Family Run Addiction Centre, dedicated to professionalism, care and results.
Meet The Team
Amanda Jane Kennedy - Treatment Director
Unlike any other centre I have been involved with, we really do go that extra mile. Everyone is an individual and that is how you are treated. Yes of course we are a business, but it’s our life too, and our business is your life”.
Hello let me tell you a bit about me; I was born in 1966 in Manchester. I had a happy and relatively normal childhood. I dreamed of living a beautiful life and I never ever at any time thought that that my life and childish plans were to fall foul of drink or drugs. I started experimenting with cannabis and drinking at 14. By 18 had progressed to heroin and cocaine (whilst of course still drinking).
To be honest with you everything during this phase of my life I’m ashamed to say is very hazy. I do however remember meeting the man of my dreams, for me it was love at first sight with this lovely man called Dominic. When we got together we both (he was drinking and using drugs too) tried to cut down our drinking and drug use… that lasted a few months… and then we went out of control again. I was now 24.
I did hold down the occasional job but soon I lost even that. I literally lost everything at 24. My car, house and career all gone. It wasn’t too long after this we decided to move to London to seek a new life. Before long my old life found me and I was living rough. I lived on the streets for about 2 years. It seems madness to me now but at the time all I cared about was getting my next fix.
I used to attend a homeless women’s shelter, not as a worker nor volunteer but one of the homeless. I had no contact with family, no friends, nothing. One person there, a lady called Pat told me that I was going to die unless I let her help me, what did I have to lose? Absolutely nothing, it had all gone anyway. I was so relieved I can’t begin to tell you by typing this. There are no words to explain fully how I felt. Pat got me into treatment when I was 26, it was November 1992.
I left treatment intent on helping people as lovely Pat had helped me. I volunteered for 2 years at the London Lighthouse/Terence Higgins Trust (for people with HIV and AIDS) and another drop in centre in the capital. I really felt I found my calling. But to help people I really wanted to do it properly. So I enrolled at Birkbeck College to get myself some credentials. In 1996 I graduated a fully qualified Addiction Counselor (understanding the psychology of addiction and with a special interest in personality disorders).
I am proud to be one of the first women involved in the pioneering teams going into prisons and speaking to prisoners about addiction.
I came to Spain several years ago where I was instrumental in setting up and running PCP (now Rehab Today). Last year (2008) myself and Dominic left and setup our very own Treatment Centre, Rehab in Spain - New Life Addiction.
Dominic Kennedy
“The whole point of counseling in its purest sense is care and if that care doesn’t come first you will always get a watered down version”.
Hi, I’m ‘the other half’, Dominic Kennedy. My life was pretty much a mirror image of Amanda’s. I started drinking at about 14 and for the next couple of years if any one asked then, ‘Of course I’m okay’, I would say. I knew teenagers got drunk and smoked weed so how was I any different? I held it together in school and actually did alright up until I was 16. That’s when it started going belly up. It was mostly cannabis but I wouldn’t say ‘No’ to anything I was offered. I began to become lethargic and very lazy about school. I soon left any goals and ambitions behind.
I left school and started working for my father. He was a decorator but I knew he was disappointed in me. He found drugs on me once but I brushed it off with a very believable downright lie. I realise now he was in denial himself and he didn’t want to have to admit that his son had a drug problem, what parent really does?
I did a City and Guilds in Painting and Decorating and I was maintaining a façade of a normal life. My drinking and drug use progressed but I really didn’t realize it. I was kidding myself behind the scenes.
I went to the Falkland Islands in 1984 to get out of the country and break the cycle and rut I had got myself into with my drinking and drug use. In 1985 I came back clean and sober… or so I thought. I had saved enough money to put a large deposit on a house and settle down. I started drinking just at the weekends and then it seemed like overnight that I was right back to being 16 again, actually it was within 1 week of setting foot in England. I was now worse than when I left 13 months prior.
Within 2 years I had blown the lot and found myself with nothing. By 25 I had met Amanda and married her. We moved to London where we soon couldn’t keep up repayments on any home and we were homeless.
Amanda introduced me to a lady called Pat. Pat had given Amanda a glimmer of hope and I wanted that too. So on the same day Pat booked Amanda in to a treatment centre I went in too.
I started volunteering whilst in treatment but my journey has mainly been through the Fellowships (Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous and, Cocaine Anonymous).
A qualified drugs and alcohol counselor; he continues to study with Action on Addiction in the UK. He uses a humanistic and affirming approach with clients and also specialises in family therapy.
Amanda and I came to Spain a few years ago and we set up a Treatment Centre but it was never really our own.
We felt last year that it had got away from our philosophy of intent, which was and still is being able to offer a different kind of treatment… a really humanistic form of treatment. This is no way something new but when business and money began to get in the way the basic driving philosophy of pure and simple care became secondary. We both became resolved to own and run our very own centre.
Nicholas Kenny
“I had the utmost faith in what they achieved with the clients I saw passing through and I was still clean and sober! Amanda and Dominic did it with me, the most skeptical of all so I really wanted to get them in a place where they could help the most people without being stifled. It’s their approach and true compassion that blows me away”.
