The ethos of treatment was the defining factor in that we unreservedly stopped treating people with addiction problems as anomalies and focused directly on the understanding that their particular substance use disorder as being a symptomatic response or an inability to deal with emotional turmoils that had many other driving factors.

This shift in perception had an incredible impact on the community admitted for treatment into the Cape Town centre. This method for dealing with addiction problems attracted patients not only from Cape Town but all of South Africa and from around the world.

The critical change in the formula led to unparalleled success within a very well-established and entrenched industry. Understanding most “treatment” in South Africa and across the world is based largely off the 12 step Minnesota treatment model.

Having spent a good portion of the last decade in 12 step meetings, I wholly understood the factors of that model that helped people with addiction problems and I also had a full view of what aspects of that model needed revision.

Trauma Treatment was sparked by discovering the work of a number of key individuals. Work by Dr Lance Dodes, Dr Gabor Mate, Roland Bal innumerate studies and research into ACES’s or Adverse Childhood Experiences were by far some of the greatest influences on what came to be called “the care model” at Recovery Direct.

I began working with a team of therapists psychological counsellors with a specialised interest area in establishing and fine-tuning this care model into a formalised clinical treatment practice, the likes of which have yet to be paralleled.

The result was a centre that places individualised therapeutic care into a highly intensive programme wherein the dynamic treatment process assigns two specialised therapists per patient and includes two unique individualised counselling sessions per day, per patient.

The dynamic between the counsellor team and the patient to establish a mutually progressive team support approach above and beyond the merits of multidisciplinary treatment which is included by default.

We have to acknowledge that this is an industry where the treatment norm may only include one individualised session per week per patient as is frequently the case in other centres. In contrast, this is a highly intensive and valuable approach to individualised recovery and care.

The individualised sessions are then further mediated behind the scenes in a daily formalised multidisciplinary process to best establish what is actually going on for each patient. From this interplay, we would be able to establish the best possible approaches that could be taken in sessions to ensure that on the conclusion of the 28-day treatment cycle, the most effective shifts and breakthroughs would have occurred.

This care model was so effective that it rapidly expanded into many truma-treatment based projects that not only dealt with the consumption of drugs and alcohol as the initial focus but all the many co-occurring disorders such as eating disorders and a broad range of psychiatric conditions such as depression, anxiety and chronic stress. From the outset I started working with Doug Kemp that had been the pioneer of the Relapse Prevention project.

This project seeks to present the key findings of all models of recovery from addictions and to establish what works for people and what does not work for people. His research and open book approach around traditional treatment and relapse preventions tactics applied evidence-based viewpoints on effectively treating addictions that added great depth to the list of possible avenues that may be applied in the process. Doug went on to found the online recovery program in Recovery Direct.

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