Women in Treatment: Reclaiming Her Legacy and Power is a workshop describing a treatment model addressing the unique treatment and recovery needs of women. Addicted women have, through the progression of their addiction, forsaken essential elements of their being in favor of their chosen substance. A woman's relationship to herself, her creativity, her family, her society, her genetic ancestry, and her source of spiritual meaning are colorful threads woven in her unique life tapestry. Many of these threads have unraveled, or severed, by the time she reaches treatment. Addiction is a pattern to be understood and treated in the context of the whole design. When treatment encourages and supports women to access, explore, and
re-kindle their inherent strength the addictive pattern gives way to hope, growth, and new direction. Shame in looking back is replaced with finding the lessons taught and uncovering the learning provided by the addictive years.

Participants in the workshop will be lead through a variety of experiences designed to demonstrate the power and attractiveness of an approach to recovery which highlights women reclaiming their legacy as well as their sobriety.

Women whose lives and fate lead them to addictive behaviors, and life styles to support those behaviors, live on the outskirts of their values and power. Women whose desire for recovery lead them to treatment, come in search of their authenticity and power as women.

An addicted woman's life-style and behaviors have, by necessity, compromised her values and self-esteem. There is high probability that by the time she reaches treatment her life experiences would provide a plethora of messages either from self and/or others, of shame, humiliation, scorn, criticism, and degradation. The nature of her psyche and soul dictates that she, at least minimally, defend herself from these insults or she long ago would have killed herself or traveled dangerously down into the depths of addiction in an attempt to drown the harsh contrasting light of sobriety from the eyes peering from her deeply wounded soul.

Women in all cultures are the container and preserver of life, warmth, nurturance, creativity, spirit and beauty. She is the carrier of our legacy for all that is good and pure and life sustaining. She is the original healer of wounds and restorer of souls. Her travels through the assorted histories of cultures has brought her, in many cases, far from these legacies which in recent decades she has been reclaiming. For the addicted woman, this legacy deepens her shame, intensifies her guilt, and leads her to bury her rage.

Addiction may be viewed as the blessing in disguise when treatment becomes the vehicle used to return her to her legacy. It becomes then our duty and responsibility as treatment providers to furnish safe passage and guide her return to what she is entitled to become again - the container and preserver of life, warmth, nurturance, spirit and beauty. It becomes our responsibility to model the features of this legacy and provide her with a means of reclaiming her truth and her power. She has already walked in copious shame and self-blame and evoking those feeling becomes a deterrent to accessing and building her strengths and teaching and instilling in her the characteristics of resiliency lost in earlier experiences with corrupt or abusive antagonists. The steps on the path to recovery, when lit by her legacy, help her achieve sobriety and reclaim a lost legacy.

Two of my favorites

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Much of addiction treatment for men focuses on teaching men how to access and share their feelings. Men's denial and silence of their feelings is a major contributor to addictive behaviors and relapse. Men have traditionally looked to women to fulfill the feeling function in their lives.

The more important the male image is to a man, the more he denies his feelings and is silent about them. To feel, he believes, is to be less like a man. This workshop will explore a paradigm which can assist men in broadening their self image to include all of who they are.

Men have traditionally looked to the female, to the woman in their lives, for their sense of completion, to connect with their ability to feel, and for their connection to their souls. Indeed, the women in their lives can be wonderful teachers; however, the master teacher resides within. The guardian of their souls is indeed a woman. She is the inner woman who lives within each man. She is the woman men have starved and neglected. She is the woman who cries for their embrace. She offers men heaven, and gives them hell when men neglect her. Like the outer woman who when scorned may get angry, the inner woman when scorned or neglected creates havoc in their lives and in their relationships and she may indeed create what men experience as discontent, moodiness, their long dark nights of the soul and increased potential for relapse. Man's work is to know her, accept her presence, learn from her, and learn to appreciate her.

When she feels their love and no longer their scorn or neglect, she offers men the gifts of the universe. Embracing the feminine elements within, men learn to love the outer woman. Embracing the woman within, men regain the ability to find value, meaning, and energy in life. Men find their ability to fully feel alive, to love and to engage meaningfully with others. Participants will be led on a journey to discover the lost feminine elements within their
psyche. The group will explore ways of reacquainting themselves with the lost feminine, and begin the process of building a new relationship with the woman within.

The man who broadens his self image to allow himself to not be silent about his feelings is more capable of expressing what Robert Ackerman terms behaviors that allow them to reach their potential as fully functioning human beings. The man is then more capable of:

identifying and expressing his feelings

letting go of being in control

living with a sense of power about the present and contentment about the past

loving and being loved

liking himself

attracting and using the support of healthy people

developing a sense of humor

being at ease socially

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A Wonderful Book

Richard I Jontry, Ph.D., MAC, CAC Diplomate
P. O. Box 129 • Chadds Ford, PA 19317
610.361.0108
Mailto: drj@drjontry.com



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