Radix Recovery will address all phases of substance abuse recovery

For executive director Jacob Christenson, the launch of Radix Recovery, the Corridor’s newest substance abuse treatment facility, is about much more than the clinical process of helping clients through the often-challenging stages of recovery.

Radix will offer what Mr. Christenson describes as a unique and comprehensive “continuum of care” — treating not only the addiction itself, but the whole person behind that addiction.

“The idea is that substances affect the brain, but then addiction also begins to affect behavior over time,” Mr. Christensen said. “And that behavior leads to outcomes that aren’t very good — not being able to keep a job, or not being able to live independently, or having health problems. So instead of just saying ‘let’s teach you how to get the substance out of your brain,’ we want to help the person regain function in their life. Treating the whole person means not just dealing with the addictive behavior, but dealing with all the ramifications of that addictive behavior as well.”

Former Higley Mansion care center

Radix Recovery will be housed in the historic former Higley Mansion at 860 17th St. SE, built in 1910, a Cedar Rapids landmark which was most recently used as a senior assisted living facility before closing in the wake of the August 2020 derecho. It was reported as being fully vacant in 2021.

The renovation of the facility is estimated to cost $4.6 million. The project includes remodeling the existing 27,000-square-foot building, adding an extra 3,000 square feet and revamping the property’s landscaping, including removing or replacing dead trees and renovating the “blighted” fence surrounding the property.

The Cedar Rapids City Council approved a standard development incentive in November 2024, which provides a 10-year, 100% rebate of increased taxes generated by the project. The project is expected to generate $525,000 in total taxes over a 10-year period, of which $145,000 will be rebated .

The council then approved a development agreement for the project Dec. 17.

The renovation project is being developed by Dahnoven Builders of North Liberty.

Radix also received a $2 million grant from the Iowa Opioid Treatment and Recovery Infrastructure Program to help with the rehabilitation of the building. The rest will of the renovation be privately funded, Mr. Christenson said.

Historical significance, facility layout

The facility’s most current use as a care facility, with bathrooms in each of its private rooms, made it well-suited for the Radix Recovery program, Mr. Christenson said.

“The historical [aspect] was interesting, but not essential,” he said. “When we looked at this facility, we wanted a place where we wouldn’t have to tear down everything and start over. And as we walked around, it was already pretty well set up for what we wanted. When we walked around with some of the people that we’ve been working with who knew a lot about this market and this type of facility, they were dumbfounded that this was just sitting here. It’s pretty well tailor-made for what we want to do.”

The facility was identified by Radix founder Courtney Brennaman, a health psychologist at UnityPoint Health-St. Luke’s Hospital, and her husband, a developer, who first saw its potential for use as a substance use disorder facility.

The remodeling will maintain as much of the original materials and structures as possible to create a unique and interesting environment for clients, Mr. Christenson said.

“I am interested in that [history] being a conversation starter and something of interest to the people that come here,” Mr. Christenson said.

“The Higley Mansion holds deep significance in Radix Recovery’s mission,” the Radix Recovery website notes. “This beautiful, iconic building now serves as the cornerstone of hope and renewal. Its transformation into Radix Recovery’s home symbolizes resilience and the ability to rebuild, much like the journey of recovery itself. By breathing new life into the Higley Mansion, Radix Recovery is honoring its historic roots while creating a space dedicated to healing, growth and support for Iowans seeking lasting recovery.”

Leaders’ backgrounds

According to Radix Recovery’s website, the facility’s concept began with Dr. Brennaman’s vision, inspired by her father’s triumph over addiction.

“Experts in addiction treatment united with Covenant Family Solutions, Behavioral Health Partners, and Dahnovan Builders to form the Higley Partners,” the website says. “Together, they’re transforming Cedar Rapids’ Higley Mansion into a haven for recovery.”

Conversely, Mr. Christenson’s path to Radix is well-traveled.

He enrolled at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and joined the Army National Guard during his last year of doctoral studies. He served three years of active duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, but his primary interest at the time was in teaching.

