The Importance of Accountability for the Chronic Relapser

Why is Accountability Important?

Accountability: an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one’s actions.

One of the key differentiators between Burning Tree Ranch and other treatment centers is our core focus on the importance of accountability.

Longing for their loved ones to adopt a sober, responsible lifestyle, our families hold a deep appreciation of Burning Tree’s emphasis on accountability. Like any family that struggles with addiction, they look forward to the day when their loved one can live free from the cycle of relapse. The staff at Burning Tree believe these are reasonable aspirations for any family to hold. We also believe that, sometimes, aspirations must be strived for. That’s why we have crafted an environment where accountability is central to helping our clients look at their actions honestly. For the chronic relapser, this introduction to accountability heralds the beginning of a brand-new relationship with honesty.
Accountability is the glue that ties commitment to the results
~Bob Proctor
At Burning Tree Ranch, we have thoughtfully designed a robust, clinically sophisticated program exclusively for the chronic relapser and their family. Understanding that honesty is the key ingredient to sustainable, life-long recovery, we have incorporated accountability to help our clients achieve permanent freedom from the bondage of addiction.

More About Burning Tree Ranch

Burning Tree Ranch is a highly sophisticated, long-term residential treatment center located outside of Dallas, TX, on a beautiful, 2,000-acre ranch. The program incorporates an advanced clinical curriculum that relies on evidence-based practices, addiction psychiatry, and 12 Step participation.

With a special emphasis on treating the chronic relapser, our program is designed to measure the progress of the individual, versus the progress of the calendar. Once our clients complete the progress-based residential portion of the Burning Tree Ranch program, they transition into the extended aftercare component of our curriculum.
Jesse Earwood, Executive Director
Quote Icon
“The Burning Tree Ranch program helps our clients understand how personal accountability is critical to living a life of sobriety, free from drugs and alcohol.”
~ Jesse Earwood, Executive Director of Burning Tree Ranch

Why is Accountability Important?

By the time a client arrives at Burning Tree Ranch to receive help, they have broken relationships, failed attempts at sobriety, and multiple other consequences associated with their addiction. They have not been able to stay sober despite multiple previous treatment opportunities. Likewise, the family has been through the myriad ups and downs associated with their loved one’s unending cycle of relapse. The revolving feelings of guilt, shame, fear, and anger linger like a wet blanket. Put simply, the recovery process has not worked for them. For some, hopelessness has set in. The staff at Burning Tree Ranch understand this.

We also understand why accountability is important.
Accountability prevents our client from remaining unaware of how they feel, how they show up in life, and how their actions affect others. At Burning Tree Ranch, accountability becomes the chief ingredient that allows our clients to live in integrity with their choices. It promotes a welcomed relationship with honesty that extends itself to the client’s peers, family members, and self. For the first time, our clients begin to experience how accountability can usher in a new area of trust, faith, and fulfillment to all their relationships. They begin to see themselves clearly as they learn to match their words with their actions. As they become proud of their interactions and begin to take pride in their commitments, their acts become more, and more estimable. With that, self-esteem returns.
In short, they begin to grow.
Staying accountable is necessary to ensure sustained progress towards a healthy lifestyle, a change in psyche, and the development of a whole new way of living. Accountability affects how we interact with others and influences our personal habits and behaviors. Without accountability, old behaviors can return, making relapse inevitable.

Living a Life of Excellence Beyond Sobriety

Accountability and structure are two of the key ingredients necessary for a complete and total change in our client’s outlook on life. At Burning Tree Ranch, we hold our clients accountable for the actions and beliefs that no longer serve their needs.

Fortunately, because we are an authentic long-term treatment center, we get to know our client’s true behaviors in an intimate, first-hand setting. Dedicated to helping every client create a life of excellence beyond sobriety, we address each behavior consistently and purposefully, as they arise.

With an accountable and structured environment, our clients absorb new life skills while becoming fully immersed in the 12-step process. Underpinning this structure are a host of clinically supportive interventions that include Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, Cognitive Behavior Therapy, EMDR, Neurofeedback, Equine Therapy, Addiction Psychiatry, and Individual and Group Therapy sessions.

As our clients begin to trust the process, become vulnerable, and take risks with the clinical support of our faculty, we delve deeper and deeper into the story of what has been blocking them from a life of excellence beyond sobriety.

As they grow in their honesty, open-mindedness and willingness, the truth begins to set them free.

Being Honest Through Action

Burning Tree Ranch clients are notoriously bright, witty, and loving. They possess numerous positive attributes. However, despite their many endearing traits, and wide array of personal accomplishments, they often have a difficult time being honest with themselves. This inability to be honest has been identified as a fundamental barricade to progress.
Fortunately, Burning Tree Ranch focuses on helping our clients identify when, how, and where their actions fail to match their intentions. We believe that a client’s ability to see their own behaviors honestly, will help them to see the truth in a way that benefits them well beyond sobriety.
Instead of enabling our clients to rely on the same, ineffective skill set that has permitted them to evade personal responsibility in the past (such as charm, manipulation, anger), we provide solutions that allow our clients a new level of accountability, honesty, and introspection. By providing a structured environment where honesty is the priority, we utilize mindfulness and accountability to help our client’s inventory their actions and take stock of what has been blocking them from permanent, meaningful sobriety.

Learn more about enabling & dependency

Our Chronic relapse therapies

Burning Tree Ranch utilizes
addiction medicine to aid in the diagnosis, treatment and recovery of persons with the disease of addiction.

A form of goal-oriented therapy that helps our clients understand how their thoughts affect their actions, leading to healthier thinking patterns and behaviors.

An evidence-based psychotherapy approach that helps our clients better manage stress, regulate emotions, and improve relationships with others.

An interactive psychotherapy
technique that helps our clients reduce the emotional distress caused by the unresolved pain associated with trauma.

An experiential therapy that imparts physical, cognitive, and emotional benefit to our clients as they engage the important work of establishing lifelong recovery.

A form of positive psychotherapy that helps our clients clarify their values and connect with their authentic selves, leading to a greater sense of self-worth and empowerment.

A humanistic form of psychotherapy that helps our clients concentrate on the present moment, and engage the
opportunity to they have increase
personal freedom and fulfillment.

Facilitated by a licensed clinician, group therapy helps our clients develop improved communication skills, boundaries, and self-awareness in a therapeutic setting.

We take into account the whole
person, not just the addiction. Our holistic approach enables our clients to discovery well-being for the mind, body, and spirit.

The goal of individual therapy is to motivate the client to explore certain behaviors that may interfere with, delay, or sabotage the opportunity to achieve permanent, lifelong recovery.

A form of psychotherapy that helps our clients re-build relationships with loved ones, and establish new relationships with a healthy support group of peers.

Neurofeedback Therapy is a noninvasive treatment designed to instruct patients as to how to control brainwave activity in order to change behaviors.

The Twelve Steps teach our clients how to live by a set of spiritual principles that are taught in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Enabling & Codependency