The process of drug abuse and addiction begins with some pleasure, but later ends up in a lot of pain and mystery. You begin consuming the drug more often because you probably enjoy the high feeling that you get, or because you desperately want to escape reality due to the problems that you may be facing on a regular basis.
As the consumption continues, it turns into an abuse that it is uncontrollable. Consequently, you end up in an addiction that takes complete control of your life. You may notice that you are addicted, but refuse to admit.
When in this denial, you tell yourself that the consumption is under your control; you hardly acknowledge it as an addiction. You even go to the lengths of comparing yourself with your friends just to convince yourself that you do not have an addiction problem.
If you are lucky, the self-awareness left in you will haunt you to do the right thing, which is beating your addiction. If you have no self-awareness left, you will probably get tired of the bad routines or start feeling guilty for hurting your loved ones. At this moment, you will begin acknowledging these facts:
- It is time that you realize and live to your full potential.
- You need to spend your nights peacefully and have ample sleep.
- You need to restore your trustworthiness.
- You must take back your power and strength.
- Hanging out with you needs to change to be more enjoyable.
- It is time to relieve you the pain you feel.
- Honesty is important for yourself and others.
- You need to begin a new life, without looking back.
If you feel that you want these facts as actual parts of your life, then you know that it is time for drug rehabilitation.
What Is Drug Rehabilitation?
The psychotherapeutic treatment and medical processes that you undergo due to dependency on psychoactive substances is referred to as drug rehabilitation. These psychoactive substances include prescription drugs like oxycontin, alcohol and street drugs like heroin, cocaine, crack and amphetamines.
Since drug addiction causes you to change your behavior and messes all aspects of your life, including relationships and work, drug rehabilitation is like a remedy or solution. It focuses on helping you in regaining your normal life, healthily and safely.
Therefore, the intention of drug rehabilitation is enabling you cease substance abuse and confront substance dependence. As a result, you will be in a better position to escape social, legal, physical, financial and psychological consequences brought about by extreme drug abuse.
The treatment used in drug rehabilitation includes medication for multiple disorders and depression, counseling by therapists and interacting with other addicts while sharing experiences.
Benefits Of Drug Rehabilitation
Drug rehabilitation is there to help you and thus it benefits you. It is not an easy journey and it could also be long, which could be discouraging to many individuals. However, the change that you experience from life of addiction to recovery is immeasurable and worth your effort.
For you to acquire the following benefits of drug rehabilitation, you must be committed through hard work, determination and dedication, from the beginning to the end of the rehabilitation program.
1. Breaks the addictive cycle
While dealing with drug addiction, breaking the addictive cycle is quite challenging especially when doing it alone. Drug rehabilitation involves various processes and programs that will keep you on track, thus help you break the addictive cycle. As a result, you are in a better position to move forward and not slide back into the addiction.
2. Provide Addiction Education
As soon as your thoughts are clear after going through detoxification and rehabilitation, you get to learn about your addiction. You gain an insight regarding the events, habits, people and sensory experiences that result to cravings for drugs. Therefore, at the end of the rehabilitation, you are learned enough to protect yourself and avoid such triggers.
3. Understanding of the underlying issues
There are multiple reasons why you may indulge in drug abuse. The most surprising thing is that you may not know that certain issues are the reasons why you began addiction. Therefore, rehabilitation helps in identifying the things that lead you into drugs.
Such issues could be physical or emotional pain, stress, avoiding responsibility or desperation to belong a certain group or seek others approval. Rehabilitation, therefore, is there to help you find that specific problem through the patterns in your behavior.
After the identification of these issues, you get to gain a better understanding of them and build new coping skills that exclude substance use.
4. Create New Practices And Habits
The single most important thing that drug addicts lack is self-care and discipline. This fact explains why you will continuously consume a substance even when you know it is harmful to you and causes behaviors that harm your loved ones. For you to survive in recovery and never look back, you need to acquire both self-care and discipline.
Drug rehabilitation helps you in acquiring these two aspects by assisting you in creating new practices and habits that will propel your personal growth and development. Sticking to these healthy habits and practices will require setting goals, both short and long-term, for your relationships, emotional and physical health, and spiritual and occupational aspirations.
5. Establishing Healthy Boundaries
The relationships you have with others highly determine your happiness or misery. You may indulge in drug abuse to escape stress from family members or even friends, since the boundaries are not well laid. The confusion and anxiety may continually drive into an addiction that you never intended to have. This situation gets worse as you continually indulge in drugs.
Drug rehabilitation reaches to a stage where you need to understand the true meaning of relationships. It helps you set healthy boundaries, whereby you can say no to certain things in order to avoid unnecessary issues and thus maintain you sobriety.
