Tag Archives: treatment centers

Stop Drinking and Create a New Life For Yourself

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How can you stop drinking and create a new life for yourself?

To the alcoholic who is trapped in a cycle of addiction, this question can seem baffling, even preposterous.  But there is hope for a better life and overcoming alcohol addiction if an alcoholic is willing to follow a few simple steps:

(Note that there are a million ways to get sober, this is just one suggested path.  But it’s one that worked for me):

1) Go to a treatment center for detox – This is especially important if you are alcoholic, as alcohol withdrawal can be extremely dangerous and even fatal.  Yes, it can kill you not to drink in some cases, so best to get yourself under professional care if you are going to be going through detox.

There are other benefits to detoxing in a drug rehab as well….for example, you will usually have access to a residential treatment program as well, and a proper detox facility can potentially assist you with medications to help with withdrawal symptoms and sometimes even with drug cravings as well.

2) Stay for residential treatment as well – this is what used to be a 28 day program, nowadays it usually only lasts about 2 weeks or so.  Still highly recommended for the sheer value of giving you a moment’s peace from drug addiction and alcoholism, as well as to give you a chance to learn about recovery and some coping skills for when you get out.

3) Follow their recommendation for aftercare – If the treatment center recommends long term treatment, then go to long term treatment.  Pretty much everyone who goes against these types of recommendations usually regrets it.

4) Focus on staying clean and building a recovery network in early recovery - This is early recovery.  Stay clean and network with other recovering addicts and alcoholics.  For most people this will mean heavy AA or NA meetings and/or sponsorship.  This is the foundation of your life in recovery.  The trip to rehab was just a small blip on the map; now you have to live the rest of your life.

5) Transition to a purposeful and creative life - Start branching out and doing new things, as well as revisiting old dreams.  For example, my sponsor in early recovery pushed me to go back to college in my second year of sobriety, and I’m so glad he did.  This is about living life, not just hitting meetings.  Diversify and explore.

6) Embrace the creative life in recovery – Once you see the power of the creative life in recovery, you should embrace it as your long term solution.  Find creative ways to help others….bonus points if they happen to be recovering addicts and alcoholics, although this is not necessary.  Seek spiritual growth, but also tend to other areas of your life, such as nutrition, mental health, physical fitness, and so on.  This is about empowering yourself to succeed in multiple areas of your life, not just limiting yourself to “spirituality” or “recovery.”

7) Approach long term sobriety holistically - Now you have completely transitioned out of “early recovery” and you are creating a new and exciting life with passion and purpose.  Seek health and balance in all areas of your life with a holistic approach.

Go here for more info on how to stop drinking.

Are Luxury Treatment Centers the Answer?

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A good question was posed as to whether or not California treatment centers offer any better odds of recovery based on the fact that they are basically luxury resorts.

One argument says that luxury treatment centers must certianly offer some advantages, simply due to the fact that you are dealing with more money, so that can offer a lot of solutions.  While money might not be able to fix anything and everything, here are some things that it can buy:

1) Longer stays at treatment

2) More one-on-one time with therapists or counselors

3) More specialized and individualized treatment

4) Wider treatment options, can accompany different modalities/philosophies

5) Better, and more comprehensive medical care at treatment centers

The question then, is this: do we really need a luxury treatment center in order to have these things?  Can we not incorporate these ideas into “traditional” treatment centers, without having costs spiral out of control?

What can we learn from luxury treatment centers?

Managing Chronic Pain in Treatment Centers

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There is a recurring problem with treating addiction in drug rehabs: people who have chronic pain. Some of these people are addicted to painkillers, and opiate medications have become their drug of choice. Other people have chronic pain and are addicted to something else (such as alcohol), but they can’t use their prescription medications in a drug rehab facility, so that becomes a problem as well. A third group of people might have been self medicating for years with alcohol or other drugs, and now that they have checked into a treatment center and are getting clean and sober, they are starting to notice a chronic pain in their body that they might never have even known was their.

All 3 of these types of situations present a problem for recovering addicts.

Most treatment centers and drug rehabs take the approach that no client that is admitted to their care can use opiate painkillers while they are in treatment. This is just the approach that the majority of treatment centers have taken.

Most professionals have the attitude that it is important to try to manage chronic pain without addictive opiate medications, especially if the person is checking into a treatment center for any type of addiction (alcoholism, cocaine, whatever the case may be).

So here are some pointers about chronic pain that can help the recovering addict:

1. The pain is far less than people realize - this is because of the nature of opiate painkillers (such as Vicodin, Oxycontin, Morphine, etc.)–they do not really lessen the pain at all at the source….instead, they simply dull the brain into thinking that it doesn’t mind the pain so much–right at the level of the brain. They have found that patients given opiate medications can still accurately describe the level of their pain, even though their brain has been dulled into not caring about it so much. This is very different from how some other pain medications work, such as NSAIDS like Ibuprofen, which actually reduce the pain and inflammation right at the site of the pain itself.

2. Opiate addicts who have become dependent on painkillers are simply playing catch-up, trying to constantly medicate themselves from withdrawal symptoms. The withdrawal symptoms will eventually start to become indistinguishable from their original source of pain, so this is a long term game that they can never really win anyway. Kicking the opiates and finding an alternative is the best long term solution.

3. Alternative solutions will present themselves as people remain clean and sober, and coming to manage their pain effectively might be a learning process. If someone is taking a large dose of opiates several times a day to manage their pain, and they go to treatment and detox and get clean, it might take a month or two before they really learn how to get their pain down to a manageable level. Realize that this is very possible though! Their are alternatives to opiate medications, including both alternate medications and alternate therapies. Hypnosis, in particular, has proven to be especially helpful for some people in managing very serious chronic pain. But recovering addicts can learn what works for them and go far beyond the ideas here, using things like hot showers, massage, or even meditation to help them in alleviating their pain.

If you are addicted to opiates, understand that those types of drugs merely mask the pain, they do not lessen it, and many of the alternative therapies can actually lessen the amount of pain right at the source.