Anyone who’s attended rehab has had to endure their fair share share of group therapy, behavior modification and meditation. For most clients these practices beneficial. But since staying sober every second of every hour of your 30-to-90 day stay can sometimes break the most resilient of spirits, some creative rehabs have become adept at—if nothing else—keeping their attention-addled deficient and mischief-prone clients as distracted as possible. So-called treatment programs are jam-packed with summer-campy pastimes that allow you to gain valuable expertise (and discover unexpected talents!) in Ping Pong, pottery making, basket weaving, bowling, water polo, finger-painting poetry writing and other danger-and-drama-free activities.
For these rehabs—often the pricier ones— straightforward amusements are not sufficient for their brand. They take the bland but benign notion of “recreational therapy” and dress it up in such kooky pretentions to which the only reasonable response is: What were they thinking? The Fix surveyed the world in search of the weirdest of these rehab “therapies.” And while we don’t pretend to know what their inventors were thinking, we did note that each activity is claimed to possess a deep “spiritual” dimension—either New Age or Native American in style. Make of that what you will. Here are six of the most…exotic:
1. HULA HOOPS
Hula hoop therapy sounds playful enough, but in the world of addiction treatment, hula hoops, like so much else, take on a much deeper significance. Who knew they could treat trauma victims? Visualizing your “personal” hula hoop is used as a therapeutic tool to teach the traumatized, the codependent, and the sexually abused healthy ways to negotiate fraught issues around space, boundaries, and the limits of their control. What’s inside the hoop, the thinking goes, represents what’s within one’s control, and clients are encouraged to reinforce this principle by reciting little litanies like “This is a boundary. I am protected and contained.” A favorite at The Meadows, hula hoop therapy was dreamed up by its senior clinical advisor, Pia Mellody, who travels the globe giving workshops and hawking her many books on addiction, co-dependence and relationships.
2. BLOCKS OF FOAM
Another Pia Mellody production is styrofoam block therapy, which has taken these lightweight but firm bricks out of the pilates studio and into the anything-goes arena of addiction treatment. As with the hula hoops, treatment with styrofoam aims to help clients deal, in a symbolic way, with unresolved childhood traumas and other early issues that are a common source of drug and alcohol abuse. And just as the hula hoop externalizes the issue of boundaries, the brick may objectify negative responses to abuse. Shame, for example, is a common theme at rehabs—talking about it, reading about it, journaling about it, processing it—and the Meadows goes the extra step by advising clients to actually carry around a giant “block of shame” all day as a reminder of how their lives have been burdened by its destructive effects.
Likewise, the hoop people wander around with their colorful plastic “boundaries.” The two groups are encouraged to interact, and hoop-vs.-block group conflicts are reportedly rare. Neither object can be used as a weapon—the bulky bricks of gray-colored foam only look like dangerous chunks of concrete that, if thrown, could take half your face off. However, there is a ritual called “returning the shame to the owner” in which the styrofoam is handed back to the person said to be originally responsible for the shame-inducing trauma. Although these encounters obviously have the potential to turn violent, they, too, remain merely symbolic because the perpetrator rarely consents to participate. Instead, the client sits across from an empty chair, has their say and then leaves the foam on the chair. Forever.
3. PAINTING HORSES
Hanging around horses—a.k.a. Equine Assisted Therapy—is fairly common at many luxury rehabs. What with dogs being trained by scientists to detect early signs of cancer in their owner’s smell, the therapeutic powers of domestic animals remain a vast untapped resource. Horses are thought to be especially skilled at mirroring the moods and mental states of the rider. “As flight and herd animals, they can sense on a deep level what may be going on with the client that is missed by human beings,” says One80Center founder and clinical director, Bernadine Fried. And painting, of course, is a legit part of art therapy. So far, so good. But the what-were-they-thinking moment results from Fried’s bizarre marriage of the two: One80Center doesn’t just put their clients on horseback and offer them art therapy: residents actually paint directly on the horse. “Using horses as a life canvas gives movement to the client’s story,” says Fried. People may paint a painful memory from their addiction-riddled past, a hopeful fantasy for their sobriety-born future, or, in a meta-move, themselves painting the horse. Anything goes!
