Being of service to others and seeing clients transform their lives is one of our most rewarding experiences. In our culture, our team aims to feel and experience this joy on a daily basis. As a team, we encourage each other to express our individual points of view and to feel free to be true to ourselves, honest and authentic in everything we do. To live authentically is one of the top values we teach you, and we try to live that in our own lives.

We believe in being empowered and in taking action with a can-do attitude. We are proactive and start looking for solutions when we identify a problem. We do not believe in passively waiting for an outside solution. Empowerment is another value that we teach you, and we model it in our way of working.

In our line of work, relationships are everything. If we don’t get along as staff it will transfer to you, the client. As staff we walk our talk. This doesn’t mean that we pretend to be happy. What it means is that we work through our issues on our own, just as you, our clients, are doing. We strongly encourage our staff to take the opportunity of using the amazing Core Belief Restructuring (CBR) methodology for transforming their own lives. We expect our entire team to work on their issues and to improve the quality of their lives, in so crafting a better work environment for everyone involved. If a therapist hasn’t done their own deep core work, we can’t expect them to know how to do it with you.

At Avive la Vie, our therapists have years of experience in resolving their issues, both small and large, and they continue to work on themselves as challenges arise. Our therapists have a fearlessness about them and a willingness to enter deep places in therapy, because they have gone there themselves and welcome the benefits of self-exploration. Thank you for sharing in our culture. We’re looking forward to including you in our culture and have you experience it firsthand when you attend our residential program.

We believe that compassion is the key to healing and creating lasting change. Having awareness of your patterns, conditioning and core beliefs is the beginning. You then combine that awareness with compassion for yourself and learn to feel deep self-acceptance and forgiveness.

From there you can start to naturally shift out of your old patterns of thinking and acting. Motivation to create a new and joyful life comes from building on these successes. We will help you to start believing that you can do it.

An addiction treatment protocol and program should be customized for each individual. We believe in the individuality of each person and adjust our protocols to meet the individual, regardless of our stance on any particular issue. We are in collaboration with our clients. Everything we do in our program takes each unique client into consideration. It’s always a two-way street.

We believe that the answers are already within each person. We therefore seek to assist you to find your own best answers, keeping advice to a minimum. We empower you to find answers by teaching you the skill of Mindful Inquiry. We guide you to self-empowerment through assignments and the discovery of your unique core values.

We say to people that we rarely even talk about drugs and alcohol. We don’t think of our program as treating addiction; we focus instead on healing one’s core beliefs that are fueling an addiction. We then move to clearing and restructuring these self-defeating ideas. When a person is able to make peace with their beliefs, the secondary effect is that their addictive behavior will soon fade away.

Many addiction programs use fear and shame as an attempt to motivate changes in behavior. We do not believe in shame-based thinking. Instead, we initiate change by creating awareness and self-acceptance. The next components for change are vulnerability and connection. We work on developing a healthy sense of vulnerability; having the confidence to be vulnerable with others creates connection.

Living connected with others creates healthy attachments, which are essential for well-being. Our culture is about consciousness. And consciousness brings change. It’s not easy because you have to be willing to acknowledge all the emotional pain that you have in your being. You cannot avoid some of it and experience the rest. We believe that motivating people with shame perpetuates patterns of avoidance.

Emotional Fluidity teaches a person how to hold no judgment around emotions. Any emotion is not bad, or good; instead the goal is to allow emotion to run through you, instead of bottling up your feelings. This empowers you to both experience emotions and learn what is triggering to you based on what emotion shows up.

We all want to be connected with one another, whether we are aware of this need or not. It is encoded in our genes. Connection is the antidote to addiction, anxiety, depression and over identification with performance for validation.

It is our goal to change the paradigm of society from being fear and shame-based, to being aware and conscious. Fear and shame never creates the results that we desire in our lives.

We want to help people move away from functioning from a place of self-limiting beliefs that keep generating the same unwanted behavior and results over and over. We want people to become open, connected human beings who live authentic lives.