Treatment Curriculum For Florida’s Leading Virtual Intensive Outpatient

The goal with psychoeducation is to help people better understand substance use concerns. It is meant to help individuals develop insight into maladaptive behaviors and problematic ways of coping. Psychoeducation groups focus on educating patients by providing information and then opening up discussions based on that information. 

Psychoeducation leads into processing groups, where group facilitators introduce and teach on a topic and then open up the session for patients to process those learnings and discuss how any particular topic may impact them. While the process group can also naturally go in a different direction from the psychoeducation groups, the content from them can be a launching point, offering rich material for discussion. 

Throughout their time in the virtual IOP, patients have an opportunity to discuss many topics, all of which can help them on their healing journey. These topics include: 

• Addiction and the brain: This topic covers the science of addiction, including how substance abuse changes the brain. 
• Understanding the role of trauma: This topic covers the role trauma can have in why a person starts using substances and how the effects of trauma can reinforce the behaviors associated with addiction.  
• Seeking Safety – when substances control you: Substance abuse has a negative impact across multiple areas of a person’s life, often harming their physical, emotional, and spiritual health. Achieving recovery from addiction is difficult, but it can be doubly challenging when someone is also suffering from PTSD and the effects of trauma. The goal with this topic is to help patients see the ways substance abuse has been controlling them in order to increase their motivation for change.  
• Social support and healthy relationships: This topic covers how relationships with family, friends, and colleagues can be impacted by the stress ongoing substance abuse causes. 
• Coping with grief and loss: Many individuals who are actively using substances are experiencing feelings of grief and loss that can stem from things such as death, resentment, damaged relationships, and missed opportunities. This discussion allows the group to dive deeper into how these feelings may be impacting someone’s use of drugs or alcohol. 
• Dealing with public perception and expectations: This topic covers the unrealistic public expectations people who are struggling with addictions believe that they are facing, which often results in stress, frustration, and guilt when they feel like they are unable to meet those expectations. 
• Recognizing and coping with shame: In these discussions, patients talk through deep feelings of shame they may be feeling by those who violated their values when they were actively using substances. By recognizing the presence of this shame, people can learn how to release those feelings. 
• Introduction to community-based programs: This topic covers how a combined approach of using evidence-based psychotherapies along with medication and community-based support is the best way to achieve recovery. 
• Recognizing and coping with anger and resentment: Anger and resentment are pivotal emotions for most people who are working toward recovery from addictions. Anger, which often masks fear or shame, can be a significant cue or trigger for a person who has an addiction and can result in them using substances to suppress or numb that anger. Having discussions on this topic allows patients to dive into this concept, with the goal of helping to remove the threat it poses to their recovery. 

While the curriculum we use in the virtual IOP is highly structured, the clinicians who lead the groups work hard to make sure that each discussion and the topics being covered meet the needs of the individuals in the group.