Philosophy

Atherton New Living is a program that was designed to help encourage, motivate, and inspire clients to adapt to adversity, find contentment in life, and push themselves to achieve their wildest dreams.

This program focuses on mental, emotional, and physical well being. Our society is currently overstimulated, and with that comes a lack of emotional control.

One of the more common occurrences is clients attending a 30 day program. They finish the 30 days feeling better, and feeling they have this addiction thing under control.

Similar to when inmates leave prison after years of incarceration, they are thrust into an unknown society and uneducated on how to properly adapt to the world around them.

Whether fresh out of prison or fresh out of rehab, when people are forced into the unknown they tend to gravitate to old ways and old habits.

All of us do this, it’s instinctive for us to react with old habits when we haven’t developed new ones. This program encourages, motivates, and inspires individuals to create new habits that can withstand all levels of adversity.

In this program we identify the clients strengths, weaknesses, likes, dislikes, and use them to our advantage while practicing the art of life’s fundamentals.

Too often in life, people are under the belief that they have life’s basic fundamentals down to a science, yet don’t practice them on a daily basis.

Honesty is a basic fundamental that we all understand and we’re all aware of. It sounds very simple and basic to practice being honest with yourself and others, but how often are we actually honest with ourselves? Truly honest with ourselves where we analyze each decision we make by focusing on our reason of thought.

Are we being selfish in an attempt to feed our self-esteem issues, not realizing we’re making it worse, or are we being selfish to help build our self-esteem for the betterment of our character?

To be truly honest with oneself, you have to confront and address characteristics that you’ve avoided for years.

One of the more common issues in sobriety is the inability to recognize unhealthy stimuli and the frequency in which we use them. We unintentionally seek foods and entertainment that provide stimuli, then justify why those behaviors are acceptable.

The food industry does a phenomenal job of marketing addictive foods to us. Cell phones, video games, and TV shows keep us glued to our device for entertainment.

But, what we fail to realize is that those small subtle addictive foods and entertainment devices make it more likely for us to relapse because at some point that stimuli won’t be enough to feed our appetite.

One of the great fundamental practices of this program is to decrease self-esteem issues. Self-esteem can either improve, maintain, or get worse by our daily actions.

In this program we emphasize not making self-esteem worse. We take a comprehensive look at each individual’s daily routine in search of how their self-esteem is being affected.

For instance, saying or behaving in a way that triggers a negative response from others. Gossiping can take us down a path we didn’t intend to go, but it happens to the best of us.

Being loud and acting out in hopes to impress others. Feeling offended and easily defensive is a tall tale sign that self-esteem is low.

These small examples have a huge impact on our psyche. By eliminating some of these small habits, we naturally increase good ones. The idea being that we’re not looking to practice great habits and behaviors, we’re simply looking to eliminate the bad ones.

Attention to detail is another example of a fundamental that is practiced in this program. Let’s say you listen to a podcast instead of scrolling endlessly through social media. That can be great because you’re making an effort to improve.

But what if you start to notice that your attitude throughout the day is negative. The more you pay attention, and focus on the details of your day, you notice that the podcast you watch gets your blood boiling and spirals you into a vortex of negative thought process. That is a simple detail that is easily fixable.

By paying attention to those fine details, clients are now seeking truth. They’re examining themselves, being honest about the situation, and doing what’s necessary to correct it. These are simple acts that we all need to practice, but few actually do.

All of us have choices to make on a daily basis where we either do, or we don’t. This can be viewed two different ways. You can either do the right thing, or don’t.

You can either do the wrong thing, or don’t. Too often we impulsively make decisions and suffer the consequences later. The do and don’t thought process encourages clients to think before they act.

The practice of a quick analysis before making a decision, will go a long way for any client in recovery. One of the lessons clients learn in this program is the understanding of how to maximize effort.

You can’t maximize success through minimal effort. Maximum effort was made on a daily basis to obtain our drugs while we were under the influence. For all of us in recovery, it was our actions as drug addicts that is now our greatest example of our potential in maximizing effort.

In this program the focus is on the client. Each client will be encouraged to focus their attention on what’s relevant to them specifically in pursuit of maintaining their sobriety. Focusing energy on social issues that don’t pertain to them, or their sobriety, is counterproductive to the objective.

Focusing energy on the past or the future can also be counterproductive. The true objective of the program is to allow clients to find what works best for them to maintain sobriety for the longevity of their lives, and they do this by focusing energy on themselves and what’s most relevant to them.