Residential Drug Rehab

Drug use rarely fits into one neat category. At Abbington House, residential drug rehab looks beyond the substance itself to understand what kept it going, what it was doing for the person and what needs to change when they leave.

Call:

01438 583222

Drug use does not always arrive with one neat label. We regularly see alcohol and cocaine together, cocaine and ketamine, or people using something to bring themselves up and something else to bring themselves back down again. Prescription medicines can be part of the picture too, although it is less common for someone to come to us because of prescribed medication alone. Drinking is often there somewhere as well.

Abbington House provides residential drug rehab in Stevenage, Hertfordshire. If alcohol is the main problem, our alcohol rehab page is the better place to start. If you are still trying to work out whether drug use has become addiction, our drug addiction information may be more useful first.

Who comes to Abbington House for drug rehab

People do not usually arrive here describing their situation in clinical language. They might say cocaine has got out of hand, that weekends have started spilling into the week, or simply that there is a bit of everything going on.

Sometimes it is alcohol and cocaine. Sometimes cocaine and ketamine. Sometimes somebody has spent a long time moving between uppers and downers without really thinking of it as mixed drug use at all. They just know life has become increasingly difficult to manage.

Families usually know more than people give them credit for. They often know which substances are involved. What they do not always know is the scale of it.

They know what it is doing to the family. They know about the worry, the tension in the house and the promises to stop that have not lasted. They can often see that something is getting worse even when they cannot see every part of it.

That is why our first job is not to squeeze somebody into a category. We need to understand what has actually been happening.

The substances we treat

For some people, one substance clearly sits at the centre of the problem. When that is the case, we have more detailed information about how treatment applies to it.

Cocaine rehab covers cocaine and crack use, including situations where alcohol has become closely tied to using.

Ketamine rehab looks at treatment where ketamine has become difficult to stop or has started taking up more of somebody's life than they intended.

Cannabis rehab is for people whose cannabis use has become persistent enough that attempts to stop do not seem to hold.

Heroin rehab and our information on opioid and painkiller rehab cover opioid use, including prescription painkillers.

We also work with dependence involving prescription medicines, including benzodiazepines.

But the substance name is only the starting point. Someone can arrive saying, “I’m here because of cocaine,”and that may be completely true. We still want to understand what cocaine was doing for them in the first place.

It is not only about the drug

There are reasons people use cocaine. For one person it might have made them feel confident in situations where they normally felt uncomfortable. For somebody else it may have helped them keep going when they were exhausted or struggling. We have also worked with people who, looking back, can see that substance use had become a way of self-medicating difficulties around ADHD long before they understood what was happening.

That does not mean every person has some hidden diagnosis waiting to be uncovered. It means we do not stop the conversation at, “You use cocaine, therefore cocaine is the problem.”

If something kept being used despite everything it was costing somebody, then it was probably doing something for them as well.

That is an important part of how we understand addiction at Abbington House.

Repeated attempts to stop matter too. Someone may have genuinely meant it every time they said they were finished. Then a few days or weeks later they are back in the same pattern. Anxiety, depression, trauma or neurodivergence may sit underneath that. Sometimes there is something else entirely that only starts to become clear once life has quietened down.

The point is not to invent an explanation for somebody. It is to take enough time to understand them.

What drug rehab here actuallylooks like

People sometimes imagine residential rehab as a rigid timetable where every hour is accounted for and everybody is expected to fit into the same routine.
There is structure here, but Abbington House is still a home.
One of the reasons residential treatment can help is that somebody is temporarily away from many of the pressures, relationships, routines and triggers that have kept drug use going. For a while, there is some distance between the person and the environment they have been trying to change inside.
Where detox is clinically appropriate, it takes place at Abbington House and is assessed individually. The details of withdrawal and detox sit within our detox section; there is no need to repeat them here.
The first day or two are often much less dramatic than people expect. A lot of it is simply about settling in.
People can arrive exhausted. Some are anxious. Some are embarrassed about what has happened, and some are still not entirely convinced they want to be here. We are not trying to drag everything out of somebody the moment they walk through the door.
There is a room to sleep in. There is fresh food. The house is calm. There are people around who understand addiction because many of our staff have lived through it themselves.
Those things might sound small compared with therapy, but they matter.
People tend to engage when they feel understood. If somebody feels they are being judged, managed or spoken at, they can close down very quickly. If they begin to feel that the people around them genuinely understand where they are coming from, something changes.
That feeling of safety gives the deeper therapeutic work somewhere to begin.

