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Addiction Affects More Than Just You

Posted on November 30, 2017November 30, 2017 by JohnAdmin

Addiction is one of the toughest conditions to get through. It’s not just that you’re fighting your body – in many cases, you’re fighting against your own will. Being an addict isn’t easy, and it’s never a choice. It’s the absence of choice, and addiction affects more than just you.

What makes it even harder is that it isn’t an isolated condition. Sometimes, addicts find solace in the idea that, by giving up, they’re not really hurting anyone except themselves. After all, if addiction really is a choice, then they have the right to choose to live their lives this way.

While that’s true, addiction affects far more people than just yourself. If you’re struggling with addiction, then never forget that it’s not just about getting better for your own sake.

Addiction Affects Your Dependents

Most adults are responsible, not because of some intrinsic personal quality, but because responsibility is something most of us are given at a certain point in our lives when others begin to rely on us and our ability to provide for them. If you have a pet, a child, a disabled family member or elderly relative, then you are responsible for them, either single-handedly or alongside others.

Your dependents pay the highest price when you begin to lose the ability to care for them. Addiction doesn’t just hurt you and take away from your ability to live in this scenario – addiction affects them directly, and puts them in harms way. No child wants to grow up alongside someone struggling with addiction – and your beloved pet will lose the person they fell in love with in the first place.

Addiction Affects Your Marriage

This doesn’t just go for couples who tied the knot – if you made a long-term commitment to someone else, then addiction affects the relationship and will often lead to a growing fragility and possible break in that commitment. Relationships are demanding and the way addiction affects them is never positively.

To be with someone, you must take into consideration that they’re different from you, and you two must work together to overcome those differences, reach compromises, and live together in a way that keeps you both happy and satisfied. That means making sacrifices to certain personal goals, and it can oftentimes mean having to make selfless decisions.

That’s hard to do when addiction drives you to fulfill your inner need for the next high, more than anything else. When you stop putting your significant other first, and addiction affects the relationship by taking over, then the relationship can quickly devolve into an utter mess.

Addiction Affects Your Family

Beyond your immediate partner, your relationships with the rest of the family can also be greatly influenced and your addiction affects everyone in it. In fact, it’s not uncommon for familial ties to sour when addiction begins to take over.

Think about it – your loved ones are losing someone they’ve cared for, for many years. Beyond that, struggling with an addiction often means becoming more distant from others as you find yourself caught in a rollercoaster of emotions. If you struggle to stay sober and find yourself frequently caught in a cycle of withdrawal and relapse, then the emotional toll that has on you is reflected on those around you, as most people become prone to acting out under these circumstances.

Sure, not everyone has a great relationship with their family to begin with. In fact, in some cases, your old family might even be the root cause behind many personal issues, anxieties and difficulties. In that case, the last thing you want is to seek closure through them. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t stand to lose something.

Addiction Affects Your Friends

Friends are like a second family – or, in other words, the family we choose. The bonds we create with our friends can last entire lifetimes, and in some cases, they can be stronger than the bonds we share with our family. That makes it that much more painful when an addiction affects you and causes you to damage and risk those bonds.

Good friends care about you. Good friends will vehemently defend you. And they’ll fight you day and night if they think you’re doing something that’ll end up hurting you. A real friend will have your best interests at heart – and they’ll often not be able to stomach seeing you slip further and further into addiction.

Even if addiction affects your relationship, if you prove to them that you’re willing to fight that addiction – even just a little bit – then they’ll help you with everything they have to offer. And that kind of friendship can save your life, more than once.

Addiction Affects Your Career

We all need to work – not just to feed ourselves, but to stay sane. If we’re not doing something meaningful or useful with our lives, we’ll struggle to find a reason to live. In some cases, your career might even be the centerpiece to that struggle, if you find yourself working in a position you loathe. But if addiction affects your work and takes a hold of you because of some other tragedy, then you might find yourself fall behind in your work and lose your shot at a career entirely.

To some, that can be the greatest loss of all – seeing your life’s work fade away over your addiction. The only way to avoid that is to overcome your addiction as quickly as possible – and use your career as a tool to do so.

