ARISE® Comprehensive Care

ARISE® Comprehensive Care and ongoing family work are essential to recovery they help the family and Person of Concern (PoC) transition through the most vulnerable parts of the recovery process. Just because the PoC agrees to enter treatment doesn’t guarantee that s/he will agree to stay once detoxed. The ongoing family work can be instrumental in keeping the PoC engaged in treatment. The return back to “normal” life following treatment discharge can be extremely challenging not only for the PoC but also for the family, as everyone is learning to maintain the forward momentum while coping with everyday challenges and facing the persistent temptation to fall back into old routines and habits.

ARISE® Comprehensive Care provides the PoC and his/her family with the necessary ongoing support and education to approach living in recovery. It is during these months, after the immediate crisis has been handled and the PoC’s brain begins to gradually regain normal functioning, that the CAI can begin doing more sophisticated family work and psychoeducation that would have fallen on deaf ears earlier in the process. Initially, this work will focus on monitoring, relapse prevention, crisis and/or relapse planning, discharge planning, resolving relational issues, and family psychoeducation (including the neurobiology of addiction). This is the time for individual and/or family therapy work to begin, if needed. If the CAI is a licensed clinician qualified to provide these services, s/he may do so. If not, s/he will provide appropriate referrals.

Learning strategies for health and wellness

Once the family is well on their way into early recovery, the CAI begins addressing more permanent strategies for health and wellness. This includes helping the PoC and the entire family in addressing their complete bio-psycho-social-cultural-spiritual spectrum of health. Focus may be on communication skills, managing normal life cycle transitions, stress management techniques, healthy diet and eating patterns, rebuilding social lives and repairing damaged relationships, finding sober support networks, resolving unresolved grief and family issues, re-entering the workplace, educational retraining, reestablishing spiritual practices, learning how to play and celebrate together as a family, etc.

Length of Care

Typically, the ARISE® Comprehensive Care services extend over a 6-12 month period following the PoC beginning treatment. Comprehensive Care should continue until the individual and family are firmly on the road to long-term recovery. The Comprehensive Care work may be extended as long as needed, particularly if there are repeated relapses, job difficulties, a major life transition such as divorce or untimely death of a key family member.

IMPORTANT NOTE: ARISE® Comprehensive Care work can commence with the Intervention Network even if the PoC did not enter treatment. The family will still benefit from the family work and as with any system, changes to the whole prevent “more of the same” for any individual within it.

ARISE® Comprehensive Care sessions typically start out as one-hour weekly meetings of the whole Intervention Network for the first 4-6 weeks. Some treatment programs will not allow the PoC to have contact with the family during the initial weeks of treatment; the Intervention Network commences and the PoC joins when permitted. Meetings decrease in frequency as needed for the following months, typically twice a month for 2-3 months and then to once a month for the last month or two. You may find the need to increase the number of meetings during particularly vulnerable times or during an emergency. Use your discretion (and that of the Intervention Network), when scheduling the next meeting. As always, Network members can call emergency meetings at any time necessary.

In our experience, families who participate in ARISE® Comprehensive Care meetings have great success in helping maintain the loved one’s success into long-term recovery. They also find that their family relationships have improved and that there is far less risk of continuing the disease of addiction into future generations.