The image you’re picturing right now is probably informed by pop culture, which means it’s either a dark and imposing institutional hallway or a sunny spa-like room with a pool. The reality is somewhere far less glamorous than either of those two places, and far less terrifying than you might expect.
Having the contours of a day worked out beforehand is crucial, and it’s the one thing you won’t get from typing residential treatment Mesa AZ into a search engine, which mostly returns photographs of buildings and lists of services. The following outlines the broad structural strokes, which may vary from program to program, but rarely from day to day, at least for the first month.
Morning Is Boring
Most places start some time between six and seven, with a breakfast, meds, and beds made. You have a group check-in where everyone reports how they slept and what they’re most afraid of, but this isn’t really a therapy session, it’s a comfort and a reassurance. It’s one of the few constants in a life where nothing much repeats itself, and as it turns out, that’s what most people miss when they leave.
Groups Are The Backbone
The majority of the treatment is organized around groups, either two or three of them per day, running between an hour and ninety minutes, with different focuses. Some are didactic, meant to teach you about physiology or the particular mechanisms of desire, and some are simply spaces for people to report what is happening in their lives, and how they might want to think about it.
Individual Counseling Is Not A Big Part Of Any Given Day
You’ll have one or two individual counseling hours a week, if that, which is less frequent than most people coming in tend to expect. You also have to have meetings with your case manager about whatever logistics you need to have sorted out, and you may see a doctor or psychiatrist if medications are a concern. It can add up to several hours a week, but it rarely amounts to more than that. The role of those individual hours is to guide and assist, rather than to do any of the work for you.
The Afternoon
The afternoon is often where you have the less formal meetings, exercise, arts and crafts, meditation, and assigned readings and writings, which makes them easy to devalue, at least for the first several weeks. It is actually one of the most important tools that residential treatment has, to demonstrate that there are periods of your day that can be filled without alcohol, which is arguably a more valuable lesson than any of the therapeutic content that you’re likely to receive.
Weekends And Family
The weekend is often less intense, as far as the schedule goes, but most programs make space for family treatment in one way or another, whether that means a particular day when families can visit or a dedicated family therapist, usually with some combination of both. Ask questions about any program that doesn’t have a dedicated family track, because the makeup of whatever household you return to has everything to do with why you’re there in the first place.
Evenings And Phones
Evenings are frequently devoted to either a house meeting or a community meeting for whichever twelve-step program the facility subscribes to, followed by free time and a set bedtime. How that free time operates is entirely up to the facility, which means it’s usually worth asking about ahead of time, because you may find that you aren’t allowed any phone use for the first two weeks or that you’re only permitted one supervised call every night.
What This Is Really For
All of this may sound extremely cloying when put on a page, and it’s worth noting that most people who are in treatment at some point during their first week refer to it as infantilizing. Alcoholism and addiction, especially long-standing ones, erode a person’s ability to participate in normal social structures up to and including the ability to have a coherent daily schedule. The job of residential treatment is to provide a scaffolding similar to what the person used to experience before their addiction took hold, only with the presence of alcohol removed. Most people stop thinking about the schedule as anything other than a helpful framework by week two.
Conclusion: Your Day In Residential Treatment Isn’t As Dramatic As You Expect
Residential treatment is an early morning, several hours of group therapy, a couple of hours of individual counseling a week, and lots of time spent convincing yourself that all of this is a worthwhile use of your time. What most people fear in this space is far more terrifying than anything they eventually encounter, which is why finding out what the day looks like when you’re not on a call with admissions is an incredibly valuable exercise. Any program that can’t give you a basic outline is worth taking caution with, and the less a program wants to tell you what its day looks like, the more you need to keep asking.
The owners and authors of Cinnamon Hollow are not doctors and this is in no way intended to be used as medical advice. We cannot be held responsible for your results. As with any product, service or supplement, use at your own risk. Always do your own research and consult with your personal physician before using.