“I tried to apply for teaching positions while I was in Afghanistan,” he said. “I got a lot of interviews, but I was not in a great place to come back and interview.”

After earning his Ph.D. in marriage and family therapy, Mr. Christenson took a position practicing in wilderness therapy at Aspen Achievement Academy, an adolescent therapy program based in Loa, Utah, which closed in 2011, and at the time, he felt his teaching career might be over.

“I learned I was good at therapy, so I anticipated I was going to work in that for a while,” he said. But after Aspen ceased operations, Mr. Christensen threw his hat back in the teaching ring and landed a position as marriage and family therapy instructor at Mount Mercy University, bringing him to Eastern Iowa for good. He also opened a private therapy practice on the side, but found his client load was becoming overwhelming, so in 2013 he founded Covenant Family Solutions, an outpatient facility providing health care therapy services for a variety of clients. 

“At the time, I thought, ‘we’ll just keep it really small,’” Mr. Christenson said. “But it grew really quickly, and by 2018 we had several locations. It was just overwhelming to be able to manage it all, so I quit teaching and started managing Covenant full-time.”

Covenant grew rapidly under Mr. Christenson’s watch, and now has eight clinics spread across central and Eastern Iowa.

“Things were good with that, and I enjoyed that work,” he said, “but then we were approached by Higley Partners to operate this facility, and at first I balked at it. I said ‘I’m not sure we’re interested. It’s not really what we do.’ I knew how it worked. I’ve worked with SUD (substance abuse disorder) clients before, so I knew the background. I went back and forth with this group for a few months before I had an awakening moment that this was just the right thing to do.”

“Addiction is an awful thing,” he added. “It takes away your ability to freely choose your life as you want to live it. And I had the feeling ‘you can do this, and it would be the right thing to do.’ So we committed to helping with the project, and I committed to being the executive director” — a role he’s now held full-time since September.

“If you would have asked me in 2011 what I would be doing in 2025, I would have said, I’ll be teaching at a university,” he said. “And if you asked me in August of this year, I would have said I’d be running Covenant. But things changed, and this opportunity became something that I felt really passionate about, and I wanted to make a difference. It was a reluctant engagement, but one I don’t regret.”

Pervasiveness of substance abuse

Mr. Christenson said he doesn’t have immediate personal connections with substance abuse victims, but the problems are pervasive throughout all levels of society.

“Certainly I know people that are struggling with addictions,” he said. “I think it’s hard to live your life without [knowing people in recovery]. But through the work that I’ve done is where I’ve seen most of the pain. When I was contemplating this move, and I was thinking about the people that I work with, I was saying in my head, ‘it’s been a little while since I’ve done straight-up SUD counseling,’ and then I started to think about the caseload of people that I was working with. I realized, for that person, alcohol was causing all their nervous problems, or this person was going to lose their job because they were using too much weed. Everybody I work with knows somebody who is involved with alcohol and drugs in a way that’s damaging their life. So it started to dawn on me that I was way more involved in working in this environment already than I previously thought.”

The general population may not have a substance use disorder, Mr. Christenson said, “but whether it’s diagnosed as a disorder or not, alcohol and drugs cause a lot of problems for a lot of people. The classic one is, ‘well, I can’t sleep very well, so drink a bottle of wine. Well, it knocks me out, but now I’m just unconscious. I’m not actually sleeping better, so I wake up even more tired, then I need to drink another bottle of wine and then I just feel crappy the next day, and I go through this over and over.’ People see alcohol and drugs as the solution to their problem, but they also cause a lot of problems. It’s way more ubiquitous than you might initially think.”

Continuum of care, treatment phases

Mr. Christenson noted that once fully open in late summer or early fall, Radix will provide a continuum of care in substance use disorder treatment, including detox, inpatient, partial hospitalization, and outpatient programs.

