Sorry to come back to this - I realised I recommended Sanctuary Lodge/UKAT, but didn’t say why 🤦🏼♀️
My issue was alcohol and I went for 28 days. There were people in there who had much longer stays, and a few had shorter stays. People there were experiencing many different types of addiction, many had more than one.
Within a couple of hours of being there I saw a doctor (this was standard) who established that I required a medical detox , so this was started that day and took 7 days. It didn’t mean a delay in therapy, that started alongside the detox.
From the minute we woke up to the minute we went to bed, our time was accounted for. We had group therapy, 1:1 therapy, organised downtime activities such as yoga, acupuncture, and scheduled free time to prepare written work. Phone/internet use was limited to about an hour à day, and by the time we had queued up to be given our devices it was more like 50 minutes. There was a basic onsite gym, with closely monitored use.
The food was excellent. I was one of the people who had stopped eating pretty much anything substantial or healthy because of the level of my addiction, and I rediscovered the joy of good food. We were not given much in the way of sweet things, and the good provided was healthy, varied and plentiful.
SL did follow a 12 step approach, but in a very basic way - the 12 steps in their recognised format are quite wordy, but break it down and Step 1 is basically to admit you’ve got a problem, Step 2 is to recognise you can’t sort it out by yourself. In a typical 28 day stay, most people cover steps 1-3 in depth. Every evening we attended a Zoom meeting of AA, NA, CA, or had someone who had previously attended the rehab come to talk to us about their lives since leaving. I was invited back after about 2 years sobriety to give such a talk.
After I left rehab, there was one year follow-up in the form of 90 minute Zoom meetings once a week, and I saw through these meetings that additional follow-up support was provided to one chap in particular who needed it.
Sanctuary Lodge is a private facility and my stay there was expensive (for me, anyway, but reading Mumsnet I see people paying similar amounts for good holidays). A huge benefit was that as soon as I recognised I needed outside help and was ready to accept it, a place was available for me the following week. That gave me time enough to get my stuff together, explain what was happening to people who I wanted to know, but not long enough to talk myself out of it or persuade myself I wasn’t really ‘that bad’.