Today we discuss the reasons why we continue to implement gender specific care and the benefits and hardships we face while doing so.
Talking Points A discussion on societal norms in our culture and how they affect care in our industry. Going into the effective reasons why we continue to implement gender specific care despite the obstacles we currently face. The current hardships and obstacles with gender specific care in our culture. The detrimental reasons why we don’t use non-gender specific care. Quotes ““Trauma is typically experienced through a gendered lens. I think that a lot of the traumas we see are actually gender specific or gender impacted.” – Clinton Nicholson, MA, LPC, LAC, Chief Operating Officer Episode Transcripts Episode 44 Transcripts[Music]
hello everybody
welcome to
another special episode of finding peeks
i am brandon burns chief executive
officer of peaks recovery centers chief
clinical officer
guru
clinical officiant
part-time uber
driver clint nicholson chief operating
officer
part-time lyft driver
we actually share yeah we share a car
yeah
they fight all the time about it
he steals his uber sticker he steals his
lip sticker
here we are here we are you’re a coke
guy i’m a pepsi guy i mean yeah yeah
it’s all about the bumper sticker yeah
kidding and jokes aside folks of course
we’re just trying to liven it up a
little bit here be a little bit more uh
intentional about drawing you in to talk
about some serious topics that we want
to speak to the world about
here at finding
peaks
as an episode as me as the host i’m just
going to continue to talk more about it
that i am invested in this concept of
disrupting an industry through our
company culture and our vision and with
that hopeful that uh the folks on the
other side of these cameras and the
social medias uh and so forth the ones
emailing us fervently at finding peaks
at peaksrecovery.com
do it
thoughts ideas questions bring it
forward
hopefully to give you information for
which
if you are pursuing treatment services
whether it’s substance use disorder or
mental health primary uh in that regard
that at the end of the day the
information that we’re giving you
empowers you to seek treatment uh to
find the programs that appropriate for
you and your loved one and to identify
where
treatment centers may fall short and
actually delivering those services to
your loved ones so today we are going to
talk about
kind of societal norms and culture and
how that influences substance use
disorder
and mental health
uh for those out there who are like why
is he using substance use disorder and
not the word addiction is because our
prior episode
we really sort of went after that word
and got a little passionate about it and
i don’t want to use the word for fear
that
he will he will give me a good punch in
the face so trying to move away from it
it’s familiar
it’s a figurative punch in the face
figurative punches totally he can’t do
that it’s an hr issue you are my boss um
so cultural norms our experience is it’s
something that we see with an addiction
treatment it does influence behaviors it
does cause
trauma
for individuals within society i was
talking um
a pretty uh famous
marketing uh
platform in our industry without using
their name i was recently talking about
for example how uh during election
season right after election season
addiction treatment experience or
addiction treatment centers and mental
health centers experience an increase in
call volume related to the results of
elections in that regard so
something about elections is stirring
the pot of
substance use disorder and mental health
in that regard it’s interesting i don’t
have much more to expand or gain
insights into that but that is curious
there is something about
the world we live in
the society we live in that causes
people to experience
um suffering in those processes to the
degree that they’ll reach out to centers
like ours
to address what’s going on uh maybe the
hangover post-election maybe just the
anxiety about who just took power and
what that means for the individual
but really to open this up i’m going to
take a general direction towards you
know the benefits in disrupting an
industry
or taking a look at what it means to
disrupt an industry whether you know
co-ed facilities or gender specific care
is going to be really important
especially given the fact that when we
talk about male versus you know female
that we’re not really culturally
nurturing
um
these binary terms alone that it is much
greater than just those terms by
themselves but from our lens within
treatment you know it’s kind of at a
high level what are we seeing on the
therapist side giving your guys’s
talents in being therapist
that
you know whether it’s trauma or drive
something that’s driving
the substance use disorder or disrupting
them from an anxious depressive state
what are we seeing kind of through the
lens of our
patients
that
you are seeing where culture is actually
playing an influence on how they feel
about who they are
i feel like there’s so much to unpack in
what you just said truthfully
um and i i appreciate you mentioning
that obviously gender specific care is
automatically binary uh
and we and we can do things variable
things uh
to try to bridge that gap but but it’s a
binary decision i just want to
acknowledge that and
however that being said
you know having spent a lot of time on
both of our campuses our men’s campus
and our women’s campus
the the culture that whether or not it’s
from well it’s certainly from society
but the culture of both of our campuses
are very different i um
you guys have probably visited both our
campuses i assume yeah done the tour
that once i’ve done the tour um online i
did it to work yeah but i do think um
you know like at the
just in general like during groups that