“If you have somebody that’s actively addicted — let’s say they are an active alcoholic, drinking a ton every day just to be able to feel right, not even necessarily to  feel intoxicated, but just to maintain — coming off of alcohol is dangerous if you’re not being monitored,” he said. “So your first level of care is detox. In detox, we’re just going to get you clean and help you to get to a point where those substances are enough out of your system that you can begin to really focus on recovery.

“Then we’ll offer inpatient treatment,” he said, during which clients will live at Radix full-time. “You can spend anywhere from 30 to even 90 or more days in inpatient, where you’re really working on and focusing on everything that you need to do to get your life back in order. We have three words that we talk a lot about — rest, rebuild and recover. Let’s get you out of your life that was just going down the toilet. Let’s get you to the point where you’re recovering, and then let’s also help you begin to rebuild your life. That’s what inpatient is really about.”

Next in the process is a partial hospitalization program, or PHP.

“That’s an everyday program, but you go home at night,” Mr. Christenson said. “You’re in the program maybe from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. Because they go home at night, they’re considered an outpatient. The main idea would be, you’re getting about 28 hours of treatment a week.”

The final phase, Mr, Christenson said, is an intensive outpatient program, in which clients may live in a sober living environment — “a house where other people are recovering too. And maybe there’s a case manager that’s there that’s talking to you from time to time or helping you manage your life. At the same time, you’re living independently when you’re not in the program. People may go back to work, they begin to rebuild their lives.”

Typical timeframes include five to 10 days of detox, 30 to 60 days of inpatient treatment, 10 to 12 weeks of partial hospitalization and 10 to 12 weeks of intensive outpatient treatment.

Clients may also participate in standard outpatient programs, including individual or group counseling sessions, after their main treatment regimen is completed.

Radix Recovery will offer all phases of treatment and recovery under a single roof, which is highly unusual in the substance abuse treatment industry. Most hospitals, for example, may offer intensive outpatient programming, while other treatment facilities may focus on detox and inpatient treatment.

“So when you’re done with those programs, you go somewhere else,” he said. “Typically people do one here, one there, and sort of move around.”

Amenities, ‘whole-person treatment’

Radix Recovery focuses on treating the whole person, Mr. Christenson stressed, and will include amenities like a computer room, library, salon, barber, alternative treatments, an infrared sauna, and cold plunge.

The facility will also have a pickleball court and an exercise room with personal trainers.

“There’s really nothing that compares to us in Iowa, once you add in our other differentiators,” Mr. Christenson said. 

The Radix Recovery program also includes vocational training, financial counseling, and other services to help clients rebuild their lives.

“When you’re in the midst of an addiction, everything else falls apart,” Mr. Christenson said. “Your finances fall apart. I was actually talking to one addict who was saying that he was spending $300 a day on dope. That’s $9,000 a month. That’s a lot of money. No matter how you sell that, by the time that you come out of addiction, you don’t have anything left. So we work with them on finances. When people come out of an addiction, their lives are pretty much in turmoil, and so we want to help them to rebuild everything — and take care of themselves, their whole selves.”

The operation of Radix Recovery is a joint venture.

Covenant Family Solutions serves as the clinical team for the facility, managing the program and day-to-day operations to ensure high-quality care and impactful recovery outcomes.

Behavioral Health Partners contributes expertise in addiction treatment consulting and marketing, shaping the strategic vision and expanding Radix Recovery’s reach.

Family program, community-building

Radix Recovery will also offer a program to help family members of clients, especially those who may be enabling the addiction.

“If we have people coming from farther away, which we believe will happen just because of the quality of services that we can provide, it’ll be harder to do in-person work (with families), Mr. Christenson said. “But a lot of programs on the weekends are unstructured, and so we can use that unstructured time to incorporate some family programming … we know that if you come out of an environment that leads you to use, and you get clean, and go back to an environment that’s exactly the same, it’s really hard to maintain sobriety. So if we’re talking about the family and the circumstances and things that are contributing, we’ve got to work to help them change all those things.”

The program aims to change the environment that contributes to the addiction, as clients often need to leave their current environment to maintain sobriety.

“There’s almost always someone, some type of interdependence that has been created around an addiction that allows it to continue,” he said. “That definitely makes it harder to stop.”

