Staff featured in this video (in order of appearance):
- Dougie Dudgeon, Team Leader and Counsellor
- Dan Stanley, Team Leader and Counsellor
- Dr Cosmo Duff Gordon, Founder and Service Director
- Dougie Dudgeon
Start2Stop Mews House is a residential facility that offers daycare treatment in tandem. Residents that stay here are on the daycare programme, but we also offer that daycare programme to non-residents. These are people that may be returning from extended treatments elsewhere.
Dan Stanley
In primary treatment, it’s really easy to stay clean. Now it’s very difficult to get there and it also comes with a lot of challenges. But when you’re in a safe environment, far away from all of your triggers and the place where you live and the challenges of life between stresses and family and work, it can be relatively easy when you’re wrapped around in the community, everything’s done for you to stay clean. Now where people really struggle is when they come back to their living environment. And that’s where we really come in for secondary treatment.
Dr Cosmo Duff Gordon
We don’t want clients hidden from the world like in primary treatment, we want them stepping into the world. What we’re after really is full deck of recovery structures, developing life direction, and working on that. Ideally getting either job or part-time work, or volunteering work, having some fun, and of course, relapse prevention skills. Just learning to be sober or clean in central London is no small thing. And if you can do that for a few months while you’re at Start2Stop, that’s recovery capital.
Dougie Dudgeon
Sobriety is one thing, recovery is another. Recovery is abstinence and change. Primary treatment can help cement a period of abstinence, but the change has to happen in a different environment.
The key focus of secondary treatment is reintegration into life. Being based in the middle of London and having the opportunities here for people to go out and experience things, in many cases for the first time sober, to experience West End plays or sporting events or art galleries, museums, that kind of thing, where they can actually go out and experience those, talk about them, be close to a huge number of meetings, but not just that, all kinds of facilities that integrate into all the meaningful parts of life that need to be reawoken at least, if not, initiated. To do that within a therapeutic community, with other people who are experiencing it, can be quite transformative for the client.
Dr Cosmo Duff Gordon
In terms of how transformative treatment can be, the answer is it can be incredibly transformative. Almost actually mind-blowingly transformative. I mean, the most extraordinary 180s can happen and that’s across the board. When people really get recovery, health, relationships, happiness, connection, everything’s going to improve. And we’ve seen that in, you know, countless, countless, countless clients.
Dan Stanley
You can recover, you can go on to recover that what you’ve lost and to heal from it. There’s help available. Treatment can be very effective for those that are willing to come and be honest and open-minded and embrace the process. They can be free. They can live a life that they may not know is possible. They can be free from shame, they can be free from fear, they can be free from the guilt that addiction holds them to. They can go on to live wonderful lives.
If you would like to find out more about our Residential and Daycare Addictions Treatment and how Start 2 Stop can help then please get in touch here.