IOP tracks
Substance use treatment, without leaving your life.
The substance use track of our intensive outpatient program — alcohol and drug recovery, twelve hours a week across four evenings, from any island, while you keep working and stay with your family.
Who the substance use track is for.
This track is its own group, because early recovery has its own room. It is built for people whose use has outgrown willpower and weekly support, and who need real structure without disappearing from their life for a month.
- Drinking or using has kept growing through months of genuine effort to stop
- You have quit before and want the part that keeps it from coming back
- You are stepping down from detox or residential treatment and need structure to hold the ground
- Weekly support helps and Thursday nights are still winning
What it involves
What recovery work looks like here.
Craving management, taught as a skill
Cravings are predictable enough to plan for. Skills groups work the specifics — what precedes yours, what interrupts it, what to do in the twenty minutes that decide the night. This is practice, not willpower coaching.
Relapse prevention that names your actual risks
A relapse plan built from someone else’s life does not hold. Yours gets built around your triggers, your schedule, your people, and the particular Friday that has gone wrong before.
The part nobody sells: the rest of the week
Recovery is mostly ordinary hours. Group works what to do with a free evening, how to be at a family party, how to answer the question about why you are not drinking — the unglamorous logistics that decide whether month four happens.
Where medication and medical care fit.
Medication is a legitimate part of treatment for alcohol and opioid use disorder, and it is a question worth asking rather than assuming. It gets answered in your psychiatric evaluation, where a prescriber reviews your history and tells you plainly what they can and cannot prescribe in your situation — and refers you to the right care if what you need sits outside this program.
One thing needs saying directly: withdrawal from alcohol or benzodiazepines can be medically dangerous, and an outpatient program is not a detox. If you are physically dependent, the honest sequence is medical detox first and this program after. Say so at intake and we will help you find the first step rather than starting you in the wrong place.
Questions
Straight answers.
Do I have to be abstinent before I can start?
You have to be honest, and you have to be medically safe to be treated as an outpatient. Arriving still using is a common starting point, not a disqualification. Arriving in physical withdrawal from alcohol or benzodiazepines is a medical situation that needs detox first, which is exactly what the assessment screens for.
What happens if I use during the program?
You tell your clinician and it becomes clinical information, because that is what it is. A lapse is treated as data about the plan — what it missed, what needs to change — rather than a rule violation. What does not work is hiding it, since the group and the plan can only work with what is true.
Is this a twelve-step program?
No. Our curriculum is clinical and evidence-based, and it works alongside twelve-step meetings for people who use them. If a fellowship is part of your recovery, keep it. If it is not, this program does not require one.
Is what I say in group private?
Confidentiality is a ground rule of group and a professional obligation of your clinicians, and substance use records carry additional protections beyond ordinary clinical records. What is not sealed is the room itself — other members hear what you say, which is the price and the point of group treatment.
Call before you have a plan.
You do not need to have decided anything, or to have stopped, to make the first call. You need to say what is happening.