The facility will create a community of recovery, with a large open space for activities like pool tables and video games for recovering addicts to socialize in an informal atmosphere.

“We will bring people together in a safe space, because isolation goes hand in hand with addiction,” Mr. Christenson said. “When we counter that, when we build a community, that’s something that not a lot of programs do. In a perfect world, we’ll have people that will graduate from our program, and then they’ll come back and help. Maybe we’ll have open times that those folks can come in and mentor some of the people that are currently in the inpatient program. Building this community of recovery is something that a lot of programs don’t do.”

Conventional 12-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous will also be made available to recovering addicts, but Mr. Christensen said such programs won’t be mandated.

“The way that we’ve constructed our programming, we will facilitate and help people to engage with 12-step programs, but it’s not going to be the foundation of everything we do,” he said. “There’ll be an option, and it’s something that we will present as important, because spirituality is very well tied to recovery from addiction. There’s really good evidence that people that tap into spirituality, whatever that means, or however that is defined, are much more successful than those that don’t. So we will present that to people and say, here is a model that you can look at. We don’t say you have to go to an NA meeting today, but even in the groups that we host, we’ll present aspects of it. As an example, the fourth step [of AA] is a fearless moral inventory, really looking at yourself, recognizing your weaknesses and not being afraid of that any more. That’s not a bad thing for anybody. Now, if you talk about recognizing a higher power and turning your world over to that higher power, maybe some people will balk at that. But there’s aspects of 12-steps that we can present to everybody that they’ll benefit from, whether they want to engage spiritually or not.”

Funding and staffing

In mid-March, Radix began offering outpatient services through remodeled spaces on the facility’s lower level. Remodeling of the main level for detox and inpatient services should be completed by late summer or early fall, Mr. Christenson said.

In the meantime, Radix is working to get “in-network” with insurance, offering private pay options, and working to get credentialed with Medicaid.

“On top of that, there’s a stage in there where we’ll bill out of network, which means we won’t have a contract with the insurance companies, but we can still bill them,” Mr. Christenson said.

The facility’s certification and accreditation process should be completed soon, Mr. Christenson said, which will allow Radix Recovery to launch more outward-facing marketing efforts through social media channels and traditional advertising campaigns.

Currently, a lot of clients are coming to Radix through word of mouth, from the Radix website and from organic searches on Google, Mr. Christenson said.

“It’s hard to say where they’re coming from, because people will come in and say, ‘I saw you on Google, but they won’t say ‘I talked to my parole officer, and he said to go to you,’” he said. “We’re in this in-between place. We’ve to provide treatment to get all the accreditations so that we can get contracted, but we can’t get contracted until we have a certain track record.”

Even when insurance is an option, affordability can be a concern for programs like Radix.

“I think some people will find it infeasible,” he said. “But that’s the same with all mental health treatment. There’s always barriers to care. But we’ll have the ability to offer to Medicaid clients, and then also, depending on our success, offer scholarships and grants and other such things.”

The facility will have a mix of medical and clinical staff, including mental health providers, therapists, behavioral health technicians, and some medical personnel for monitoring patient health.

“We will have some traditional medical staff,” Mr. Christenson said. “We’ll do mostly remote on the high-level medical, such as medication management. But we will have a handful of RNs to monitor general patient general health, as well as administering mandatory TB testing and distribution of medications. There will be a medical component, but that won’t be the biggest feel when you walk in.

“My intent is not to have people walking around in scrubs. You’re not going to walk in and feel like you’re in a medical facility. You’ll be here because this is a place that you can feel relaxed and able to focus on your recovery and not feel like you are dealing with the stigma that typically goes with addiction treatment. You won’t feel like you are just this patient that has to be managed, but that we are really here to walk alongside you in your effort to recover.”

Overall, Radix will likely employ 40 to 60 staff members when fully operational, with a capacity for 68 beds and the ability to serve up to 120 to 130 people daily, when the inpatient and detox  wings are opened on the facility’s main floor.

