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Learning Life Skills at Burning Tree Ranch

What Are Life Skills?

The World Health Organization has defined life skills as, “the abilities for adaptive and positive behavior that enable individuals to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life”.

Burning Tree Ranch is committed to helping our clients create a life of excellence beyond sobriety. We believe that enrolling our community in the development of life skills is pertinent to the goal of sustainable, lifelong recovery.

"Life Skills" help an individual to make conscious decisions, communicate effectively and adopt an active, healthy life-style.

Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

By creating structure, accountability, and consistent clinical scheduling, we introduce our clients to the necessary setting for positive growth. This setting, a 3,000-acre ranch located outside of Dallas, TX, is home to the nation’s only authentic long-term, residential treatment center in the country. It is here that we engage our clients on a trajectory of dynamic self-improvement. With emotional, mental, and spiritual health remaining at the forefront of our efforts, we know through experience that establishing a durable foundation in life skills is a must-have for those struggling with chronic addiction and mental health disorders.

3 categories that have benefited our clients since 1999.

Self-Awareness – Coming to know oneself deeply and intimately. This life skill helps our clients to grow in their understanding of their feelings, thoughts, and behaviors.
Interpersonal Skills – Coming to know others deeply and intimately. This life skill helps our clients learn how to manifest respectful, healthy relationships with the use of assertive, non-threatening forms of communication.
Thinking Skills – Learning to make effective decisions that promote personal growth. This skill set allows our clients to better connect their decisions and belief system with the probable consequence or benefit.

Commitment, Accountability, and Integrity are the three main principles that we focus on at Burning Tree Ranch.

~ Jesse Earwood, Executive Director

Establishing Sobriety with Life Skills

At Burning Tree Ranch, we believe that life skills are critical to the process of establishing meaningful, permanent sobriety. We focus on several aspects of Life Skills to help our clients embark upon a lifetime of recovery.

Some of these include:

Identifying Values
Communication Skills
Establishing Boundaries
Equanimity and Emotional Intelligence

Identifying Values

Addiction has caused many of our clients to act and behave outside the bounds of their native value system. This can result in a sense of self-loathing, insecurity, and discontentedness. At Burning Tree Ranch, the staff seeks to reunite our clients with their most cherished values, encouraging them to engage their lives on principle rather than a fleeting gratification. Gradually, as they grow more mindful of the values they have reclaimed, their connection to individual purpose and sobriety begin to thrive.

Exhibiting genuine concern for others, demonstrating empathy, and accepting responsibility for mistakes are key indicators to progress in this life skill. As treatment progresses, our clients begin to correlate their renewed values with the changed behaviors they observe in themselves. This is a burgeoning development in self-awareness and often a very exciting period in our clients journey through treatment. As self-esteem returns, and confidence begins to flourish, our clients begin to foster a deeper appreciation for their values, and a sense of hope for all that lies before them.

Communication Skills

Persons who suffer with a history of chronic relapse often find it difficult to communicate their needs, feelings, and ideas with clarity. They may use too many words, or too few. Oftentimes, dysregulated emotions may impair their cognitive functions, thus leading to confusion, even hostility. At Burning Tree Ranch, we blend the ability to communicate with the ability to listen and convey emotions. Many of our clients have a long history of trying to rid themselves of negative feelings as soon as they arise, often turning to mood- and mind-altering substances for escape.

To combat this practice, we help our clients build resilience in the face of honest, sometimes uncomfortable communication with peers, family members, and staff. By creating an environment where they are allowed to accept criticism from others in an emotionally balanced way, we set the stage for deeper self-awareness and clarity. As this skill develops, and our clients learn more about themselves, we then offer them an opportunity to create a deeper relationship with accountability. Encouraged to deliver constructive criticism to others in a format that promotes neutrality, respect, and objectivity, our clients begin to gain confidence in their own integrity. As a result, they earn a deepening relationship with honesty, finding that their communication has become more clear, concise, and authentic – even when it’s uncomfortable.

Establishing Boundaries

Persons with chronic relapse patterns often share a history of breaking the boundaries set by others. Not surprisingly, they may also lack consistency in forming and enforcing their own. This can lead to a lot of confusion in our clients’ relationships. Afterall, boundaries function as a basic guideline to help others understand how we wish to be treated. They also indicate what behaviors we are and are not okay with in a relationship. As our clients grow in their self-love, self-awareness, and identity, they begin to learn more about the correlation between healthy boundaries and their own emotional well-being. Instead of taking the boundaries set by others as a personal affront, we help them see that self-care is a virtue that each participant in a relationship can benefit from.

