How Addiction Recovery Aids in Personal Achievements. Guest Post from Per Wickstrom.
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How Addiction Recovery Aids in Personal Achievements
We all know that recovering from drug and alcohol addiction can be one of the greatest conquests of a person’s life. And in fact, for those who are successful, overcoming an addiction, once and for all, feels like the best possible achievement they can ever have.
Addiction recovery is a battle like no other. Drug and alcohol addiction is not just a simple little problem that someone needs a few weeks in an inpatient facility to get past. It is so much more than that, and it is so much more devastating than that. It robs people of their lives and their loved ones, their careers and their homes, their friends and their possessions.
How Addiction Recovery Helps People Succeed in Life
On the flip side though, if one does manage to push through their addiction battle and make it through to the other side, they will often be stronger and more capable than they ever could have conceived of being before. It is a huge victory to beat addiction and achieve a level of permanent sobriety and abstinence. Not everyone who suffers with addiction achieves it either, so when one does it is quite the accomplishment.
Thankfully, there are many wonderful therapies available to help addicts deal with issues that lead them to abuse drugs and alcohol. Some of the therapies we use at my centers I am particularly fond of, and I feel like these therapies do just about as much good for our clients out in the workaday world as they do in the rehab itself:
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, (CBT), seeks to help clients recognize, avoid, and cope with the situations in which they are most likely to abuse drugs. At the same time though, CBT also totally removes old, negative, and impacting personalities and helps individuals restore their basic personality wherein true potential and success can be discovered.
- Contingency Management uses positive reinforcement such as providing rewards or privileges for remaining drug free, for attending and participating in counseling sessions, or for taking treatment medications as prescribed. This also builds one up to the point where he or she can effectively set goals and apply discipline to achieving those goals in life after rehab.
- Motivational Enhancement Therapy, (MET), uses strategies to evoke rapid and internally motivated behavior change to stop drug use and facilitate treatment entry. This also eliminates old habits and personality traits and restores the ones that they had before addiction set in on them.
- Family Therapy, (especially for youth), approaches a person’s drug problems in the context of family interactions and dynamics that may contribute to drug use and other risky behaviors. It also starts rebuilding the family from the get go, so when the client leaves rehab he or she can immediately jump back into the workplace and start succeeding with the help of his or her family.
Addiction Recovery: Helping People Succeed on Multiple Accounts
I have seen addicts who could barely form coherent sentences emerge from my rehab centers and only months later call me to tell me they already had a startup company going, were going back to college, or had just gotten a promotion at their new job. I know that addiction treatment works, and I am so pleased that it helps people in all areas of life succeed even more so in their lives after treatment.
Per Wickstrom is the founder and CEO of Best Drug Rehabilitation, one of the top holistic rehabilitation centers in the country. He found sobriety after a decades-long struggle with addiction and has since dedicated his life and career to helping others find the same life-affirming success he has. Visit his blog or connect with Per via Twitter or Facebook.
Achieve your goals and follow your passion of helping others. When you are ready to take the next step to become an addiction recovery coach, visit The Addictions Academy or call 1.800.706.0318 to learn more.