are at our men’s campus we talk
clinically about
um
really helping men truthfully like it’s
an excavating process of like helping
men
gain insight into themselves and um
maybe even allowing themselves to
release some
difficult emotions that they haven’t
been able to release
and
the women’s house tends to be a lot
about containment where the women have a
lot more access it seems like
to be expressive and being open and are
a lot more in touch with their trauma
um
and it’s about kind of helping them
kind of make sense of it and then also
contain it um
and
combining these cultures in a primary
care setting
um i i think would be a lot like trying
to combine water and oil is that that’s
not a thing right you can’t do that very
well they don’t even do it just not well
yeah you can do it but they don’t they
don’t mix very well um
and i think uh i think that’s why
that’s the appeal i think of of a gender
specific program is that um
it’s just having that ability like it’s
just a different skill set if i’m just
gonna be totally honest with you and i
think
um and we see it too clinically like we
have clinicians that are drawn to work
more with the men and clinicians that
are drawn to work more with the women
because
um just of their their skill set and
approach uh
fits better in one side or the other and
not good or bad but just simply a fact
is what i notice
i think that you said something really
important um
like
i do think that there is uh the level of
care is actually important when you talk
about gender specific treatment um when
you’re doing the residential sort of
stabilization model
uh safety is is vital towards because
what we’re again trying to do is help
people access vulnerability and so in
order to establish safety uh i think
what i’ve recognized over the years and
i think what we see in our programming
is that gender specific programs
actually do foster a sense of safety
that
maybe a
co-ed program would actually create
barriers to
and so by providing these sort of
gender-specific
approaches we allow people to be able to
explore
in a way that is um
helps them actually kind of bypass
the uh
the shame and expectations and
um
that that the sort of like binary model
actually imposes on people um
now i think as you sort of progress
through your treatment
the integration of men and women
actually becomes really important and i
think it becomes uh really helpful and
really beneficial because in the end we
don’t live in these sort of like
vortexes you know we we live together um
with one another and so being able to
sort of uh kind of re-establish and help
people develop that sense of safety
within a coed environment is also really
important so
yeah in
into that point uh
and i think it’s worth mentioning to the
viewers that you know challenge me of
course go to the google
search engines whatever and you know and
ask google you know in relation to
addiction how
google the data and you’ll see that
women and men experience addiction for
example differently than one another
generally you’ll see that men are using
higher quantities of the drugs and
they’re using it more often where
women are generally using
less quantities and less often in that
regard but both experiencing
frustrations around that addiction and
of course that’s not going to be true
across the board
but when we think about you know
stabilization and vulnerability coming
into a setting if we’re
if our experiences are different
on one side of the equation coming into
another experience i think in ways that
makes us vulnerable to the people that
we’re around in a in a pretty
significant way but with those you know
touches of differences for people
entering treatment i think it’s
interesting from a residential
standpoint you know
that
it feels good and first and foremost to
break it up and move them apart but
that’s interesting to think of course
that well at some point there has to be
this integration um maybe interesting is
the wrong word because it is the world
we live in uh in that regard but the
world that we live in prior to coming to
p you know to a place like peaks uh is
scary and we’ve been mistreated in a
variety of different ways and we have
different experiences within that you
know maybe it’s trauma uh maybe it’s
mental health maybe it’s a female in the
way her dad treated her versus a male in
the way that his dad treated him and out
of those experiences it seems best to
create that separation so that that
vulnerability and the ability to bring
that forward
can thrive but also where where do we
where do you guys think we have blinders
on in this moment because we operate a
gender specific you know uh
culture of course and i think those
experiences for us are uh really
important but
um challenging you guys to think about
maybe in a gender specific setting maybe
it’s around the binary language of just
men and women where we’re not really
seeing that being fully efficacious
i mean i think
i’m not sure it’s a blinder like or
maybe it is like i’m aware of the
blinder that like
creating gender specific program it
serves
a significant portion of the population
but it doesn’t serve another part of the
population i think that’s very much true
um
and then i do think like another course
correction we’ve had i think just in the
last month or two is
we kind of had a lot of our residential
staff
matched the gender of the program they
were working in
and it
and it wasn’t the best idea necessarily
i think it it’s helpful to have
um well boundaried healthy people
of both genders interacting with our
clients and and we had kind of began to
isolate our programs into very specific
camps almost from a staff perspective
and um
and i’ve run plenty of uh programs in
our
plenty of groups and individual sessions
in our women’s program and there is
there is some uh i think there is some
