Meet Pamela Anderson
Meet Pamela Anderson
My name is Pamela Anderson. I’m the Executive Director of A Forever Recovery Rehabilitation Center. I have an MBA and I am an addictions counselor. We decided to open a drug center for substance abuse and alcoholics that was different than any other approach. We got together a bunch of people, some in recovery, some of them professionals, and we looked at a lot of programs, what is good in them and what we wanted to build into our program. We thought it would be masterful if we could get the basic treatment modalities and put them under one roof— that being indigenous, cognitive behavior therapy, self-help groups, and faith-based. We want to take the individual and give them a clean slate to start from, which means we take a person off any kind of a substance, psychotropic or otherwise, legal or illegal, that they have been using and we start out with a clean body. And we enhance that by having a person use the gym and exercise for detoxification. And then we go into nutrition. We want nutritious food. We try to have it all healthy, made from scratch and organic. So, it’s a new approach to treatment which encompasses the whole self.
Our Three-Phase Program
At A Forever Recovery, our curriculum is basically in three phases. The first phase of our program, we do an inventory and self-discovery. It is a series of questions, about 280, that were written to have a person go through their childhood, their early adolescence, and then their adulthood. And it’s written for you to get rid of the guilt, get rid of your anxiety, just to come face to face with all your issues. When they are finished doing that, you may burn it or you can save it. It’s just so that you’re starting your mind out, you’re open, you’re open to change, you’re open to progress, and you’re open to looking at yourself as the potential for being sober, content, and happy.
The second phase of our program or the bulk of our program consists of moral reconation therapy, and it is a cognitive-based program for moral reasoning. It’s a series of steps they go through. Step one being honesty; can you be honest with yourself, can you be honest with others? Then can you trust? Can you trust this program, can you trust yourself? Then you go into acceptance and uncertainty. The program, it has 12 steps, the last step being you have come to a state of grace, and then we consider you able to graduate. Along with that, we have life skills classes such as anger management, music therapy. Some are a little lighter, but they all are recovery-based.
Then, the third part of our program is our aftercare program where we work with you and your family to develop a plan that you are going to follow for structure when you leave our program. You may choose to go to sober living. We outline meetings for you to go to. You may go to intensive outpatient or you may go to counseling, but you need to follow the aftercare program for long-term sobriety.
Helping Clients Learn to Love Themselves Again
One thing about myself and my staff, I expect everybody to hold themselves to higher, or at least the same, standards as we expect out of our clients, and that being honesty and trustworthiness. A family can put their loved one in my care and know that we will give them the best care possible and that we will really try to change a person’s moral reasoning to make them understand that they can love themselves again and that every single person has value and that every person has potential.