6. Improves Self
Regardless of whatever surrounds you, who you are determines how you deal with or react to certain situations. As you start a drug rehabilitation program, it is highly possible that your self-esteem is very low, you can hardly manage yourself, your self-awareness is weak and you feel worthless.
However, as you undergo the multiple processes to become a better person, you begin to feel better. The therapies help you regain the worth that you thought was gone and the stories from other people’s experiences make you realize that your addiction was just a fall that you can rise from.
At the end, you will realize that rehabilitation plays a major role in restoring your self- esteem, self-care, self-management, self-awareness and self-worth. As a result, you will deal with problems with more power and strength and have the determination to push through whatever comes your way.
Signs Indicating Drug Rehabilitation Need
As mentioned earlier, denial makes you think that your life is still on the right track even when it is in the worst situation. Since controlling this denial is hard, especially when you are constantly under the influence of a psychoactive substance, signs can help you gauge the position of your life.
The signs bellow can help you know how much control a substance has over you. If these signs are familiar with your current behavior or habits, then know it is time to seek professional help for you to make a complete change.
1) Drugs Are Your Priority
Once your main focus has shifted to drugs, then you have a serious problem. You will notice that drugs have become a priority if your thoughts are based on them often in a day. Additionally, you tend to spend your resources, effort and time in getting and consuming whatever you are addicted to.
A drug can also become a priority if you are longer interested in activities, hobbies, interests and involvements that you indulged in previously. You may even lack value and time for your loved ones. If you notice any of these tendencies, it is time to get professional help.
2) Your Health Is In Jeopardy
Drugs disorient the functioning of the human body by introducing toxic substances to various body organs, thus produce specific drug effects. Therefore, you are highly likely to suffer from ill health if you abuse drugs for a lengthy period. For example, it is known that alcohol addiction causes multiple types of cancer and liver cirrhosis.
The health issues could be physical or mental, or even both. The mental issues begin because your mental state alters in a way. The common signs of mental health problems are anxiety, psychosis, depression and agitation.
3) Your Drug Tolerance Has Increased
The first time you consume a drug, you are likely to take it in very small amounts that produce an intense high. However, with time, your body gets used to it and begins to build a tolerance. Therefore, for you to get the same intensity of high, you will definitely increase your dosage, thus risk overdosing.
An overdose is a warning that death or coma can occur. Therefore, if you notice that you often want to take high quantities to get high or increase the number of times you consume in a day, then know that you need treatment through rehabilitation.
4) You Are Mentally Ill
If you suffer from a mental illness and under medication, your drugs modify your feelings, behavior and thoughts. If you begin abusing drugs under this condition, you may cause your mental health to worsen by accelerating the illness symptoms. As a result, you will continuously use the psychoactive substances to try to solve the issues you experience.
In this event, it is necessary to seek rehabilitation because you are suffering from two serious issues. Your treatment may also be complicated because treating your addiction and mental illness are two different things that cannot be ignored.
5) Your Personal Efforts To Quit Have Failed
Most drug addicts believe they can quit consuming the drugs on their own. At times you may succeed and stay sober for a while; but later lapse into using the substance again. This means that addiction is not just a condition, but a chronic one as well.
If you have tried quitting drug use but failed, you need to know that outpatient treatment and self-help groups are not working for you. You need more which involves higher care levels, medical attention, stability and therapy, which you can only get through rehabilitation.
The Drug Rehab Process
If your behaviors or conditions seem to match the above signs and you have decided to seek help in a rehabilitation center, you are on the right track towards making yourself better. You should begin this process by conducting research regarding drug rehabilitation.
Getting A Treatment Facility
From the information that you gather, choose a rehabilitation center that is certified and provides quality services. Beware of factors like payment options, waiting lists, treatment type and location while doing the choosing. Ensure that your selection offers a full range of services, so that you can achieve full recovery outcomes.
Just before you leave for the rehabilitation center, it is important to inquire if you made the right choice. So contact the facility, after gathering your own personal information since the representatives may also ask some questions.
The common questions they may ask are regarding the type of drug abuse, support system, existing medical condition, financial and insurance information, living environment and presence of co-occurring conditions or mental illnesses. While inquiring about these, the facility representative will give you a better insight on the treatment options available and answer your questions to your satisfaction.
Assessment
Upon your arrival into the drug rehabilitation facility, you will be welcomed by a counselor, doctor and psychologists. These professionals must conduct an evaluation, which will seem like an interview, to determine your issues and to admit you into the substance treatment program that you specified.
This evaluation process involves answering certain questions regarding you mental health or medical history. They will then proceed to conduct mental health screening and physical examination that may include blood tests. Other questions are to inquire on the substances you abused and the issues that led you into drug abuse and addiction.
