Young women graduate from Turnbridge when mind and body have been healed, and lessons have become actions. By this time, they will have lived a healthful, productive and enjoyable life. They will have secured a permanent sisterhood of support and shared experience. They will have learned to feel the pure joys of a healthy body and authentic experiences. They will have voiced pain from their deepest places and in so doing will have rid themselves of guilt, shame, and self-destructive beliefs. They will be permanently enriched from having learned to overcome one of life’s toughest challenges. They will possess the grit and the grace to persevere and succeed.
As Phase III concludes, women will be proactively maintaining a regular schedule, holding a job or volunteer, or deeply involved in the educational pursuits of their choosing. They are living in recovery – an example for themselves and others.
Each young woman’s integrated care team works closely together to identify when she is truly ready to complete the program. When case managers and clinicians are seeing not just adherence to plans and schedules, but regular use of autonomous healthy life skills and aspiration beyond addiction, they begin collaboratively planning for a client’s departure.
No young woman leaves Turnbridge without a clearly established and thoroughly communicated plan for continued wellbeing and support. Two months before a woman leaves the program, a Turnbridge Discharge Planner identifies and contacts the psychologists, psychiatrists, physicians and other health care professionals, sponsors, educators, and employers women will rely upon for ongoing treatment, support and livelihood after leaving. Establishing this network of healthcare providers, recovery community connections, and other supporters a young woman needs prior to her departure builds a critical bridge between life in treatment and independent living. Managing this transition between supervision and autonomy is essential to lasting recovery and is often an overlooked aspect of treatment.
To complete treatment at Turnbridge is to have searched more deeply, healed more completely, and learned more fundamentally than most people will in a lifetime. To successfully complete this program, young women will have had a life-changing experience from which they will have regained physical health, restored faith in self and others, and will have developed a deeply-seated power that comes from knowing that she is infinitely stronger and more resilient than she could have imagined.
Overcoming the challenges of mental health disorders is difficult, intense work. The women who attend Turnbridge become part of our family and models of hope. Once a member of the Turnbridge Sisterhood, always a member. Turnbridge maintains a strong and active alumni community. Our cherished alumnus regularly come together for reunions and support one another in good times and bad. We are also blessed to welcome back many of our alumni as Turnbridge staff and volunteers using their personal experiences to help others.
