A significant part of seeking drug addiction therapy and drug treatment is participating in your own healing.
Sure, the therapists, drug counselors, residential drug treatment staff will all be there to support you on your journey, but essentially you’ve got to take your own healing into your own hands.
In a way it might be difficult because part of the illness of addiction is a sense of powerlessness. Typically, although it’s not true for all addicts, there’s a feeling of powerlessness that lives underneath an addiction. Powerlessness is a feeling, often an unconscious one, that leads to believing that power is outside of your control. This is having what is sometimes called an external locus of control. To explain this further, psychologist Julian Rotter introduced and coined the term, locus of control, in the 1950’s. To put it more simply, your locus of control is what you deem to have power over the successes and failures in your life. Ultimately, an addict hands over his or her power to the substance or behavior he or she is addicted to.
Empowerment Within Support
Yet, one of the most powerful acts a recovering addict can do is to grab the reigns of his or her healing. This is an act of empowerment. Part of this is to create a support network of friends, family, mental health professionals, and other community members.
Finding help and getting support is essential to the healing process. You might have even tried. Perhaps you’ve sought out friends or others to help you. Perhaps you’ve contacted mental health professionals to facilitate your healing, and it hasn’t worked out for whatever reason.
You might not have found the right combination of people or you might even have encountered some inner resistance.
It’s Ok to Accept Healing For Your Own Responsibility
In fact, sometimes it’s difficult to accept healing for our own responsibility. And, this is completely understandable because we are often taught to hand over our power to health professionals, giving in to that powerlessness again.
We continue the behavior that we know so well – to let someone else who is more powerful, more knowledgeable, more able to get the job done, to let him or her do it. But the point of recovery is not only a physical healing; it’s a psychological healing too. It’s a healing of your empowerment, your strength, and your belief in yourself.
When you’re setting up your support system, know that those individuals are there to help you, not to take over the direction of your healing – you’re in control of that.
When you’re looking for people to join your healing network, you can begin by looking for people who have successfully worked with addiction and recovery.
In fact, there is a great deal of misunderstanding when it comes to addiction, and so you’re going to have to find someone you trust and a professional who is educated in the type of addiction you’re suffering from.
Someone who is not as familiar with addiction but who means well might still sabotage your healing process by giving you misinformation.
Setting up your support network is something you might want to discuss in your drug addiction therapy with a drug counselor.
The two of you can discuss the benefits of having such a network and who to include. In addition to addiction experts, you may want other recovering addicts who are a step or two ahead of you, those who have been through the difficulties you might be experiencing now.
You may want to include others who can offer various forms of support such as compassion, a listening ear, understanding, love, and acceptance.
Most importantly, setting up a support network is trusting in the belief that you deserve this kind of help. Gathering the right amount of support means developing a trust that you are basically good and that within yourself there is a wonderful person who deserves healing, health, and well being.
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