For safety purposes and smooth stay in the facility, staff members will educate you on the expectations and rules of the center. Additionally, they may also conduct a search to ensure that your belongings do not include weapons, drugs and other banned objects. To reduce escape temptations from the outside world, communication devices may also be confiscated.
Success Keys
The information that you provide in your assessment determines the rest of the activities and treatment that you will receive. Therefore, despite the shame that you may feel, the assessment phase can only be successful if you are honest and trusting, since your information will be confidential.
Detoxification
The initial commencement of the rehabilitation process involves the detoxification process, which ensures that your body is free of the substance dependency. It is a painful and scary process due to the withdrawal symptoms that will arise and you will be tempted to give up. However, it is important to hang in there because the end result is worth it.
The detox process duration and intensity is dependent upon the drug and severity of usage. Similarly, the withdrawal symptoms severity vary depending on your body, active addiction length, the substance abused, mental health status and family history and amount abused regularly.
Common Withdrawal Symptoms
Despite that drugs vary, they all target the same brain chemicals and neurological processes. As a result, they tend to share the same withdrawal symptoms upon stopping their consumption. In the first few days into the detox process, you may experience sweating, irritability, depression and insomnia.
As weeks go by, the symptoms may accelerate to extreme depression, stroke, hallucinations, severe fatigue, diarrhea, tremors, rapid heartbeat, nausea, heart attack and reduced appetite. Since some of these symptoms are life threatening, rehabilitation programs may use medications to ease the symptoms pain and intensity, as they conduct 24-hour supervision and intensive monitoring.
Detox Medication
Medications recommended for the detoxification process not only reduce the agony that you may feel due to the withdrawal symptoms, but also serve other purposes. They change your brain’s functioning and thus counter the cravings and assist you in reaching that point where you no longer have substance dependency.
Methadone
Methadone is the most appropriate medication for opiate prescriptions and heroin addicts. As it decreases the cravings for drugs, it also alleviates the withdrawal symptoms. This medication begins with high doses that reduce over time.
Unfortunately, methadone causes some side effects despite being a treatment. They include sexual dysfunction, excessive sweating, nausea and vomiting, constipation, respiratory depression and itchy skin.
Buprenorphine
In most cases, buprenorphine is also used in addicts that abuse opiates and heroin. It is also preferred to methadone since it hardly causes a high feeling. It is known to reduce drug cravings and diminish withdrawal symptoms.
However, it is hardly perfect as well, since it causes side effects as well, which include sleep problems, muscle cramps, nausea and vomiting and constipation.
Success Keys
The detox phase is very challenging due to the pain that may feel extreme. Here you will feel that the process is against you and not for you. However, lapsing is not any better since you will go back to your issues. So perseverance is most needed since the symptoms are temporary.
Rehabilitation
The rehabilitation phase is the real deal in the drug rehabilitation process. This is where you dig deeper into the issues that caused your addiction. You may find that your reasons for abusing drugs are based on trauma or pain that you experienced in the past. Since the human brain is good at shutting down or hiding extreme pain or terrible feelings in the subconscious mind, the issues build up over time.
Therefore, confronting these issues takes place through individuals and group therapy, counseling and cognitive behavior therapy. At the ends the sessions, goals are set for you to work on your own. They may include indulging in new recovery activities, maintaining sobriety for some numbered days and attending meetings.
Success Keys
Since the rehabilitation phase is the core of the whole drug rehabilitation process, you must let yourself free and allow vulnerability. By being vulnerable, you allow the counselors to see through you and find the best ways to help you. Consequently, you are able to accept what you are taught as you let go of previous toxic believes.
Aftercare
Aftercare is also very essential in the process of drug rehabilitation outside the rehabilitation facility. It focuses on preventing relapse and helping you in blending back into the community as a changed person.
During the rehabilitation stage, the therapy sessions require you to open up about yourself and your environment. You get skills to deal with a challenging environment, which you must practice in aftercare. Some facilities may even assign you a case manager, who will assist you in housing needs, social and family environment, legal consequences, employment responsibilities and education.
Success Keys
Aftercare mainly involves maintaining sobriety at home, getting involved in support groups and participating in vocational and educational programs. If you are financially well off, it is crucial to move into a new community instantly, in case your current is toxic and threatens your sobriety.
In conclusion, drug rehabilitation is the best move towards recovering from drug addiction. It is not only about you but also about saving those around you, since you cause them pain. Rehab saves your social life because drug addiction can lead you into crime like theft and murder.
Despite that the drug rehabilitation process begins with a tough patch in the detoxification stage, you must be strong for the sake of your future. Lapsing into drug addiction will only make things worse for you since you will go back to the same problems that you were trying to escape in the first place. As soon as you feel that you need rehabilitation, take action immediately to save you and others.