The benefits of addiction recovery

There are basically three types of motivation for people who enter addiction treatment. The first type of motivation is external pressure, coercion, like a spouse threatening to leave, a judge who gives the option of treatment or jail, an employer who says get treatment or find another job, etc. The second type is calculation — the person has reached a point at which they’ve decided being straight and clean will benefit them – in a relationship, financially, health-wise, or in some other way — this is what I’ll describe in this post, looking for the benefits of addiction recovery. The third type is commitment to change regardless if there are benefits or not. This third type is the highest form of motivation, and unfortunately, it’s the most rare form of motivation when people first enter treatment.

I’d say calculation motivates a large number of people we see come into NewDay Counseling’s intensive outpatient program. The client expects benefits from treatment and remaining sober. This is normal, because who would enter treatment if they thought things would get worse? Although a person in recovery almost always sees many benefits as they stay clean and sober, it might not all happen in the beginning. This is why a lot of people give up in early recovery — they start dealing with the wreckage of past, and it can seem as if things are getting worse, so why not take a drink, hit the pipe, snort a line, smoke a joint, whatever to relieve the stress?

What a person in recovery has to understand is that things might get worse before they get better. When a person begins dealing with reality after years of damage and consequences, it can be very difficult to resist the temptation to ease the pain with a drug. The benefits of recovery usually come slowly, but they’re real and they last if the person sticks with the recovery program and makes it though the hard part. Through the years I’ve witnessed what seemed like miracles as people leave treatment and rise from the bottom to develop healthy relationships, advance in a career, find a deep and meaningful spiritual purpose in life, and, in general, go through an amazing and powerful psychic transformation.

But it hardly ever comes easy. First a person has to deal with things they’ve let go for years — it’s not fun, but it’s worth it. The thing to understand is, that although recovery can be hard, if the person returns to drinking or using other drugs, the consequences get worse and worse and the next time they try to recovery it’s even harder. There’s no time like now. The person in early recovery might not be able to see the benefits of addiction recovery in the beginning, but professionals who know recovery, and people who’ve been through the hard part of recovery and reaped the rewards on the other side can help the person in early recovery by being their guide, their light in the darkness.