Willowdene Farm is a therapeutic environment; the workplace, the residential areas and the leisure areas have all been designed and consructed to facilitate engagement. Central to successful rehabilitation is a willingness and determination on the part of the residents to rehabilitate themselves, and that requires full commitment to the therapeutic process.

Every resident receives formal one-on-one therapy as well as intervention and additional counselling on a more informal, as required, basis. Much of Willowdene Farm’s interview procedure is designed to assess each potential resident’s willingness to engage with their past in a therapeutic environment.

Therapy at Willowdene Farm is focused around the use of pyschotherapeutic techniques, and is never conducted in a group setting; in fact any ‘group therapy’, informal or otherwise, is actively discouraged during the programme.

The personal nature of therapy at Willowdene Farm allows residents to engage with their past life experiences and personal issues; drawing out and dealing with both learned processes and traumas in a safe, confidential situation.

Willowdene Farm’s full-time therapist is able to develop a strong working relationship with a resident, which facilitates the use of creative techniques to appropriately address situations uncovered throughout the therapeutic process. The relationship between resident and therapist becomes one of ‘partnership’, to identify the emotional blockages that contributed to that individual being locked into addiction.

Every resident will follow a similar pattern for the first four sessions, after which time a personalised programme will be followed. Each resident’s therapeutic programme will use techniques appropriate to his individual circumstances, and may draw on gestallt therapy, family therapy, and expressions of anger in various ways.

Together, the therapist and the resident engage with past issues through creative approaches designed to unlock issues and establish an environment in which each issue can be adequately confronted and dealt with.

Spanning up to 25 formal sessions and including any additional specific intervention or counselling, therapy at Willowdene Farm is a painful process that leads to healing. It is designed to bring about a deeper self-awareness, self-confidence and self-worth.

The ultimate goal of therapy at Willowdene Farm is freedom, and freedom does not come without a price. That price is commitment to the process, hard work throughout and a desire to change. Through the pain that is uncovered, and the release and healing that follows, residents are able to move through strongholds in their lives that had kept them trapped in a cycle of substance mis-use and embark upon a future filled with hope.