To some, that might in and of itself be enough motivation to get through the entire journey. For others, that might be a little intimidating – along with everything else in this list. But it’s not all dread and gloom. Just like how addiction affects others around you, it’s in their best interest to help you get better – and if you’re open to their help, and never give up, you’ll always have a shot at complete recovery. If you find you need a little extra push to stay sober, consider checking out a Houston men’s sober living or women’s recovery home to meet like minded individuals and for a supportive group of friends who also value sobriety.

What Are the Advantages to a Houston Sober Living Community?

Posted on November 16, 2017 by JohnAdmin

It’s hard to overcome drug addiction. Regardless of the exact nature of your addiction – the emotional factors, the physical dependence and withdrawal, the lack of support or constant temptations – everyone who struggles to stay clean struggles for a reason. It’s one of those things that can’t really be compared. Everyone has their own challenges to overcome – and as such, a single unified treatment is nearly impossible. That’s when a Houston sober living community can come in handy.

Drug addiction treatment is all about matching someone to the best fitting treatment model. It’s not so much that therapists are looking for a perfect fit – they’re looking for the best fit. Perfect isn’t how life works, and it’s the same in addiction treatment.

Talk therapy like CBT and DBT, group therapies, art therapy and medications are just a few of the many possible tools used by mental health experts and treatment facility coordinators in the treatment of drug addiction. But sometimes, therapy isn’t quite enough. Drug addiction can change the way we think and feel, and it can affect our perception for quite some time. As it takes a while for the brain to readjust and repair after an addiction, cravings can last for weeks and months.

Therefore treatment options like a Houston sober living community have seen a lot of success. “Rewiring the brain”, so to speak, is a challenge. But with living environments that simulate the responsibilities of real life without any of the temptations, patients can more easily confront their cravings, overcome them, and move on to living healthy lives.

What a Houston Sober Living Community Means

A Houston sober living community is an apartment, home or communal property of some other kind maintained and used for tenants who want to stay sober. It’s typically advised as a post-rehab alternative to jumping straight into living “in the real world” or to replace other outpatient programs.

Rules at a Houston sober living community change from one community to the next, but typically there are a few ground rules that never change.

The biggest and most important rule is that sobriety is paramount in a Houston sober living community. This means that, no matter what, drugs and alcohol are not allowed on the premises. Some places go so far as to ban any products that are commonly used as alcohol alternatives, such as mouthwash, or even bath soap. They will also have unscheduled drug tests to determine whether the rules were broken, and to uncover the possibility of drug use at the facility.

There are also strict visitation rules in place, to prevent any behavior that might enable drug use. This means no sleepovers, and curfews. These curfews are also meant to help people struggling with sleeping cycles and concrete schedules get used to going to bed and waking up at consistent times.

On top of sleeping right, many Houston sober living communities put an emphasis on eating right, moving often, and finding work. Most Houston sober living communities make it mandatory to look for a job, keep a job, or go to school.

Sober communities aren’t just glorified prisons. They’re communities with systems in place to help people stay strict with themselves – but they also put an emphasis on activities that help tenants bond with one another, find common interests, and work on themselves in their free time.

A Houston sober living community doesn’t just stay in one place – they often plan events, frequently outdoors, to foster new interests and ignite a passion for old hobbies. Interests and hobbies are important for drug recovery – they provide an emotional and creative outlet, and help people measure their own post-addiction progress through their measured progress in other skills.

Why People Choose Houston Sober Living Communities

Life is tough – even the day-by-day can take a while to get used to straight out of the rehab environment. A Houston sober living community or home tries to emulate the responsibilities and necessities of life as closely as possible, while still providing a safe environment that offers therapy, and takes away temptations in stressful times.

Through men and women’s Houston sober living communities, people can learn to cope and master life outside of rehab, completely drug-free.

Recovery Goes On

Ultimately, frequency and consistency will never stop being important in long-term recovery. If you want to stay sober, then discipline is necessary. Of course, ideally, you’re never alone in this: friends, family, loved ones, no matter who you have on your side, if they believe in your ability to recover and support you when things get tough, you should have the motivation and inspiration to stay clean.

Life has a bit of habit of throwing curveballs at you; curveballs that will test you in every way. While Houston sober living communities can help you get used to living without drugs, and even teach you how to enjoy a sober life, nothing can really prepare you for days when it feels like your world is falling apart. From divorce, to death and injury, it’s these problems that pose the biggest risk to years and years of recovery being interrupted with a relapse.

