IOP serving Highland Beach — clinical intensity that fits a real life.

RECO's Delray campus is a 12-minute drive up A1A from Highland Beach — close enough that residents in Bel Lido Isle, Toscana, or the Penthouse can keep part-time work or family routines while attending 15 clinical hours of IOP per week. The same primary therapist follows your case from PHP into IOP, and addiction psychiatry, MAT management, and CBT/DBT groups all happen in-house rather than across multiple providers.

Highland Beach sits on a quiet stretch of A1A between Delray and Boca Raton, and from most addresses on the barrier island the drive to RECO Intensive runs about 12 minutes — seven miles north along the coast. For families in Bel Lido Isle, Toscana, Boca Cove, Ocean Cove, or the Penthouse condos, that proximity matters. It means a clinically dense outpatient program with in-house addiction psychiatry, group therapy spaces, and a primary therapist model is reachable without leaving Palm Beach County. General behavioral-health practices in Boca can handle medication management and weekly therapy, but they aren’t built for the structured hours, the multidisciplinary team, or the continuity of care that an Intensive Outpatient Program requires. That’s the gap RECO’s IOP is designed to fill.

An IOP at RECO runs roughly 15 clinical hours per week, distributed across three to five days. The schedule is deliberately built to coexist with the rest of a person’s life — part-time work, parenting, finishing a degree, caring for an aging parent. The same primary therapist who worked with a client during partial hospitalization or residential care continues to follow the case into IOP. That continuity is part of how RECO is structured, and it’s one of the reasons families in Highland Beach often choose a Delray-based program over a remote tele-IOP or a generalist outpatient practice.

Where IOP fits in the continuum

Intensive Outpatient Programming sits between the most structured levels of care — residential treatment and partial hospitalization — and standalone outpatient therapy or aftercare. For many clients, IOP is a step-down: someone who has completed residential treatment or PHP isn’t ready to drop to one therapy session a week, but no longer needs six hours of clinical contact per day. IOP at 15 hours per week gives the structure, accountability, and group support to keep recovery work moving forward while life slowly comes back online.

For other clients, IOP is the entry point. When ASAM criteria — particularly Dimensions 3 (emotional/behavioral conditions), 4 (readiness to change), 5 (relapse potential), and 6 (recovery environment) — indicate moderate severity rather than acute risk, IOP can be the appropriate starting level of care. Our clinical team uses the full ASAM assessment during intake to determine where someone should begin, and we adjust the plan as people stabilize or as new information emerges in the first weeks of treatment.

What 15 hours per week actually covers

The hours in IOP are not a single repeating group. A typical week includes several distinct clinical components, layered so that clients are working on different parts of recovery from different angles.

• Process and psychoeducation groups covering the biology of addiction, the neuroscience of cravings, and the cognitive patterns that drive use.
• Relapse-prevention groups using CBT-based skill modules — trigger mapping, urge surfing, cognitive restructuring, and behavioral chain analysis.
• DBT skills groups focused on distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness, which are particularly important for clients whose substance use has been entangled with anxiety, trauma, or mood disorders.
• Weekly individual therapy with the primary therapist — the same clinician across levels of care when possible.
• Addiction psychiatry appointments as clinically indicated, including ongoing management of medications like naltrexone, acamprosate, buprenorphine, or extended-release Vivitrol when MAT is part of the plan.
• Family sessions and experiential components as appropriate to the case — some weeks include a family therapy hour, a trauma-focused individual session using EMDR or TF-CBT, or a community-based experiential group.

Clients with alcohol use disorder, opioid use disorder, or co-occurring conditions get treatment plans calibrated to their specific clinical picture. The alcohol-specific track and opioid-specific track describe how those treatment pathways differ in practice.

Compatible with work, school, and family life

IOP scheduling is built around the reality that clients have obligations beyond treatment. Morning and evening tracks are available so that someone can be back at a part-time job, picking up children from school, or attending classes outside of group hours. For Highland Beach residents specifically, the 12-minute drive from places like Bel Lido Isle or Toscana means group hours don’t get swallowed up by traffic — clients can reasonably keep a part-time work schedule, attend evening group, and be home for dinner.

This is intentionally different from the residential or PHP phase, where treatment is the primary focus and the rest of life is paused. IOP is the phase where people start carrying real-world demands again, in a controlled and gradual way, while still having enough clinical support that early stressors don’t become relapse triggers. Many clients in IOP also live in structured sober living housing during this phase, which adds an additional layer of accountability and peer support outside of clinical hours.

The transition to aftercare and alumni programming

Stepping down from IOP is gradual rather than abrupt. As clients near the end of their IOP weeks, the team begins working with them on what continuing care will look like — outpatient therapy frequency, psychiatry follow-up, sober support meetings, and integration into the alumni community. The handoff from IOP to aftercare is planned, not improvised.

RECO’s alumni program is an ongoing structure rather than a single event. Monthly alumni gatherings, recovery milestone recognition, and peer-led check-ins give clients a way to stay connected to the recovery community after formal treatment ends. For people who came through PHP and IOP at RECO, the alumni network often includes peers they began treatment with — which can make the post-treatment year far less isolating than it would otherwise be.

Local proof, insurance, and how to start

For Highland Beach families, the practical questions tend to be similar: Will my insurance cover this? How quickly can my family member start? Do I have to come into Delray for an assessment, or can we start the conversation by phone? RECO works with most major commercial insurance carriers — including Aetna, Cigna, BCBS, and many regional Florida plans — and verifies benefits before treatment begins so families know what to expect financially. Initial clinical conversations happen by phone; the in-person ASAM assessment is scheduled once it’s clear IOP (or another level of care) is the right fit.

If you’re researching from a Highland Beach address and weighing options, a call to the admissions team is the most efficient way to get specifics for your situation. The clinical staff can walk through what an IOP week would look like, how the schedule would interact with work or school commitments, and what the step-down plan from IOP would look like over the following months.

Serving residents of: Bel Lido Isle, Boca Cove, Ocean Cove, Toscana, Penthouse.