power to having like a a healthy well
boundaried um
compassionate person
providing some care in that women’s
program and then at the same time like
you know we have a lot of really
successful uh
staff members that are women working in
our men’s program that provide an
element of care and compassion and
concern
that um that has been really help
helpful i think
i don’t know what other blind spots do
you think we have i mean i i do think
that when we
you know anytime you sort of like
separate out um
into categories or groups you you are
reinforcing some of the stereotypes that
go along with those so they’re
in in a way that we um
having gender-specific programming does
further entrench some of those
uh kind of variables and i would say um
kind of
beliefs about self and experiences of
shame and victimization i think it kind
of can reinforce that sometimes rather
than
helping to break that up which is
i mean we live in
a diverse world you know like we are
like
gender is a spectrum you know everything
is a freaking spectrum really and to
when when we
reinforce that the world is black and
white we we miss all of the gray and in
the ends i mean the gray is where we
heal and so
i think that it’s uh
i believe pretty firmly in gender
specific programming to a point but i
think that it has its limits like there
is a ceiling that you hit at which point
uh it’s kind of run its course and now
it’s time to fully engage with the world
around you you know these these sort of
like um
i don’t know kind of like
self-manifested little worlds that we
try to live in and i think that and
maybe that’s hark that kind of goes back
to the election
era right like i think that we do we get
we kind of
find our own little cloister of our own
little beliefs and our own little circle
of people that feel and believe the same
thing that we do and when that gets
disrupted it is
extremely um imbalancing yeah but
um
in the end that’s what we’re trying to
learn how to do is to to balance and
stay still in chaos rather than try to
avoid or ignore it
yeah and and you know and and to catch
it really in terms of you know to bring
outside societal norms in you know
america has had many discussions about
it and about non-binary bathrooms in
that regard and that somebody who
identifies
as a female
for example with male genitalia wants to
use the female bathroom and there’s a
lot of tension about that within society
but at the same time we’ve had
individuals come in who are
male per their genitalia in that regard
transitioning into
womanhood and going through that
experience and we’ve
placed those individuals into our
women’s program at time and
out of that once it’s become aware
through the whispers of culture a parent
finds out or something and seems to be
you know dysregulated at some level in
the same way that culture is out there
you know so for me i you know went
around and i always found myself in the
marketing stance of like oh we’re gender
specific and that’s really great and
then people would say well what if they
are non-binary in that regard and what
are you guys doing about that
and how does that blur these norms of
you know gender specific care at the end
of the day and we’ve also done it the
other way women
or or individuals with female genitalia
identifying as male and making that
transition who went into our men’s
program as well too and
um and then tension occurs throughout
that as an experience but uh i think
those are you know the types of things
that are playing roles within this that
for which you know treatment centers
such as ours mental health treatment
centers and so forth integrated care all
have to be accounting for in real time
because these individuals uh across the
board in the spectrum are all suffering
in their own you know unique way uh in
that regard so
so having a gender-specific camp is you
know good to a degree but at the same
time uh really requires um an ability to
be
more relational and you know less
transactional from those those terms
absolutely yeah it’s complicated yeah
and you have to allow it to be
complicated i think if you try to keep
it simple
um
it’ll fail what do you guys think is the
biggest like concern men and women early
stages of recovery in the same room
group room together what do you think is
the the the sort of liability there for
which this industry might fear most you
know within those moments
i mean there’s the obvious
things of people struggling
people
who are maybe having some difficulty or
haven’t regulated their impulses in a
long time
providing them
an opportunity
um
to become distracted by either uh
trying to attract people of the opposite
sex but don’t get me wrong it happens um
even in gender specific programs so i’m
not
that right
that isn’t the only reason by any
stretch of the imagination but just
having sat in in i don’t know countless
men’s and women’s groups it is
men when they’re in groups with other
men they do share about their shame in a
different way or they share about their
stories are they sure about their
struggles in a different way than if
women are introduced to the room and
it’s the same with the women like i i do
think
um for a period of time i think that’s
just really important and i think even
you know even in the aftercare setting
um you know i don’t think it’s
necessarily a bad idea for people to
still attend um gender-specific either
groups or support groups or just have a
friend group that’s gender-specific
where they can talk about these things
without kind of some of that other
distraction but i mean it’s the same
reason why we you know in some ways we
don’t
uh
intentionally try to trigger people or
tempt them with things or or have
liquor bottles laying around like
there’s no value in that creating that
safety is just to me about removing a
lot of
