Blue Ridge First Step's Mission
   

The mission of First Step is to provide adults and older adolescents in the Charlottesville area with compassionate, comprehensive, high-quality, and confidential outpatient treatment for chemical dependency.

If you are like most people who enter treatment for an addiction, you are feeling overwhelmed by the problems you are experiencing in your life. You may not even realize the role your dependency to alcohol or drugs has had in perpetuating these problems. Being in an intensive, highly structured program will help you gain insight into the unmanageability of your life and will give you the tools you need to make the changes necessary to sustain your recovery.

Addiction often negatively affects the people who love or care about the addict. In most cases, your family members and significant others have been suffering and need assistance to understand and process their experience, so that they can get well, too. First Step provides a weekly family program to educate and support those people who are most important to you, and to help start the healing process in the family or close social circles.
 

Primary Goal

The primary goal of this program is to help you develop the coping strategies you will need to resume a productive and successful life without the use of mood-altering substances. To accomplish this, First Step uses group therapy, educational groups, assignments, and involvement of the family and close friends. We also require attendance at 12-step meetings while people are in this program, to help ensure that clients become connected with a recovery community that continue to support them after they have finished treatment here.

First Step Objectives
• To increase clients' insight into concepts related to chemical dependency and recovery, including: disease concept, powerlessness, unmanageability, denial, cross-addiction, feelings, defenses, relapse triggers, recovery roadblocks, and relapse prevention planning.
• To assist clients in their acceptance of an alcohol and/or drug addiction and increase their awareness of the negative effects of the addiction on their families, personal relationships, careers, and on their own physical and emotional health.
• To provide clients and their families with an exposure to Twelve Step Programs so as to facilitate their long-term recovery.
• To facilitate clients' development of a personal recovery program.
• To increase insight of clients' family members and significant others about chemical dependency, treatment, and recovery; provide support for their experience; and facilitate awareness of the need for their own personal recovery program.
• To enable clients to develop a comprehensive Aftercare Plan to include: a relapse prevention plan, weekly attendance at Aftercare Group for one year, regular twelve step meeting attendance, and individual or family counseling, when appropriate.
• To facilitate clients' use of group process to practice more adaptive coping skills critical to recovery including: self-disclosure and giving and receiving both support and feedback.