Oasis Recovery Centre

29/10/2024

There is an old African Proverb by Burkina Faso that says:“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”

We have often heard that where there is union, there is strength, and at Oasis we incorporate this as an essential value and key to the treatment our client’s receive, that in TEAM WORK, there is strength. Each team member plays a vital role, and we as a team are interdependent on each other in achieving the greatest of tasks… walking together with each other, and with our clients in their own passage of healing. The work that we do, is different from other work, it requires intensive collaboration with the entire multidisciplinary team, as well as our professional colleagues referring their clients into the trusted hands of Oasis. In essence we walk together with our clients, their families, their professionals working with them to support and promote health, wellness and healing. This wraparound process aims to provide healing experiences and hope, for each of our clients, rather than just treat the problem. This collaborative approach speaks to individualised plans of care relevant for each specific clients individual needs and encouraging and empowering those brave enough to take a step towards a path of recovery.

Thank you Oasis Recovery Centre South Africa team for building a place of safety, integrity, compassion and individualised care. We couldn’t do it without you!

27/10/2024

ENCOUNTER THERAPY: ABC OF GROUP THERAPY
RELATIONAL RESTORATION IN CONNECTION

The knowledge one walks away with after attending group therapy, about the self, gives clarity and understanding, which is essential for development and growth. It expands one’s cognition, which is crucial in our judgment, problem-solving, higher-level thinking, planning, imagination, perception, and more.

In fact, “the main way in which cognitions and emotions are linked is through appraisals. When anything happens, we evaluate what it means for us, its significance to us – this is an emotional appraisal, or an appraisal that leads to an emotional reaction. These appraisals are believed to help us in making fine distinctions about our emotional experiences or in determining the extent or the intensity of the emotion”(Ogelk, 2017).

A. Group Therapy is an interactive process. There is no right or wrong. Express your needs, ask questions and discuss what you want to share during each session and to get out of each session. The therapist’s role is one of facilitator and guide, and we ask that you learn to trust us, through consistent behaviour, care and compassionate confrontation, because sometimes, it can feel uncomfortable.

B. Group Therapy requires respect for self and other. When in the group sessions, remember to be open, transparent and respectful. What you share is as important as the next, and can add value to each person engaged in the group process. Trust is important, vital, and you need to be the most unfiltered version of you. Relationships are vital. Building a space of safety requires compassion, humility, kindness and gratitude. When there is conflict within the group, this is usually due to the focus remaining on other, rather than identifying our own behaviours that contribute to the lack of safety. Nothing that celebrates the humiliation of pain of another person builds lasting connection.

C. Reflect before the group session and after the session. Carefully, meaningfully and deeply think and connect with yourself before the group and after the group session. This allows for growth, and builds capacity to connect with self and other.

18/08/2023

The day-to-day struggles that parents of kids with mental health conditions must navigate have led to their own crisis: The stress can take a physical toll that disrupts parents’ ability to provide…

28/07/2023

Rules of life
Having always been someone who could see the gain in pushing boundaries, I have always understood the harsh reality rules in treatment can feel like.

However, when we look at the rules, help our clients understand them, they are only there to protect. Protect our clients from engaging in unhealthy patterns, behaviours that may create an unsafe community.

The safety of the community is paramount for us at Oasis. It is where our community are fighting for honest, authentic and raw connection with themselves and others, that we find the strength of recovery lies.

Over and over again, we are faced with clients who overstep rules, the staff are for a while trapped in a box of a negative perception of authority. However; they step up for you. They step up to help you from falling into the same life trap that you have been sitting in for a long time; what brought you broken to our doors.

Dishonesty, disconnection, toxic bonds and a life time of being unknown due to the secrets that protect your instinct to fight, the instinct to keep your illness alive, and the instinct to do life alone as this is all you have ever known.

Life is full of rules, speed limits or tests you need to pass. They may feel at the time unrealistic, too rigid, too strict, and yet how many lives do speed limits save. When sitting in front of your doctor, how many tests have they passed in order to save lives. At times, it may feel like jumping through hoops or going against your very essence, but rules are set to keep us safe.

To keep you safe.
Addiction survives in an environment where there are no rules, no one intervening and saying stop this will hurt you, and no one honest enough to hold a mirror up and help you see who you are beneath the symptoms of addiction.
To step into recovery, we need to follow the rules. We need to hold onto them, because they have only been given to keep you safe.

Why is it that we still walk into the darkness, or being unseen. To walk through life feeling broken, but no one knowing, head held high or low in order to not be seen, and to quieten our voices by numbing and avoiding our pain, our trauma, our truth.

To let go, is scary.
To let in people who will not hurt you, is scary.
To listen, is scary.
To trust, is scary.

But staying alone, is life threatening.
To all those who struggle to let people guide them, let people hold them, let people stand in the way of your next fall. It’s okay, and it was your only way of staying safe.