This is where the support networks of Houston sober living communities and other walks of life become central to your ability to remain strong and stay clean. No matter how bad things get, there’s always a way back to normalcy, a way back to happiness and a good life. It’s never easy, but every tragedy has an end, and a new beginning afterwards.

Addiction Trigger: How To Manage Triggers For Addictive Behavior In Recovery

Posted on November 9, 2017 by JohnAdmin

Learning to deal with an addiction trigger is an important part of your recovery. An addiction trigger is just those little cues that exist in life that influence your behavior. For example, you may see an old colleague and feel the urge to go grab a drink like you used to do after work. In some instances, you may even be unaware of your addiction trigger, until you find yourself facing the possibility of a serious relapse. Gaining recognition of your personal triggers along with an understanding of other common ones gives you more control over managing your behavior.

Understanding External Addiction Trigger Potential

An external addiction trigger are influenced by your environment, and there will be times that you have little control over them before they arise. For instance, you may detect a certain smell that triggers a craving as you walk through downtown on your way to work. Yet, being aware that the addiction trigger exists allows you time to plan for how you will handle them in the future.
• Interacting with certain people
• Seeing reminders of past drug abuse
• Enjoying experiences such as concerts
• Visiting favorite places
• Celebrating holidays

Discovering Internal Addiction Trigger Potential

An internal addiction trigger is a thought or emotion that generates a desire to use drugs or alcohol. Usually, this is a negative emotional response, but happiness can also be an addiction trigger if you associate doing drugs with celebrating special moments. As you work on identifying the feelings that accompany your cravings, consider whether these emotions may be a trigger for you.
• Boredom
• Anger
• Self-pity
• Sadness
• Anxiety
• Loneliness
• Excitement
• Exhaustion
• Confidence

Handling Specific Places

During your time in treatment, you likely learned to avoid places such as bars or the neighborhood where you used to get your drugs. However, other places can also trigger cravings that may not be avoidable. For instance, entering a bathroom can cause an addiction trigger if you to want to use drugs, or you may find that staying in a hotel brings up old memories. Knowing that this might happen gives you a way to plan. For instance, you may choose to stay in a different hotel, or redecorate your bathroom so that it looks different.

Coping With Social Triggers

People are often unaware of the effect that they can have on someone who is recovering from drugs or alcohol. In fact, you may even run into people who do not know or understand that you are in recovery. For example, your old college roommate could come to town and arrive bearing a bottle of your favorite drink. While their intentions are well meaning, you will need to be prepared to turn down their offer to relive old times. This is why it is important to surround yourself with other sober-minded people during the early stages of recovery. Leaning on the people in your sober living community make it easier to avoid social situations that trigger cravings.

Dealing With Emotional Stress

Emotions can be a powerful addiction trigger that often leave you feeling powerless when they take over. Yet, you can learn how to deal with emotional stress in positive ways. Engaging in physical activity such as going for a swim helps to melt away anxiety, and you can use relaxation techniques such as meditation and yoga to get yourself in a stronger state of mind. Talking to your sober mentor or therapist also allows you to release pent up emotions before they lead to a major breakdown.

Identifying High Risk Situations

The interesting thing about an addiction trigger is that they vary so much from one individual to another. For instance, your roommate may find that attending a family event is their trigger, while you may know that watching certain movies cause you to crave drugs or alcohol. Learn which situations are high-risk for you so that you can develop strategies to combat your cravings. For instance, knowing that you will be having a drug test after your holiday celebration makes you stay accountable for your sobriety.

Working Through A Triggered Response

Unfortunately, you can’t go through life completely avoiding triggers since even seeing a spoon could cause you to remember your old habits. The good news is that you can learn how to work through a craving that is triggered by something in your environment or an emotional response. Begin by recognizing the addiction trigger for so that you can notice it faster the next time. Then, move on to your action plan, and do whatever helps you avoid falling prey to a craving such as talking to a member of your support team or engaging in a favorite activity.

The best thing about learning how to manage triggers is that each time you overcome a craving makes it easier to do it again. As you continue on your sober journey, keep track of what triggers your cravings so that you become stronger in your commitment to beating your addiction.

