Find Your Path to Recovery. Embrace Healing.
Holistic Healing, Transforming Lives
Our core values and philosophy are who we really are, and our commitment to incorporate them into everyday life at Free Spirit and beyond is what creates the magic of our process.
Challenge by Choice: At Free Spirit we believe in choice and self-determination, where participants take the lead on their own growth. Like navigating on a hike, the more you know and understand about the path ahead, your preferences, and when possible, your destination, the more informed your choices are and the deeper your commitment to staying your path despite its obstacles. Choices at Free Spirit come from within—they are not dictated by heavy structure or arbitrary consequences—and they will last long after Free Spirit. This means that our participants come willingly to Free Spirit and make a personal commitment to the process. We dedicate time and effort to explain to our potential participants what this would entail, so their choice can be well-informed.
Community Life: Being a part of a community has an incredible effect on teens and young adults and is crucial for those struggling with substance use or other addictions. We know from extensive research that community and connection build resilience in general and specifically resilience to addiction. We pay close attention to the connection between the “drug of choice” to struggles with relationships and attachment and we focus our work on the underlying psychological issues that may have led to the addictive behavior. Belonging, sensing your value to the community, receiving valuable feedback from peers, and learning to live and be in relationships with others, young and old, all have a powerful impact on every single member of our community. Both our kibbutz in Israel and our farm in Cyprus share similar principles of community life and mutual care for our surroundings. On our end, we, the staff, love being a part of our community, we love our participants, and truly love doing what we do!
Family work: It is tremendously important for families to join the process and reconnect with their loved ones who are struggling. This is a crucial component in translating the community feel at Holina Free Spirit into future success. We invite parents to visit and partake in a weeklong process and be an integral part of our journey. Parents who have done this in the past call it an eye-opening and life-changing experience. We see how the commitment contributes to their loved one’s long-term success.
Doing, Experiencing, Reflecting: We believe in the value of action and experience. Through doing, we learn and experience ourselves as competent. Through reflecting we build resilience (Dan Siegel), learn about ourselves and the world around us, and generalize from one experience to more instances in life. This is true for emotional regulation, daily functioning, social interactions and more. It may go without saying that experiences also include struggles, breakdowns, and failures alongside success, joy, and connection. This is how we learn to cope and function and pursue our goals, beyond most obstacles.
Therapy: The therapeutic process happens continuously throughout every part of the day and activities. We believe in immersive therapy, where our staff and therapists are present as conversations and interactions are happening, rather than meet participants formally a couple of hours per week. This makes for a comprehensive therapeutic process, dealing both with deep content when it naturally comes up (this typically happens during critical times of challenge, hiking outdoors, or during one-on-one time), as well as daily functioning content such as anxiety and avoidance, self-discipline, motivation and drive, social skills and interpersonal relationships, counter-productive or destructive behaviors and more. Being there as it happens allows us to do truly relevant, powerful work together with our participants and succeed where most therapies may have failed. We also offer, as needed, mind-body based trauma work, Cognitive-Relational therapy, and more.
Substance-use informed treatment: Substance use requires special attention on the behavioral and perceptual levels, but more often than not, the use is secondary to the underlying issues. We focus more on the causes, but address the fact that habitual, addictive use is an obstacle to achieving a fulfilling and healthy life. This is why it is critical that our community is sober, allowing participants to remain present and form healing connections. We incorporate evidence-based practices adapted to young people who are still struggling to find themselves and may not be ready yet to define themselves as addicts and /or make long-term commitments to sobriety. Our first goal is to keep them sober long enough to benefit from our therapeutic work.
We also work at harm reduction and realistic expectations from families back home. The paradigm of success or failure may actually trigger heavier usage and loss of the progress already made. We try to steer our participants and their families toward more flexible and realistic goals and expectations. At this age and given post-pandemic life and the Israel-Gaza war, many young people struggle to find meaning and connection in the real world and turn to cannabis or alcohol as a substitute for real connections and productivity. It is often used for self-medication, and, for some, to overcome their own insecurity in making connections. Some are able to maintain a functioning daily life, while others fall upon deeper depression and regression. Click HERE to learn about who will get the most out of Free Spirit.