Nicholas was born on April 13th 1972 to a very respectable middle class family. He is quite keen for me to add that he was privately educated (Addiction has no boundaries)!
He remembers taking his first drink at 10. In his early teens he started smoking pot and boozing heavily. At 18 he decided to leave the UK and continue his education in America (he realises now that he was running away from his problems). “I lost the plot when I was in the states” he says frankly, “and I just couldn’t see it!” Everything collapsed for Nicholas in America and he went from job to job, each less glamorous than the last. He moved (ran away again!) all over the U.S and eventually in his late 20’s he kicked the drugs. But he freely admits; “I was still getting pissed whenever I could”. His drinking got to a critical point so… yes, he moved again and this time to France and became a kitchen installer.
Sick and tired of running away, because looking back at his jaunts around the world he saw this was exactly what he was doing, running away from his demons. He heard about Amanda and Dominic’s place in Spain and became a very skeptical client indeed. He was of course convinced it wouldn’t work for him, but he’d never been to Spain before so what was there to lose?
Nicholas completed their treatment course and felt right about moving back to the U.K.
At 34 and still miraculously to him, clean and sober he decided to go back to investigate further just how they did it. The three became firm friends and Dominic and Amanda soon offered him an administration job with them which he took.
So now the ‘complete skeptic’ is working with the two people whom he thought could never pull him out of his drink and drug hell!
Nicholas saw that Amanda and Dominic needed a different environment for their practice to really thrive and after experiencing their treatment first hand he put it to them to set up Rehab in Spain - New Life Addiction.
Dr. Scott E. Borrelli, Consultant Psychologist
Board Certified in Clinical, Counselling and Medical Psychology
“We are really lucky to have Scott on board with us, ...he completely complements the therapy Amanda and I do”. (Dominic Kennedy - March 2009).
As Professor of Psychology and Counselling at Boston University and the University of Maryland, Scott has been training and supervising psychotherapists for many years, teaching them to select from an ever-expanding range of valuable counselling approaches to fit individual client needs. He has headed psychology departments in many settings, including hospitals, clinics, schools and community agencies. He is Board Certified in clinical, counselling and medical psychology and a Licensed Psychologist in America (California, Florida, Massachusetts), as well as a Chartered Psychologist in the United Kingdom. He specialises in integrative and interpersonal therapies, with interests in multiple diagnoses, diversity issues, addiction and substance abuse, and trauma interventions. He often combines hypnotherapy, stress management, and meditation in his clinical approach. He is a European Accredited EMDR Consultant, and Chief Editor of the EMDR Practitioner
(www.emdr-practitioner.net).
Consistent with the team perspective at Rehab in Spain, Scott combines compassion and positive expectations with state-of-the art treatment approaches, focusing on all dimensions of the client/person: biological, psychological, social/family, and spiritual. Honest communication, self-knowledge, (re-) empowerment of the individual and the shaping of a caring community are all considered real possibilities at the Centre, liberating clients from addiction, and allowing the achievement of true happiness.
Dr. Wolfgang Piller and Dr. Axel Thieke
“I have worked very closely with both doctors over the past 7 years and I am delighted that they are still working with me. They both understand addiction and more so the physical aspects. Our clients are never rushed with the doctors and are always able to chat privately to them at any time about anything”. (Amanda Kennedy - March 2009)
- Dr. Piller specialises in nutritional advice - vital when recovering from addiction.
- They have a medical practice in Almuñecar, Spain.
- Each client visits our doctors for a physical checkup and frank chat about the actual medical affects of what their body is experiencing.
- Each patient is ensured the most appropriate detoxification regime is prescribed.
Lely Aldworth
"Yoga and meditation are about joining up the dots and getting connected to what is real right now. Recovery asks us to take one day at a time, yoga and meditation asks us to take one second at a time. The tools are the body, the breath and awareness. Once we move out of the thinking mind into the body and into the heart, we are connecting rather than disconnecting, and can navigate more easily between what is known as ‘small mind’ and ‘big mind’".
Lely studied Hatha and Astanga yoga in London, qualifying in 1999 as a yoga teacher with the Sivananda School in Kerala, India. She continues to study Lyengar, Hatha and dynamic styles of yoga, along with Buddhist meditation. She leads yoga retreats in Spain and since 2005 and has worked alongside Amanda and Dominic with people recovering from drugs and alcohol addictions in other treatment centres, developing accessible yoga and meditation programmes.
Arantza Puente
"I am over the moon that Arantza is with us again, not only is her yoga amazing but she offers clients so much more, she is genuinely concerned for everybody and full of love". (Amanda Kennedy – March 2009)
Arantza studied Hatha yoga in London, before qualifying in 1999 as a yoga teacher with the Sivananda School in Kerala, India. She went onto further qualify as a Thai yoga masseur with the Asokananda School in Chang-mai, Thailand. She continues to study Zen Buddhist and Vipassana meditation. She runs local yoga classes and retreats in both English and Spanish and she also works as a masseur and yoga instructor in another 12-step treatment centre (The one Amanda and Dominic Kennedy initially set up before Rehab in Spain – New Life Addiction).