um
a lot of temptations maybe for people to
that
so they can just really dial in and
focus on themselves and and
having done this in both settings i can
just tell you the the
depth and the quality and the safety
um in in the group setting certainly is
just different when it’s gender specific
it’s it’s
for sure for a period of time to your
point well and i think i mean
to your point jason like whether you
like it or not um
trauma is typically experienced through
a gender a gendered lens you know i
think that
a lot of
um of the traumas that we see that we
address are actually gender specific or
gender impacted i guess maybe would be a
more appropriate way of saying it so
when you are
bringing people especially who are sort
of like early in this process who are
just starting to access these feelings
who are processing shame who are
experiencing vulnerability who are still
working on establishing a sense of felt
and internal safety bringing those two
worlds together can be um cataclysmic to
a certain degree so it just has to be
done very mindfully
and um they are
there are
certain ways to approach it and um
i think that there are also ways in
which you can talk about it directly you
know to to not try to avoid it actually
but to really engage in it and and speak
to the fact that you know um
the way that men and women i think
experience uh being a victim in our
culture is really different
and um i think that there’s a lot of
really interesting dialogue to be had
around that
um so that would be like just an example
of one way that you can kind of open
that door but in the end you’ve got um
you know
when you when you’re bringing these
traumas together you always have to be
really careful
yeah it in
this is just the the kind of i’m going
to go out on a limb here and trying to
describe something that
is just coming to mind as we have this
uh conversation but uh you know in
consumerism for example in america like
there there are there’s specialization
of services there is you know peaks
recovery is an addiction treatment
center to resolve you know in it you
know mental health issues and uh
substance use disorder and then there’s
the the doctor to help you know manage
pain and then there is the restaurant
that specializes in serving food that
you can’t necessarily cook yourself or
whatever the case might be
what i’m getting at here is that
oftentimes we experience things that we
need as an internal frustration hungry
externalize it go to a restaurant i’m
got an addiction externalize it i go to
this place can’t sleep externalize it
get on these meds
as an experience at the end of the day
and so for me
in the seven and a half years or so now
that i’ve been doing this and just you
know witnessing this within addiction
treatment cultures and uh integrated
care as well too is this immediate
externalization to create that internal
wellness and the individuals that we
treat and serve are so disrupted
generally speaking when you take the one
externalization feature drugs and
alcohol away from them or the
environments which it was more
comfortable to be depressed in or
anxious in or those sorts of things now
they’re in these new environments and
we’ve talked about it before it becomes
about the pillows and the couches and
you guys tvs are only 70 inches and it
should be 85 and you know
couching the silliness aside from it it
feels like in a in a in a co-ed facility
we start wanting to feel internally well
and
because culturally speaking of course
we’re
largely a heterosexual population
there’s a significant potential for
conflict there in the externalization of
i don’t feel well in here they’ve just
taken this i mean i can’t think of a
greater dopamine kick on the other side
of losing all that dopamine kick from
drugs and alcohol that sex as an
opportunity provides now it doesn’t
as you guys are pointing out discourage
externalization and gender specific
cultures because
people can be sexual in multiple ways
than just being heterosexual in that
regard i think the world has taught us
that
in a big way as we have more and more of
these conversations and bring it to
light but
it seems to be that conflict that is
most uh
as an experienced dire within thinking
about whether to cross that bridge into
a coed facility
and if we’re not disrupting that then it
leaves this major external
externalization and distraction in front
of us and if i’m motivated by that i’m
not going to talk about how you know my
dad smacked me around maybe culture has
taught me to be strong and big and now i
see wounded you know female on the other
side as a male heterosexual and i think
oh i’m just going to be tough man and
i’m going to save and now i’m being you
know maybe codependent all these sort of
features out of it and i think that’s
the rub
that um
to the core of this that we’re not
thinking about in terms of business
models but it’s a cheaper business model
in our industry to invite the model in
to have them all on one site and yeah
they’re housed together here and here
but we’re running groups in the middle
here and then we have two or four you
know staff members at night time trying
to keep all the kids apart and in
between but the reality is with
intentionality and once that external
external hook takes place it’s nearly
impossible to do productive work um
am i wrong am i no i don’t think you’re
wrong at all and i do think
i think people
i mean you’re mentioning substance use
like when when people are struggling
with substance use
issues
they
uh
yeah
um
but i will say it is it’s challenge like
they’re used to feeling an uncomfortable
feeling and i have to do something about
it and that something provides immediate
relief from it
and so
when somebody is four days sober that
impulse doesn’t go away like i’m feeling
uncomfortable i need to do something
