Canada Drug Rehab

by John Newport, Ph.D.

I like to define wellness as a dynamic process of taking charge of our health and striving to attain optimal health and well-being at all levels of our lives.  I firmly believe that a wellness lifestyle goes hand in hand with recovery from addiction, and would like to highlight 3 keys for integrating wellness into our recovery.

Nutritional Foundations:  Adopting a nutritious diet is a cornerstone of any sound addiction recovery program.  Don’t skip meals – especially breakfast – and avoid nutritional stressors, including excessive amounts of sugar, caffeine and highly processed foods.

Fitness and Recovery:  Engaging in a regular exercise program helps safeguard against relapse and yields many other benefits.  Among other things, exercise energizes us, raises our self esteem, and helps us let go of accumulated stresses, while dramatically improving our overall well-being.

Central Purpose:  We all need to focus on pursuing our unique purpose for being on this planet.  When we feel good about what we’re doing, we are highly motivated to take care of ourselves and give recovery top priority.

For more information on wellness and recovery please visit www.wellnessandrecovery.com.

Dr. John Newport is author of The Wellness-Recovery Connection: Charting Your Pathway to Optimal Health While Recovering from Alcoholism and Drug Addiction, and is developing a series of Wellness and Recovery Workbooks in collaboration with the Gorski/CENAPS® Corporation.  For further information visit www.relapse.org.

About a year ago we decided to add a new program to help alumni who were struggling with irrational thoughts and unmanageable feelings. These clients were vulnerable to relapse but didn’t necessarily need to go back to either the 30 day or 42 addiction programs we offer here at Sunshine Coast Health Center. The program needed to forego with the standard paperwork that typically accompanies a new admission. And, since the individual would still be abstinent or just at the start of a return to alcohol or drug use, overnight nursing monitoring would not be necessary since the returning client would not be experiencing withdrawal during the alcohol or drug detox process.

So we created a 7-day program for early relapsers. We thought of a name and we decided to call it S.L.I.P. which was short for (Short-term Lapse Intervention Program). We even planned to trademark the name - we thought it was that good.

Then came a visit from Terence T. Gorski last December that changed everything. While Terry understood that we liked the fact that SLIP was a convenient acronym and that “slip” was a common term for a short-term relapse, he let us know in no uncertain terms that the name was definitely a no-go.

Mr. Gorski is well known in addiction treatment circles for his work in relapse prevention. His company, CENAPS Corporation, was in the early stages of certifying Sunshine Coast Health Center as a Center of Excellence for relapse prevention. So, when Terry recommended a new name for the 7 day program, we listened.

Fundamentally, Terry explained, relapse is not an accident. Understanding relapse means understanding that relapse is a process. The relapse process starts long before an individual picks up the first drink or takes his first hit. The relapse process is also made up of many unique, progressive stages . CENAPS calls it the “Relapse Cycle”:

1. I commit to stabilize
2. I am cured
3. I stop growing
4. My old thinking returns
5. I have a stress problem
6. My old behaviour returns
7. I start isolating
8. My old people, places, and things return
9. pain and problems
10. addictive thinking
11. I get back into high risk situations and have a loss of control
12. relapse

This process can repeat itself as an individual re-commits to sobriety and goes through addiction treatment, thus the term “relapse cycle.”

Source: CENAPS Corporation

So, in the end, Sunshine Coast kept the program but changed the name from SLIP to the Rapid Stabilization Program. The new name doesn’t exactly roll off of the tongue but, more importantly, doesn’t mislead people into thinking that relapse is something that suddenly, unexpectedly happens like being struck by a bolt of lightning.

For more information on the Rapid Stabilization Program see the Relapse Prevention Programs section.

Daniel Jordan is the General Manager of Sunshine Coast Health Center and hopes that these postings will help  take away some of the mystery often associated with addiction.

At Sunshine Coast Health Center, we welcome back clients who have had a relapse with open arms. When I say ‘open arms’ I mean that we no longer worry about how many times they have relapsed. A few years back we did worry about how many times clients relapsed before we would refer them to another program. Why?

Perhaps it was because we were worried about the impact a multiple-relapsing client would have on clients who were in the program for the first time. For example, perhaps clients might doubt the program (’Gee, I guess this program’s no good if alumni keep coming back’) or doubt themselves (’If he can’t stay clean and sober, how can I?’).  

Also, it would hurt our ‘success rate’ to keep re-admitting a chronic relapser.

Another concern we had was that we would be unable to teach the client anything new if they kept coming back.

I still recall having a staff meeting where we tried to assign a number of relapses a client could have before we would no longer accept them back. Eventually, we came up with a number but it never became policy.

Fortunately, as we have grown as an alcohol and drug treatment center our policy on relapsing clients has also ‘grown up.’ It is now based more on the needs of the client and less on what’s best for Sunshine Coast. In the end, it became clear to us that if we:

1. claim to offer individualized treatment, then the relapsing client should always receive a fresh, effective treatment plan that builds upon previous treatment episodes;
2. believe that addiction is a chronic condition then there is no better way to drive this message home to clients than to have them meet program alumni who have relapsed;
3. say we are “Partners in Recovery” there should be no arbitrary deadline when support is no longer provided;
4. want to reduce our relapse rates, there is no better way than to work with chronic relapsers .

So, when it comes to the ‘r’ word, at Sunshine Coast we decided to pull our collective heads out of the sand and acknowledge that, yes, our clients do relapse. If they weren’t, there would be a line-up from Powell River to Vancouver of people from all corners of the globe waiting for their turn.

One final note: Sunshine Coast now has relapse prevention programs that have been implemented in consultation with Terence T. Gorski, Stephen Grinstead, and CENAPS Corporation. By October 2008, Sunshine Coast Health Center hopes to be the first Gorski-CENAPS Certified Relapse Prevention Center in Canada.

Daniel Jordan is the General Manager of Sunshine Coast Health Center. His posts in “Life in the Drug Rehab Business” are designed to lower the veil on the secretive world of addiction treatment. By being transparent, Daniel believes that Sunshine Coast can help lead the way to a lowering of the stigma attached addiction and, at the same time, raise the standard of today’s addiction treatment programs.