Treatment is built around the person in front of us

Once somebody has started to settle, the work becomes more individual.

Michael Williams is responsible for care planning at Abbington House. The care plan is not built around the assumption that everybody using the same drug needs the same thing. It looks at the person, the pattern of substance use and what appears to have been keeping that pattern alive.

Treatment includes one-to-one therapy and group work, but the important part is what those conversations are trying to understand. Why did this become useful? What kept pulling the person back to it? What happened during previous attempts to stop? What becomes difficult when the substance is taken away?

Our approach is trauma-informed, and where mental health difficulties or neurodivergence are part of somebody’s life, they are not treated as an inconvenience sitting beside the addiction. They form part of understanding the person properly.

That does not mean every difficult experience gets turned into a clinical explanation. Sometimes somebody simply needs enough time, safety and honesty around them to begin making connections they had not been able to make before.

Why feeling understood matters

Michael Williams knows that from his own experience of addiction and recovery.

“As someone who has battled addiction, the loss of my parents and a deep sense of hopelessness, the thing that first opened my eyes to the possibility of change was having people around me who would advocate for me, take the time to understand me and help me see potential in myself that I couldn’t see at the time.

That is what Abbington House stands for. This is more than addiction treatment. Everyone who walks through our door is a human being who may not yet be able to see their own potential.”

The people around you matter

Abbington House is a small residential rehab centre in Stevenage Old Town, Hertfordshire. People are known personally here, and most of the staff have their own experience of recovery.

That does not mean everybody's story is treated as though it is the same. It means people are less likely to feel that they need to explain addiction from the beginning before somebody understands what they mean.

The first person many families or potential residents speak to is Michael Garnham, our Director of Admissions. Michael is approaching 30 years in recovery from alcohol and cocaine addiction. That experience matters when somebody calls feeling frightened, ashamed or unsure what needs to happen next.

You can meet the wider Abbington House team and see the people involved in treatment and day-to-day care.

Abbington House is CQC-regulated and received the Doctify Great Patient Experience Award 2026, placing the centre within the top 30% of providers for patient experience.

Families are part of what has happened too

Addiction does not stay neatly with the person using drugs.
By the time somebody comes into treatment, their family may have spent months or years worrying about what is going to happen next. They may have heard promises to stop before. They may be exhausted from trying to work out when to help and when helping has started making things worse.
We run weekly online family sessions because families need somewhere to make sense of what has happened as well.
The work is not about teaching relatives how to control somebody's recovery. It is about helping them understand addiction, their own experience of living around it and what healthier boundaries can look like when somebody comes home.

Life at Abbington House

A lot of recovery happens in conversations that are not scheduled.

It might be talking to somebody over breakfast, sitting with another resident after a difficult therapy session or having a member of staff notice that something is not quite right before the person has found the words for it themselves.

Fresh meals, a warm bed and a calm house are part of the treatment environment here. They are not luxuries added around the edges.

For somebody who has been living with constant stress, broken sleep, arguments, secrecy or the repeated cycle of using and trying to stop, ordinary things can start to matter again.

This is why we describe Abbington House as residential treatment rather than a clinical environment somebody simply passes through. People live here while they do the work.

Support continues afterwards too. Everyone completing treatment at Abbington House has access to one year of structured aftercare, alongside lifetime access to the Abbington Community.

How long drug rehab takes and what it costs

Most residential stays at Abbington House are around 28 days, although length of stay is assessed individually. Our length of stay page explains this in more detail.

Treatment is charged as a single fixed fee rather than adding separate charges as the stay progresses. The current fee and what is included are kept in one place on our rehab costs page.

Private residential treatment is not the only option. Free local drug and alcohol services are available, and your GP can also help you understand the support available where you live. Our guide to choosing addiction treatment explains some of the different routes.

Starting drug rehab at Abbington House

You do not need to know exactly what to say when you call us.

Sometimes somebody rings and knows precisely what has been happening. Other times it takes a conversation to understand the pattern properly. A family member may know the drugs involved but be trying to work out how serious things have become and what they can realistically do next.

The first conversation gives us somewhere to start. We can talk about what has been happening, what substances are involved, previous attempts to stop and anything else that may be important before an assessment is arranged.

After that, the admissions team will explain what happens next. You can read about the admissions process or call Abbington House on 01438 583222.

Contact us