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Our Mission
We provide comprehensive, compassionate treatment for those individuals and families suffering from eating disorders and co-occurring mental health conditions.
Our Story
By Way of the Sea:
More than a logo: A reflection of who we are
ViaMar, in Spanish, means By Way of the Sea, but it is more than our name, and the shell is more than our logo.
Together, they represent the philosophy at the heart of how we understand healing and recovery. Together, they carry a deeper meaning that symbolizes the therapeutic journey, the courage to explore what lies beneath the surface.
Treatment for an eating disorder is medically, physically, emotionally, and nutritionally transformative. Recovery requires the courage and capacity to emerge from the depths of despair, shame, and hopelessness toward a life beyond an eating disorder, a life beyond co-occurring addictions and mental health conditions. By Way of the Sea represents the journey, the passage, and the process. The shell represents protection and what once served a person as a source of safety.
The sea has long symbolized restoration, healing, rebirth, passage, and bringing to the surface what is hidden in its depths. The currents of the sea are symbolic of the forces that shape us. The tides move forward and backward, symbolic of the nonlinear nature of recovery. The shore represents emergence and a return to the life one deserves. At the surface of the sea, we can only observe one part; the deeper one goes, the more one can observe what exists beneath what is visible. The Scallop shell is symbolic of protection, the protection to feel safe from the grips of what lies beneath the surface.
Eating disorders, as with substance use disorders, along with psychological defenses, can appear at the surface as a way to cope and protect oneself from the depths of trauma, grief, attachment wounds, shame, fear, submerged and repressed emotions, unmet developmental needs, identity, and a fragile or damaged self-worth. The recovery journey requires softening and letting go of maladaptive coping strategies that once served the purpose of protection. The therapeutic process must address the very serious, destructive presenting symptoms, as well as what has remained unspoken, unfelt, and defended.
Emergence requires vulnerability, and as with the sea, there isn’t simply one way through its depths. Each person arrives in treatment with a different history, a different story, different wounds, and different defenses; therefore, each person will require different paths and approaches for recovery to emerge.
At ViaMar, our primary focus is not only to restore physical, psychiatric-medical, and nutritional well-being; we explore the experiences that shaped a person. The experiences that influenced how someone learned to survive. The experiences that shape how someone sees themselves and the world. We explore the currents that carried individuals to ViaMar to understand what will help them anchor successfully in recovery and to the life they deserve. The therapeutic process strengthens what is within each person to find their way forward. While a person’s history remains part of who they are, it no longer has to define them, hold them hostage, fuel their fear, or remain a wound to run from in search of protection and safety. Out of one’s history can emerge a renewed self, strength, and hope.
Our Values
Why ViaMar Health?
Our patients come from all across the United States to receive care from ViaMar Health. Our program is unique, as we maintain small groups in each level of care; we are licensed for residential. Our clinical team drives treatment and incorporates tools and therapeutic groups to help each individual client.
Each week at ViaMar is unique, the group content offered is shifted each week to meet the needs of our patients. Our leadership has over 70 years of experience treating eating disorders, making ViaMar Health the best option for you, your loved one, or your client.
