What is addiction treatment?

At NewDay Counseling we often see potential clients who tell us upfront during the assessment that they’ve been through addiction treatment several times. What is addiction treatment? Once we ask them where they received treatment, they report 4 day stays in a detox, or several individual sessions with a therapist, attendance at a few AA meeting the judge forced them to attend after a DUI conviction, education classes that went along with the DUI, etc. These aren’t addiction treatment.

Individual sessions, education, healing the body, eating right, learning to minimize risks and change behavior are all better that nothing, but addiction treatment is multifaceted and long term. There are people who never receive formalized treatment in a treatment facility and they recover, but they usually do more than simply decide to stop drinking and using and simply make a few lifestyle changes or begin making their body and brain healthy.

It’s sort of like a New Year’s pledge to start exercising and not eating unhealthy foods — it works until it get difficult, then the person slowly reverts to what’s comfortable and what’s comfortable is what they were doing for years before they made the pledge. After years of living a certain way learned during formative years and reinforced over and over through the years, these ways of living, thinking and behaving are ingrained and they’re not easily changed. With addiction it’s ever harder to change, because the drug itself, whether it’s alcohol, cocaine, opiates or some other mood altering drug, changes the brain and creates a dependence that tells the body it needs the drug like we need food, sex or companionship.

Addiction treatment starts by addressing the acute issues of addiction, getting detoxed, dealing with the present consequences that are pressing, stabilizing the person, then the long process of re-evaluation begins. A person often has to look at all the value judgments they’ve created through the years and re-evaluate these value-judgements. All the old ideas that no longer make sense. The first, critical value-judgement is that the drug is good and necessary to survive. The person begins to change the brain by looking objectively and realistically  at the drug. 

Then it’s a long process of getting to know one’s self, dealing with old wounds that never healed — abandonment as a child, divorce, death, job loss, disease, etc. If all the unresolved issues that were masked by the drug aren’t resolved, then they come back to haunt the person, no matter how healthy physically the person is trying to become. A person can go through a therapy of body cleansing and exercise and nutrition and become healthy physically and even feel good mentally, but if they haven’t dealt with the past and don’t truly understand addiction recovery from, they’ll likely go back to their drug of choice when unresolved issues of the past return and they become emotionally distraught.

It’s not a matter of dealing with all the unresolved issues right away — it’s about commitment to the process of recovery and understanding what the long term process entails. Most people aren’t prepared in the beginning to deal with serious issues from the past — they first have to prepare themselves to deal with these issues, and they usually need help with this preparation and support going through the process. If a person is not prepared for the pitfalls after attempting to stop using a drug, they can stumble and fall. What is addiction treatment? Addiction treatment is about a person using guides to get past the pitfalls and creating a lasting, long term recovery. The journey changes at different points in recovery and it’s best to have support and a plan for these different points in recovery — it’s easy to get lost by false promises and quick fixes.