At Burning Tree Ranch, we help our clients protect the investment they are making in themselves (and their sobriety) while encouraging their loved ones to do the same. Establishing healthy boundaries propels our clients into accepting deeper personal responsibility for the health of their relationships, while also creating accountability for their own behaviors. As our clients begin to foster a greater respect for themselves and their recovery, they find that establishing healthy boundaries invariably leads to less stress and more personal fulfillment.

Equanimity and Emotional Intelligence

People who suffer from chronic relapse usually try to avoid their emotions. Instead of expending energy on escaping from their uncomfortable feelings, we encourage our clients to experience a full range of emotions fully and with composure. By helping our clients engage the challenges they face with honesty and integrity, we support them in reducing their emotional reactivity while increasing their ability to cognitively identify their feelings. This process allows our clients to engage the clinical process more deeply, and live more honestly.

Over time, as our clients gain greater control over their emotional natures, they begin to experience more balanced states of mind, body, and spirit. As their emotional intelligence improves, they begin to manage emotions and stress more successfully, finding that they can confront difficult problems with increasing assurance. This new era of self-regulation leads directly to more satisfying relationships, improved social interactions, and a reduction in impulse driven reaction.

For many of our clients, these life skills were never learned in former treatment episodes. Burning Tree Ranch seeks to unite every client with the life skills they need to create a life of excellence beyond sobriety. By creating challenging, real-life scenarios for our clients to engage with, we provide the opportunity to practice new life skills that will benefit them at program completion and beyond.

More About Burning Tree Ranch

Burning Tree Ranch is a highly sophisticated long-term residential treatment and aftercare program designed exclusively for the chronic relapser. Operating outside the limitations of a traditional 30, 60 or 90-day format, Burning Tree adheres to progress-based metrics that inform the clinical treatment team of the unique mental, emotional, and spiritual needs of each individual, resulting in dynamic breakthroughs for those formerly unable to achieve meaningful, long-term recovery.

As of today, we are the only treatment center in the United States that combines time-intensive residential treatment with a therapeutically coordinated aftercare program focused singularly on the treatment of chronic relapsers.

Our Chronic relapse therapies

Addiction Medicine

Burning Tree Ranch utilizes
addiction medicine to aid in the diagnosis, treatment and recovery of persons with the disease of addiction.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

A form of goal-oriented therapy that helps our clients understand how their thoughts affect their actions, leading to healthier thinking patterns and behaviors.

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT)

An evidence-based psychotherapy approach that helps our clients better manage stress, regulate emotions, and improve relationships with others.

EMDR

An interactive psychotherapy
technique that helps our clients reduce the emotional distress caused by the unresolved pain associated with trauma.

Equine Therapy

An experiential therapy that imparts physical, cognitive, and emotional benefit to our clients as they engage the important work of establishing lifelong recovery.

Existential Therapy

A form of positive psychotherapy that helps our clients clarify their values and connect with their authentic selves, leading to a greater sense of self-worth and empowerment.

Gestalt Therapy

A humanistic form of psychotherapy that helps our clients concentrate on the present moment, and engage the
opportunity to they have increase
personal freedom and fulfillment.

Group Therapy

Facilitated by a licensed clinician, group therapy helps our clients develop improved communication skills, boundaries, and self-awareness in a therapeutic setting.

Holistic Approach

We take into account the whole
person, not just the addiction. Our holistic approach enables our clients to discovery well-being for the mind, body, and spirit.

Individual Therapy

The goal of individual therapy is to motivate the client to explore certain behaviors that may interfere with, delay, or sabotage the opportunity to achieve permanent, lifelong recovery.

Interpersonal Psychotherapy

A form of psychotherapy that helps our clients re-build relationships with loved ones, and establish new relationships with a healthy support group of peers.

Neurofeedback Therapy

Neurofeedback Therapy is a noninvasive treatment designed to instruct patients as to how to control brainwave activity in order to change behaviors.

12-Step Immersion

The Twelve Steps teach our clients how to live by a set of spiritual principles that are taught in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous.

find recovery,
not just sobriety

DISCOVER FREEDOM