Today.
You can be safe. You can be seen. You can be heard. Step into the fear, as the life you have been living is only destroying your ability to really live, love and connect with self and others.
Step into the fear

26/07/2023

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kk8NlLPbKeE&feature=youtu.be

25/07/2023

UNTOLD STORIES
Working with "the child"

Schema therapy has helped our clincians understand addiction, eating disorders, mental health and behavioural problems in a way that creates healing rather than simply addressing the symptom.

Empowering our clients to understand their own patterns of self-defeating behaviours, and the continuous hurt this brings into their lives, and those close to them - enables them to stop, observe and see that change is possible, perhaps even inevitable. Our clients able to see for the first time in their lives, through compassionate confrontation and safety, that what they have been doing, no longer works.

We look at the origins, because it is imperative to see and hear and validate the survivor. Whether this has been through fight, attach, cry for help, flight, collapse, please and placation, freeze, overcompensation or complete shut down, we need to acknowledge the start, in order to help change the end.

Underneath addiction, is trauma, and when we validate our clients experiences - we begin the healing and change.

23/07/2023

Richard Turrell BSc (Hons), AP-APM
Advanced BLAST practitioner (Accelerated EMDR)
Specialist Addictions Therapist, Counsellor, Psychotherapist-in-training
+44(0)7581356196

I have no hesitation in recommending and referring into Oasis. I am always pleased when I can get my clients a bed there. They strike the balance between a robust addiction program with all the necessary components and a psychologically informed approach which addresses as far as is possible and appropriate at the front end of the recovery process underlying and perpetuating issues. Their team are good with communication, they work holistically and have an excellent 360 view of what is necessary for sustained recovery. I think they are one of the leading centres internationally currently for addiction treatment and are my first choice for inpatient care.

04/07/2023

A song that represents Oasis, and our passion as a team.

To be able to leave a light of hope, for those who have none, who have no place to go, no place where they will be seen, heard and understood. This is our mission, to always leave a light on and be a refuge to those in need.

🎵 Follow the official 7clouds playlist on Spotify : https://lnkfi.re/7cloudsSpotify​🎧 Tom Walker - Leave a Light On (Lyrics)⏬ Download / Stream: https://sp...

28/06/2023

Disconnection

There are many reasons people disconnect, but the ultimate reason is the fact that the feelings in that moment are completely overwhelming. There is no reason nor rational in that moment, but a fear of facing the truth, the reality, the now.

When people use, one of the biggest reasons that people seek help is due to their loved ones, the people close to them, saying see me again. See the person sitting in front of you; a wife loving you crying, a father picking you up again and again because you need them, a friend being disappointed by constant missed opportunities and invitations. Jobs lost. Friendships missed, and relationships divided. Disconnection through different coping modes, different ways of surviving our pain, our fear, our hurt, our anger, our vulnerability.

If we sit with it, we find clarity and a way through it. Disconnecting is heart breaking for the one in despair and those around them.

Connection is key, feeling safe is key, healing is key.

There is hope.

Your recovery must come first so that everything you love in your life doesn’t come last.

11/05/2023

Intimacy
When we see the word, most often than not people think about in*******se or romantic relationships. Those are two of the dictionary definitions. However the third stands strong - a peaceful, cosy, quiet place. To find this, we need to feel safe.
Safe enough to be raw and vulnerable in a relationship or friendship.
Safe enough to create the space where two people are able to be connected in a beautiful way.
Safe enough, to feel peace.

Over the years addiction treatment has moved from a place of shame, blame, and punishment to understanding, healing and restoration. It has moved into trauma focused treatment, trauma being defined as anything less than nurturing. Because nurture at its core is what each person who enters this world needs in order to survive. A child is born and its only survival mechanism is to cry, left fragile, unable to move, unable to soothe and unable to care for self. And those who enter our gates, have learnt only survival mechanisms, unable to soothe and unable to care for self.

Healing comes in different ways, there are many different treatment modalities but at its core, healing from addiction comes through connection, with self and others. Intimacy, rawness, vulnerability is our healing through safe spaces, safe faces and safe places. It is in this we find our peace.

To all those suffering today, not knowing how to stop, not understanding why you continue to self destruct… pause, breathe, and take one step towards recovery, because that step sometimes is the only one that counts.

05/05/2023

04/05/2023

When all is said and done
When the substances are no longer there
When the hard conversations have past
How do we heal
The years of hurt, the chaos,
The mean words spoken
And all the promises broken

They say pain heals over time
But the response we have
When we look around
The trauma inside seems to be bound
To our insides, in our body that no one sees

It’s stays a while
It lingers
It takes front of stage
When days seem longer

But then you stop
And then you breathe
And see in front of you the calmest sea
With hues of blue, and waves so clear
You know that the pain is gone
And will never reappear
Because it’s up to us
To take our place
In this new world
In this new you.