Stigma and de-stigmatization

Mr. Christenson noted that a stigma is often attached to those dealing with substance abuse disorder. Radix aims to de-stigmatize addiction by helping people understand it as a physiological process, rather than a personal weakness.

“One of the things about addiction and stigma is that ultimately there comes a point in most addicts’ lives where they need help,” Mr. Christenson said. “So whether stigma or not, a lot of people come to a point where they just say, ‘I just can’t anymore, and I can’t do it on my own. I need help.’”

Prior to arriving at a treatment program like Radix, many addicts are not yet at a point where they’re starting to lose things.

“Somebody might say, ‘my wife says if I don’t stop drinking, she’s gonna leave me.’ OK, you’re getting kind of close there,” Mr. Christenson said. “That person may still say, ‘Well, I’m not gonna go to treatment.’ But when your wife’s left you, you’ve lost your job and you’re broke, that’s a lot of factors. So most of the stigma that we deal with is people that have quote-unquote ‘low-level’ problems, where they are still able to justify, rationalize, minimize, and deny that it’s a big deal.

“We do talk a lot about the disease model of addiction, and just helping people to understand and there’s always a combination of factors,” he added. “It’s not like the disease model encompasses everything. But if we can help people to recognize that your brain is reacting to alcohol, and your liver and your body is reacting to alcohol or drugs in a way that is not typical, that it’s actually a genetic and biological process, it helps people to [counter the notion that] ‘it’s just my willpower, it’s just my mind, it’s just my weakness.’ If you can help people to break that connection between weakness and badness in what’s happening, you can begin to break the stigma.”

The goal, Mr. Christenson said, is to help clients recognize that their addiction is not a personal failing, but a medical condition that requires treatment.

“Some people believe that if they were just stronger, better, smarter, wiser, had more willpower, they could just overcome this,” he said. “And because I can’t do that, therefore I’m bad or I’m weak. We want to disconnect that. When I’ve worked with people in the past, I use examples like, let’s say that you had a broken leg and you’re a marathon runner. Are you going to say that you’re weak and awful and terrible, and that’s why you can’t run fast? No, it’s because you have a broken leg, right? We can say the same thing on the disease model of addiction. Your body and your brain are reacting to alcohol or drugs in a different way than some other people would.”

Condemnation is not going to motivate addicts to change, Mr. Christenson stressed.

“One of the best ways to help people change is just to draw a discrepancy between what they want out of their life and what’s actually happening,” he said. “So when somebody comes in, they may say, ‘I’m not an alcoholic, I don’t have any problems.’ Then you may say, ‘Well, tell me about what you want out of your life.’ ‘Oh, I want a promotion. I want my wife to have sex with me more often.’ ‘OK, why is that not happening?’ ‘Well, my boss is actually about to fire me.’ ‘Why is that?’ What’s cool about this motivational interviewing idea is you just say, ‘Huh, that’s kind of weird.’ If you say ‘it’s because of the drinking!’ they clam up. They draw back. But if you just say, ‘what are your goals? How are you trying to get there? That doesn’t seem like that’s working very well.’ And then when you let them go away and come back, it’s amazing how after about two or three times of doing this, people come back and (say) ‘I think I need to change,’ because you’re letting them come to that conclusion. You’re letting it work in their mind, that what I’m trying to achieve and what I’m actually achieving are two different things. And when people hit that moment, they make the effort to change on their own. I don’t really ever have to tell them.

“When I first started practicing that kind of intervention, I thought, ‘this is garbage. This is never going to work.’ But then I would have people come back after three sessions and say ‘I really need to change.’ And you can say, ‘that’s amazing, because for the last three sessions, you’ve been blaming someone else, that if everybody will just leave you alone, everything would be fine.’ I’d just say, ‘Where do you want to go? What’s going on right now?’ They come to a point of saying ‘I think this about me,’ and then they start to make the change. There’s lots of other models and lots of other ways that you work with people, but none of it comes down to brow-beating people into believing that they’re an addict.”