about it
call the craving right
um
but okay now i don’t have access to my
what i would prefer to do so i’m going
to access a variety of other things and
sex is a really powerful one to your
point
you know eating issues like we’re not
going to set up like a gambling parlor
in a rehab either because that would be
appealing too like if i could go get
lost
in the gambling way provide the rush and
all of that but
but i do think like that’s part of this
early process and stabilization is
saying okay you have these feelings that
feel intense and overwhelming but can
you recognize that
they don’t last forever in fact they
don’t last very long at all if you kind
of let them what lasts a long time is
ruminating about them and telling
yourself i have to do something about
this rather than just like
letting it come through and being
mindful about it um
so providing gender-specific care to me
takes away one very dramatic thing that
people can
do often times or would be drawn to do
and there’s an intensity too that like
okay
people are sharing things that maybe
they haven’t talked to anybody about and
and it’s being well received it gets
really easy to conflate
um empathy with love right like if
people are understanding what you’re
saying it’s easy to feel like oh my god
this is the most important person in my
life that i met
yesterday right right so i don’t know
that’s where i see it yeah
yeah i mean
i agree i think
that
really
i guess for me treatment
and recovery is
the process of sort of reconnecting to
self
and you’re talking about externalization
right um
we there’s there’s still that tendency
early on to to believe that you’re
that your answers and your connections
lie outside of you and i think that you
can create environments like a co-ed
program especially at that like early
residential stabilization period
in which you start to reinforce that or
at least i don’t know it’s almost like
you’re kind of setting people up you’re
tempting fate really at that point and
when in reality what
you really need to be doing is getting
people to go inside go inwards right
and anything that you can do early on in
the process of treatment whether it’s
for
substance dependence or mental health
is help people reconnect to themselves
because they people come in completely
detached you know they i’ve most people
come in can just completely lost and i
mean that’s why
identity and purpose is one of our our
primary program weeks you know that’s
one of our intensives because people
have completely lost that sense of self
so
um and i think that anything that we can
do as a program anything that we can do
as therapists
to
help people
remain
focused on what’s going on inside as
opposed to outside
the better
the job that we’re doing essentially
that makes sense
to me yeah to me hopefully the viewers
uh in this regard and i think we’ll just
we’ll take it out from there this is a
uh
this is a topic that is uh interesting
and it’s uh it’s got tones of
combativeness in it uh the way that
culture probably experiences addiction
and what it is and how addiction
treatment centers substance use disorder
centers integrated care mental health
should be
behaving in this world
but there are internal conflicts within
our industry and the services that we
provide each and every day and these are
things that whether co-ed or gender
specific facility that we have to be
thinking about in real time and how are
we going to disrupt that and you know in
our experience i think i would prefer to
be generous if it feels like you we do
away with a lot by separating that out
from the very beginning but if we’re not
thinking thoughtfully about these things
and the business model is just to push
them all in one room and think like
here’s the group therapy go but yeah
they sleep in separate places that’s
just not being thoughtful about how this
works
at the end of the day because
individuals who are receiving our
services are hollow within and looking
for
largely anything to fill that space in
that void within
and sometimes these
simple you know primitive features of
our existence are the things that they
will quickly move to fill those in and
it’s just something to be mindful of so
over the next few weeks uh jason
friesman i and clinton as well too will
be joined by dr ashley johnson uh our
president chief medical officer at peaks
recovery and we’re going to be talking
about major dis major depressive
disorder
in a variety of different ways how it
connects with or
more innovative care how that connects
with treatment
the limitations of medication management
in that regard the complexity of what
takes place within treatment episodes
around this um
so uh for my next hosting position i’ll
be joined by clinton and dr aj as we
call her at the office and jason will
have another person and dr aj i suppose
to talk about uh what they’re looking at
so stay tuned for that
i think we’re going to learn a ton about
that
and you know especially around the whole
notion there are slogans around there
that say keep recovery simple and with
major depressive disorder it is just not
simple it is quite complex and really
difficult to navigate in real time so
stay tuned for that in the meantime the
tick tocks the facebook back to tick
tock follow chris burns
you know screaming at it whatever he’s
passionate about recovery it’s energized
he brings a lot of people into it they
do squatting and all kinds of
interesting things that have me just
reeling for more so check it out uh
facebook finding peeks at
peaksrecovery.com
questions inside thoughts ideas concerns
whatever it is give it to us we want to
bring future episodes to you that are of
value to you
the consumer of these types of services
uh in that regard so until next time
signing off
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