drug addiction therapy

Drug Addiction Therapy: Learning About How Abuse Relates To Addiction

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Drug Addiction Therapy | L:akehouseRecoveryCenter.comResearch shows that there are behavioral and thinking patterns that recovering addicts have in common with those who have experienced childhood abuse. Those who have experienced addiction and those who have experienced abuse seem to have the same patterns of thought. Examples of these patterns are:

  • Beating yourself up for what you should have done, reacting to life versus being proactive when faced with a challenge
  • Playing the role of victim or having a “poor me” attitude
  • Holding on to resentments
  • Engaging in wishful thinking and devaluing what you already have
  • Expecting the worst
  • Frequently experiencing fear or worry
  • Feeling unworthy or lacking a healthy self image
  • Perpetually pleasing others before meeting your own needs
  • Looking for life satisfaction externally such as in sexual relationships, overeating, drugs, overworking, or in other excessive behavior
  • Avoiding where you are right now by frequently thinking that the grass is greener on the other side. For example, moving out of town with the thought that it will be better there versus right where you are now.

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Drug Addiction Therapy: Thinking Your Way to Sobriety

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Alright thinking alone is clearly not going to get you to sobriety, especially if the cycle of addiction is in full force in your life. However, once you’ve been through drug treatment and as you’re attending drug addiction therapy, examining your thinking is going to be a significant part of your sobriety. Thinking differently is going to be necessary. It’s …

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Drug Addiction Therapy: Setting Up Your Support Network

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Drug Addiction Therapy | LakehouseRecoveryCenter.comA 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.

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Drug Addiction Therapy: The Power of Laughter

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Drug Addiction Therapy | LakehouseRecoveryCenter.comMost people take life way too seriously! And sometimes recovery is taken a little too seriously too. Yes, it’s incredibly important to follow the structure and merge into the culture of your recovery program in order to make the transition from addiction to sobriety. However, there are many moments in which it’s important to laugh, enjoy life, and discover the goodness that life has to offer.

Not only can laughter change your perspective almost immediately, there are many health benefits to laughing, both physical and mental. Laughing can lower blood pressure, boost the immune system, increase blood flow, increase memory and focus, which are both often impaired during addiction, improve creativity, and reduce stress. Perhaps you and a friend can read a joke a day to get the belly rolling and the smiles spreading from one ear to the other. Perhaps laughter can become a regular part of your drug addiction therapy.

In fact, laughter is such a healing force that this was precisely the way that Norman Cousins healed himself. Cousins was an American political journalist, author, professor, and activist. He was also a Professor of Medical Humanities for the School of Medicine at UCLA. As a professor, Cousins did research on the biochemistry of human emotions. He had already had the belief that feelings and emotions were the essence to healing and fighting illness.

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