The Car Wash Model of Substance Use and Mental Health Treatment Needs an Overhaul. How to Prevent Relapse After Addiction Treatment? You Can't!

For years, upscale addiction treatment has followed a familiar formula. Beautiful settings. Yoga and meditation. Trauma-informed therapy. Art, music, and equine groups. A few individual sessions a week. It looks comprehensive—and in many ways, it is.

In 2006, we helped launch an early version of this model at Wonderland Treatment Center. At the time, the idea of combining luxury accommodations with recovery services was novel. Wonderland drew intense media attention, in part because of the number of well-known individuals who sought treatment there. Seventeen years later, that formula has become the industry standard.

And yet, outcomes haven’t improved.

Here’s the pattern. Most people enter treatment because of a crisis: an overdose, an ER visit, an arrest, a relationship on the brink, a job at risk. In that moment, a 30-day program—often costing tens of thousands of dollars—feels like a solution. Insurance rarely covers the full cost, but urgency overrides skepticism.

If 30 days were enough, relapse rates wouldn’t hover between 60 and 90 percent.

What typically happens instead is this: people leave treatment feeling better—temporarily. Structure fades—stress returns. Old patterns reappear, at first subtly, then decisively. Eventually, many find themselves back where they started, or worse. So they go back to treatment. Sometimes the same place. Sometimes a new one.

At The Evergreen Fund, we call this the Car Wash Model: enter, clean up, exit, relapse—repeat.

By the time many people reach us, the pattern is already entrenched. The average participant has been through five treatment programs. Some have been through dozens.

So we start from a different premise: addiction is often chronic and relapsing.

People frequently ask, “How do you prevent relapse after treatment?” Our answer is simple—and uncomfortable: you don’t.

What you can do is stop pretending relapse is a moral failure or a surprise. You can stop designing care around a single, expensive 30-day reset that drains resources and then gets repeated again and again. That approach doesn’t interrupt the cycle—it funds it.

Instead of pulling people through the Car Wash Model—clean, discharge, relapse, repeat—we focus on continuity, adaptation, and long-term stabilization. Recovery doesn’t fail because people relapse. It fails because systems are built as if they won’t.

So we build for what actually happens.

Our first goal is understanding—not compliance. Using the 12 Dimensions of Human Health and Wellness, we look at the whole person: trauma, relationships, finances, career, legal issues, family, housing, physical health, mental health, spirituality, and purpose. Then we help individuals decide what they want to work on first.

Recovery, we’ve learned, isn’t about fixing one problem in isolation. It’s about stabilizing a system.

That means assembling a multidisciplinary team tailored to the person, not forcing the person into a prepackaged program. It means sustained connection, ongoing adjustment, and community integration. And it means recognizing that recovery isn’t a one-time event but a long-term process that evolves as life unfolds.

We still believe the environment matters. We still value comfort, beauty, and care. But we’ve moved beyond the idea that recovery can be rushed through a single cycle.

The Evergreen Fund exists because lasting change doesn’t come from being “washed clean.”

How to Prevent Relapse After Addiction Treatment? It comes from rebuilding a life that no longer needs the rinse-and-repeat.