New Spirit Recovery · Encino, Los Angeles, CA
Rewired is an eight-pillar recovery curriculum written by our co-founder, a Certified Addiction Counselor, and taught only inside New Spirit Recovery. Clients work through it at their own pace during residential treatment, alongside weekly individual therapy and daily Rewired groups.
Admissions answer 24/7. Rewired is included in residential treatment at no separate charge.
What it is
Rewired is an eight-pillar personal growth curriculum, the 8 R’s, that New Spirit Recovery teaches inside residential treatment. Each pillar takes one subject that ordinary addiction programming tends to skip, such as boundaries or self-care, and works it through five fixed steps. Clinical treatment stabilizes a person. Rewired asks what that person intends to build next.
Clients work the pillars while receiving daily therapy, medical monitoring and group work, with individual therapy weekly at minimum. Therapists reference pillar content in those sessions, so a journal entry written on Tuesday can become the subject of Thursday's session rather than sitting unread in a folder.
Rewired curriculum groups sit inside the six hours of daily programming, seven days a week. The written work happens around them, so each pillar gets discussed with peers and processed privately rather than only one or the other.
Our co-founder wrote Rewired for this program and no other facility teaches it. Every other element of our programming exists elsewhere in some form, which makes the curriculum the part of a stay here that cannot be replicated by choosing a different provider.
The shape of a pillar
Every pillar runs the same five steps, in the same order. The repetition is deliberate. A predictable structure removes the effort of working out what to do next, which matters most when someone is early in recovery and carrying very little spare capacity.
A short grounding in the subject, written plainly. The only passive part of a pillar.
An activity that applies the topic rather than describing it, done during the residential day.
A written question that moves the topic from general to personal. Handwriting is the point.
The same question carried into a Rewired group, where peers hear each other answer it.
A single line you keep, chosen to be usable on a hard day rather than aspirational.
Rewired groups sit inside the six hours of daily programming, seven days a week, so every pillar gets discussed with peers as well as processed on your own.
The curriculum
The 8 R’s of Rewired are Restart, Reframe, Rewire, Rewrite, Reintroduce, Reaffirm, Refocus and Reinvention. They run in order, and the order carries meaning. Restart comes first because nothing after it holds without honesty and boundaries. Reinvention comes last because it asks a person to hold everything the previous seven taught them.
Authenticity and boundaries. Recovery starts by telling the truth about where you are and then drawing a line around it. Restart works on honesty in relationships and in self-perception, then on the limits that protect both. Boundary deficits run through most substance use disorders, and correcting them takes deliberate practice.
Changing the narrative, and mindfulness. The story a person tells about their addiction decides what they believe is possible. Reframe replaces the character-failure account with what actually happens in the brain, then pairs that with mindfulness practice so a craving can be noticed rather than obeyed.
Self-care routines across every part of life. New habits hold when they are scheduled, not when they are intended. Rewire builds physical, mental, emotional and spiritual routines, because unstructured time is one of the more reliable relapse risks and a calendar works as recovery equipment.
Overcoming limiting beliefs. Rewrite catches a destructive thought pattern, examines it, and replaces addiction-era self-criticism with something a person can live with. The beliefs in question have usually gone unquestioned for years, so the work is written and slow rather than settled in one conversation.
Self-love and positive self-talk. This pillar treats self-compassion as a skill rather than a mood. Reintroduce works on the internal voice that active use trained, because a person who speaks to themselves with contempt tends to relapse toward whatever quiets that voice.
Gratitude and affirmations. Reaffirm turns the work into lines you keep. The gratitude practice and the personal affirmations are written to be usable on a hard day rather than aspirational, which is the difference between a phrase that helps and a phrase that irritates.
Aligning goals with values. Goals that contradict a person's values do not survive contact with stress. Refocus sets what you want against what you actually care about and reconciles the two, so the plan for after treatment rests on something that holds when the structure of residential care is gone.
Personal growth and flexibility. The final pillar asks what the rest of a life looks like. Reinvention carries the previous seven into a continuing care plan and treats flexibility as the point, because the version of a person who leaves treatment is not the final one.
The eight principles come from The Rewired Method: The 8 R’s of Recovery, written by our co-founder Erica Spiegelman.
How it runs
Residential treatment at New Spirit Recovery runs six programming hours a day, seven days a week, inside a roughly 35-day stay. Rewired occupies part of that structure rather than sitting on top of it. Clients move through the eight in order at a pace their therapist sets with them, so the stages below describe a typical arc rather than a fixed timetable.
Nobody opens a pillar while still in acute withdrawal. Clients begin Restart once detox has done its work, then move into Reframe. Your therapist references pillar content in individual sessions from the first week, so the reading and the therapy point at the same thing rather than competing for attention.
Routines and limiting beliefs land in the middle of a stay, once there is enough stability to handle them. Trauma, family dynamics and relationship patterns tend to surface in therapy around the same point, and the journal prompts give that material somewhere structured to go rather than leaving it loose.
Self-talk and gratitude are the pillars a person uses rather than understands. Weekend community activities put a client outside the residence with a stressor to absorb and an internal voice to manage, while the clinical team is still there to debrief it afterwards.
Refocus and Reinvention pull the previous six into a written plan for life after treatment. Discharge planning starts at intake here rather than in the last week, so these two formalise a conversation that has been running the whole stay.
Who wrote it
Erica Spiegelman is a Certified Addiction Counselor (CADAC-II) who co-founded New Spirit Recovery and created the Rewired curriculum. She is the author of Rewired: A Bold New Approach to Addiction and Recovery and of The Rewired Method: The 8 R’s of Recovery, the book the eight pillars come from. She built the curriculum out of her counselling work and her own long-term recovery, which is why the pillars ask a reader to do something rather than to absorb a lecture.
The name states the method. Our treatment philosophy centres on rewiring the negative thought patterns, behaviours and habits that attach to a substance use disorder, and on long-term recovery rather than short-term abstinence. Every pillar traces back to that idea.
Erica holds the position plainly: people need more than residential treatment alone to get sober. Rewired exists to cover what the clinical hours do not.
Who it suits
Rewired is part of residential treatment at New Spirit Recovery, so every client in the residential program works through it. It tends to matter most to people who have completed treatment before and found that clinical stabilization alone did not hold.
A second or third admission usually means detox worked and the structure afterwards did not. Rewired targets exactly that gap.
Our program treats a substance use disorder alongside a co-occurring mental health condition. Pillar work runs in step with psychiatric care rather than competing with it. See our co-occurring depression and co-occurring PTSD programs.
Refocus and Reinvention build a continuing care plan, and discharge planning starts at intake rather than in the final week. If what happens after treatment worries you more than admission does, that is the part of this program to pay attention to.
Where Rewired runs
Clients complete Rewired at our Encino, Tarzana and Northridge residences. Our Encino address, 17856 Cathedral Place, is our main location. Admissions arrive from across the San Fernando Valley, wider Los Angeles County and out of state.
Common questions
Rewired is part of residential treatment rather than a separate billable service, so it carries no additional charge. New Spirit Recovery accepts PPO plans and bills them as an out-of-network provider. HMO and EPO policies are reviewed for a Single Case Agreement. We cannot bill Medicaid, Medi-Cal or Medicare. Check your coverage.
One call covers your insurance coverage, the right level of care, and whether a bed is open today. No obligation, no cost, and nothing is shared outside our clinical team.