At Castle Craig, patients have access to several specialised therapy groups which aim to directly tackle specific problems that must dealt with in order for recovery from alcohol or drug addiction to be successful. Types of specialist therapy available at Castle Craig include:

Women Only Therapy

At Castle Craig, we understand that it can sometimes be difficult for a woman to talk about the emotional pain and traumatic experiences she has gone through in a group that includes men. Women’s Group provides a safe and comfortable setting for women in recovery to open up and share stories and feelings that they may otherwise keep hidden.

There are a number of benefits to a women-only therapy group, including:

  • Non-confrontational, non-judgmental and compassionate environment for women to share their struggles, fears and anxieties
  • Sharing within a women’s only group creates a safe community
  • Members can develop a shared sense of empathy and community, find common issues and provide mutual support that can be transferred to a safe network once people leave rehabilitation and are back to their home environment
  • All-female groups provide a more supportive setting for treating co-occurring disorders that women commonly struggle with, such as trauma or eating disorders.
  • Women’s group therapy helps address specific social and emotional problems that are usually associated with substance use among women, such as:
    • Stigma
    • Negative portrayal of women in society and the media
    • Stereotypes about beauty and women’s sexuality
    • Motherhood
    • Social and familial pressure
    • Marital problems
    • Intimate partner abuse or codependency
    • Other interpersonal reasons that could contribute to addiction

Family Therapy

Our team knows the importance of family involvement of family members in alcohol, drug and behavioural addiction treatment.  The strength of friends, family and colleagues’ is vital to successful recovery, but the same network can simultaneously feel traumatized by the addiction and need support themselves. The more the family knows about the addiction and know how to offer the right support, the better the outcome for the patient.

Friends talking

Our family therapy programme helps patients and families to connect and share their feelings of shame, hurt and anger. The goals of family therapy include:

  • It helps them to communicate again
  • rebuild their damaged relationships
  • Educate family about the disease of addiction
  • Help them to understand the behaviours of the addict
  • Guide the family to cope with the problem
  • Support and assist family members in rebuilding their lives

We involve the family all the way through treatment, often before admission. We provide specilised therapy  for the patient and their family/spouse We invite family members to visit Castle Craig on Sundays when we hold a family program with educational lectures about alcohol & drugs, family therapy sessions and self-help meetings such as Al Anon and Families Anonymous.

Bereavement Therapy

Grief is a powerful and complex emotion accompanied by a deep, lasting pain. Going through a natural grieving process which eventually provides acceptance and closure is critical. Using alcohol or drugs to numb the pain may prevent ourselves the ability to grieve properly.

Grief can occur not just after the death of a loved one but also after divorce, separation, miscarriage, stroke, disability, moving home, or redundancy. All of these life events can be a trigger for alcohol or drug addiction, or exacerbate an addiction that is already formed.

Some of our patients arrive with unresolved grief (or bereavement) that contributed towards or exacerbated their addiction. . We teach patients about the five stages of grief so they can understand and manage these feelings. The 5 stages of grief are:

  • Denial
  • Anger
  • Bargaining
  • Depression
  • Acceptance

Castle Craig holds a grief therapy group so that patients can share their feelings. Grief can cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and we treat this in our trauma therapy group, in individual therapy sessions and by using cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and eye-movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR).

Experiences of All-Female Therapy

Three female residents in Castle Craig’s Serenity House talk about how women’s therapy has helped them open up more in therapy sessions.

Page last reviewed and medically fact-checked | September 17, 2021