PETA members can relax, however: Water-color paints are used, and clients soap down the horse immediately after the exercise, allowing for further bonding. “The horses seem to like the attention,” says Fried, who pioneered horse painting at her previous Los Angeles luxury rehab, Wonderland, thoughtfully providing equine-averse clients an alternative to the intimidating stallion in the form of a miniature donkey. The little burro was named Waffles, according to a 2008 New Yorker story about the explosion in expensive rehabs.
4. SMUDGING
Smudging—burning aromatic sage cedar and “bathing” in the smoke—is a time-honored purification ceremony of many Native American tribes, with their sweat lodges. vision quests and healing rituals. By taking the smoke in your hands and rubbing it all over your body, you can wash away negativity caused by the evil spirits and other supernatural malignities dwelling in your body. It wasn’t enough, apparently, that the White Man stole all the Indian land and turned it into shopping malls—we also had to appropriate their sacred customs for use as lucky charms. You can smudge yourself, your pet, your room, your car—anything.
The tradition has also become part of Native American A.A. groups and the Wellbriety Meetings of the White Bison Organization, taking place before the meeting so that participants are “purified” before sharing. Saskia, a 30-year-old member of A.A. in Portland, Oregon, regularly attends such meetings despite not being Native American because she finds the practice “calming—it has a ritualistic, soothing quality to it,” she says, adding: “You feel like you’re really part of something spiritual.” The Sierra Tucson Center has also caught on to the potential appeal, and now offers smudge-first 12-step meetings.“The Shaman taught me that my scattered nature crossed over from a past life where I had been murdered by a serial killer, chopped into little pieces and scattered across many counties,” explains Marie, an ex-heroin addict.
5. FIREWALKING
If you’re a shoeless meth addict with calloused feet roaming the scorching August streets of Santa Monica Boulevard, this one’s no biggie. But for the rest of us, walking barefoot over a bed of red-hot embers takes nerve, focus, and surrender. That’s why a few rehabs, like Our Place in Florida, offer clients the chance to slay their mental Goliaths using this ancient rite of passage. Our Place believes that if a person can sufficiently concentrate their mind to test their fear of walking on fire against the reality of doing so—even just once—their self-limiting habits of thought will yield to the recognition that they can overcome other fears in other aspects of their life, including throwing away the crutch of drug or alcohol abuse for good. Our Place’s website quotes a former client saying that firewalking “was better than any drug I’ve ever taken,” which suggests that they had a better experience than the 30 Australian KFC managers who were on a firewalking exercise to “develop leadership skills” back in 2002 and landed in the hospital laid out with serious injuries sustained in the fiery exercise.
6. SOUL RETRIEVAL
Soul retrieval, a more clinical term for the New Age mantra of past life regression, falls under the rubric of “energy work”—specifically, healing residual electric imprints left behind by unresolved traumas and abuses during your previous incarnations. Not all of us can be like Shirley MacLaine, who claims to have been a royal in every version going back to Cleopatra. In fact, most of us were, like the great bulk of humanity, soldiers, slaves or women—and our scars apparently outlive us until we retrieve our still-grieving souls. Marie, a 27-year-old stylist from Laurel Canyon, did just that at The Sanctuary at Sedona, a self-described “life transformation center,” which employs full-time Shamans for mind-body healing.
Marie credits her Shaman with helping her to put the past to rest and gain a sober present after a chronic heroin addiction and numerous previous (in her current incarnation) stays at rehabs and 12-step meeting efforts. “I used to be really scattered, could never sit still, and was always onto the next thing in a constant search for something,” she says. “The Shaman taught me that my scattered nature crossed over from a past life where I had been murdered by a serial killer: I was tortured before he chopped me into little bits and pieces and scattered across many counties. My soul wandered for days trying to gather the pieces, frantically searching.And that’s how I ended here.”
There you have it. Like God, the rehab industry works in mysterious ways, and sometimes the most far-fetched techniques prove to be the most transformative.
Ruth Fowler has written for The Village Voice, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, The New York Post and The Observer. Her memoir, No Man’s Land, which documented her pre-sobriety experiences as a stripper in Manhattan, was published by Viking in 2008.
Walter Armstrong is former Editor in Chief of Poz and many other medical-related publications. He is currently Deputy Editor at The Fix.