment you leave rehab and live life, without the structure and support that we provide in our rehab setting.
In order to do this, we encourage our clients to build and maintain as many healthy habits as possible. Small, daily actions to improve our physical, emotional and spiritual state.
Though the bulk of the Sustain element of the treatment programme is very much down to our clients to do themselves, we will play our part by going the extra mile to help provide accountability to our people. We do this by providing a weekly aftercare group session, both in person and online. We will also make contact with every one of our clients, every day for the first three months after a client has completed their treatment with us. We believe this special touch will keep our clients connected, make them feel cared for and give them someone to talk to. We want to hear about all of the amazing progress our clients are making, and support them through any challenges that they may face in daily life.
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81 Torrington Park
N12 9PN
Alcohol Detox
Opiate Detox
Benzo Detox
Residential Rehabilitation
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