Your clinical program encompasses two phases to allow you a seamless transition from intensive treatment to partial treatment and into a life of excellence.
Allows you to focus entirely on treatment activities: attending twelve-step meetings, group and individual therapy, finding a sponsor, and starting work on the steps. You have the opportunity to put some time between you and chemicals, to develop relapse-prevention and coping skills, and to select and work with a sponsor through the early steps of recovery. You are given the opportunity to internalize your motivation for recovery and to establish behaviors that support sober living.
Once you demonstrate self-motivation and internalization of recovery-sustaining values and habits, you are transitioned into Phase 2. You participate in treatment in the mornings and may use the afternoons and weekends to experience some freedom outside treatment. Phase 2 is recognition of your progress, which requires fewer restrictions while offering security if issues that may affect your stability arise. You and your counselor will plan your participation in community service activities or part-time work, step work, and recovery-related social and recreational activities with your sponsor and others in the recovery community.
You will move from the treatment campus into a halfway house deemed appropriate by you and your treatment team. This setting is designed to assist those ready to “test” their newly established recovery skills in the real world and is driven by your commitment to your discharge plan. By this point, you are consistently demonstrating the desire to maintain your progress and commitment to recovery.
Clients who rigorously complete all aspects of our treatment program experience amazingly high rates of recovery. Clients participate in an honors ceremony upon completion of the two treatment phases and graduate Burning Tree’s curriculum after successfully maintaining sobriety for several months in the transition/aftercare program and upon team approval. Both honors ceremonies give our current clients the opportunity to observe success firsthand, providing encouragement to continue their own intensive and supportive treatment phases.
We track alumni from the moment they exit our programs, however, there exists controversy in our industry around how sobriety is measured. Many programs define this by abstinence from Alcohol and other drugs (AODs). While we recognize this baseline as obvious, our definition of sobriety transcends way beyond this. We define sobriety as continuous enlargement of one’s spiritual condition through sustained immersion and action in the spiritual 12 steps, 12 traditions and 12 concepts. Our job is to create healthy 12 step program members, who continue to pack into the stream of life. Therefore, we do not spend a lot of time with extensive surveys of our alumni, but we do keep in touch, we see them at the meetings we staff attend. They write us emails and letters, and pick up the phone to call us.
We know who the ones in recovery are. They are the ones who live a life of love, service and excellence, and who are steeped in gratitude for the new life they have. They are the ones who ask us if they may sponsor clients in treatment. They are the ones who speak well of Burning Tree, and who recommend it to others. They are the ones who never forget their first day in treatment, or that pivotal spot in treatment when the light came on. They are Burning Tree.