Social Drinkers

This is another post to address myths and misunderstandings regarding social drinkers, alcoholism, alcohol abuse and addiction treatment. People often tell me that they first perceived addiction rehab facilities like NewDay as just another nanny-like attempt to interfere in people’s business and tell that drinking alcohol is bad for them — just another busy-body, kill-joy

NewDay Counseling and other facilities like ours are not concerned with social drinkers. In most cases we don’t deal with cases of alcohol abuse if there are no other signs and symptoms of a serious drinking problem. Here, also, just to be clear, I’m talking about alcohol problems, but we also deal with drug problems of all kinds, cocaine, heroin, pot, meth, etc.

In the case of alcohol abuse, a person might be going through a situation in which they’re drinking more alcohol than normal, like in college, going through a divorce, the death of a family member. Many people will “abuse” or misuse alcohol situationally for a short period of time then adjust back to social, moderate drinking without any counseling or treatment.

Mainly, what NewDay deals with is cases of addiction. Addiction progresses in stages, from early to middle to late stages. We want to treat addiction in the early stages, before the person has experienced severe legal, job, financial, relationship or physical damage.

Addiction treatment is a medical treatment as well as a psychological treatment. Addiction affects the mind and the body, so treatment has to address the whole person. Addiction is a chronic brain disease, so, primarily, in treatment we’re trying to stabilize the person and stop the person from pouring more poison into their body. Then when the person is stabilized, we begin the process of dealing with the psychological and emotional damage caused by addiction.

The addict gradually loses the ability to deal with life in a healthy way, so we discuss life skills, coping skills, relapse prevention skills and we help the person develop a long term Recovery Management Plan. This is far from being a nanny and interfering with people’s pleasures, like having a few beers after a long day at work, or enjoying a couple glasses of wine with a good meal. The alcoholic is not having a good time — the alcoholic is slowly dying from excessive, addictive drinking. The drug addict is dying from addiction to their drug of choice, and putting themselves at serious risk on a daily basis. Addiction is a treatment process, just like the treatment process for diabetes or other such medical conditions.

I hope this clears up some of the misunderstanding regarding addiction treatment.