Gatehouse
Therapeutic Health Services
...
coming alongside with hope and healing
Gatehouse
Therapeutic Health Services (GTHS) operates from a separate
but adjacent building to the Gatehouse residence. We firmly
believe that the healing that is available in the process
of living in a recovery community is as critical as the healing
that is available through professional therapy. Because of
this, one of the primary goals is seen as coming alongside
the Gatehouse community as a whole and helping to maintain
its health and sobriety.
The
clinical director, Dr. Donald Durham, serves as the primary
liaison between the Gatehouse residential community and the
professional services of GTHS. In this role he assists the
staff of Gatehouse in handling matters such as clinical crises
or resistance to recovery. Additionally, he provides directions
and rationale for necessary medical interventions, including
both lab testing and medications, so that the Gatehouse staff
can stay informed at all times as to the medical needs of
the residents as well as the clinical needs.
Dr.
Don also provides the clinical evaluation and needed psychological
testing on every Gatehouse admission. He is thus connected
with every resident, even when not providing the ongoing direct
clinical services, so that he is in a place to be able to
direct the treatment of every resident. He also initiates
and maintains professional relationships with other ancillary
clinicians who may be needed in the care of each resident,
such as a dietitian, physician, psychiatrist, or specialty
assessment clinician.
We
see the goals of Gatehouse as assisting the resident in learning
a strong work ethic, age-appropriate social skills, effective
life skills, and an effective, integrated, internalized experience
of a 12-Step lifestyle. The goals of GTHS with each resident
are complementary:
-
Unfreezing
feelings. Either from trauma that has been experiences,
and/or from the process of addiction itself, most residents
say words about feelings, with very little if any actual
expression of emotion! This is because if they once begin
to feel feelings, they are afraid of what all they will
have to feel; better to feel nothing than to feel so much
pain. And yet, in the words of John Bradshaw, "you
can't heal what you can't feel." So one of our first
tasks is to create a therapy environment that is safe enough
for the person to begin to experience a full range of feelings.
-
Family
of origin work. The families is which we grow up help form
the templates upon which the rest of our lives are built.
To the extent that those templates are faulty or incomplete,
the ways in which we build our relationship skills, coping
skills, and problem-solving skills will be skewed. Our task
in therapy is to examine the critical aspects of a resident's
developmental years, evaluate the impact of wounding patterns
and events, and expose the resulting dysfunctional patterns
of living that have contributed to the substance addiction.
-
Self-esteem
work. An addict has been defined as an ego-maniac with an
inferiority complex! By definition, an addict has a low
sense of self-worth, but typically covers this up with an
artificial arrogance. The humility that is required to make
recovery work is an accurate self-assessment; in therapy
we want to expose the reality-distorting arrogance that
is a part of the resident's defense system, while building
a true foundation for self-esteem and a healthy sense of
caring for oneself.
-
Day-to-day
issues of life in community. Most addicts have been very
"busy" with lots of "party buddies,"
but few have experienced true intimacy. As residents living
together begin to "get real," dropping their defenses
and thawing out their feelings, conflicts, transference,
and other relational dynamics will emerge! This is a necessary,
but painful, part of the healing process; until a person
learns how to handle relational conflict and relationship
intimacy, he or she is highly vulnerable to relapse into
addictive processes.