7 Steps Toward Discovering A Purposeful And Meaningful Path To Recovery

Posted on November 7, 2017 by JohnAdmin

Renewing your sense of purpose is an important part of the path to recovery. After struggling with an addiction to drugs or alcohol for so long, it is normal to feel a little lost as you begin to rebuild your life. Stepping onto a more meaningful life path isn’t as hard as it looks when you follow these steps that allow you to look at your future with a brighter perspective while on the path to recovery.

Identify Your Unique Skills And Assets

Finding your purpose in life on the path to recovery should always begin with rediscovering all of those wonderful things that make you unique. Perhaps you have a knack for public speaking, and you can use this to begin talking to others about the dangers of addiction. Alternatively, you could be great with animals and decide to volunteer at a shelter. Realizing your full potential requires being willing to honestly assess your best attributes so that you can put them to good use. Keep in mind that this step should be repeated periodically as you gain new skills and personality traits that come with being dedicated to staying on the path to recovery.

Redefine Your Path To Recovery For Sober Living

In the early stages of treatment, your decision to stop using drugs or alcohol might have just been based on pure survival. In some instances, you might have even resisted getting sober. Now that you know how amazing it feels to be free from addiction, you can begin redefining your purpose for living a healthier lifestyle on the path to recovery. For instance, you could find that your purpose is to help others get clean, or you are driven to work toward that career you always wanted.

Stretch Beyond Your Comfort Zone

Living a life of purpose means being willing to step into new roles as opportunities arise. Be willing to reach out to the newcomer in your sober living community who looks like they could use a friend on the path to recovery. Sign up for a class to learn a new skill. Go back to college or start an exercise program. It takes being willing to explore new ideas for those special moments in life to arise. Choosing to do things that are hard at first on the path to recovery also bolsters your confidence as you rise up to each new challenge.

Practice Self-Forgiveness

Addiction takes a toll on your self-esteem. For this reason, a huge part of getting sober and onto the path to recovery involves learning to forgive yourself for the past and move on toward the future you deserve. Remember that the person you were yesterday no longer has to define you. Talk about your painful emotions to your counselor, sober living staff and your roommates so that you can get them out of your system. Often, just talking about your past allows you to release it and benefit from another perspective while on the path to recovery.

Be Serious About Your Sobriety

Relapse is always a constant threat that destroys the progress that you have made toward taking a purposeful path to recovery. Utilize every resource that you have available to help you stay sober. Taking advantage of twice-weekly drug testing in your sober living home, setting goals and attending therapeutic sessions all help you stay accountable so that you can thrive in your new life of sobriety.

Build Meaningful Relationships With Other Sober People

In the past few months, you have had to let go of negative influences in your life. While ending some of these relationships may have been painful, you may have also experienced a sense of freedom to be away from people that you realize you could never trust. Now, it is time to begin learning how to build positive relationships that enhance your walk down the path to recovery. The friendships you make in sober living are a great place to begin since everyone there understands what it is like to deal with addiction. Repairing family relationships also bring new meaning to life as you begin to realize what you can contribute to your loved one’s happiness.

Reach Out To Help People New To Sobriety

The lessons that you learn on the path to sobriety are meant to be shared. Talking with newcomers to your Houston sober living home helps reinforce these lessons so that you remain committed to sobriety. For instance, you may rediscover just how much you enjoy hitting the gym first thing in the morning, or sharing a new favorite recipe reminds you of how focusing on your health helps you continue to heal from your addiction.

Living a purposeful and meaningful life is a goal for which everyone should strive and having battled addiction gives you even more of a reason to push forward to grow as an individual. Maintaining a positive perspective on life is the best way to achieve this goal. Surround yourself with others that support your endeavors and be willing to reach for opportunities that accent your best attributes, and you will discover that you have found a purposeful path to sobriety.

4 Signs You Need Help With Addiction

Posted on October 19, 2017 by JohnAdmin

Addiction – regardless of what form it takes – permeates you. Not just your mind or your body, but your person. It changes people, it changes their priorities and thoughts. And worst of all, it’s incredibly hard for someone with an addiction to realize and acknowledge that they have a major problem. Here are some of the key signs to look out for that indicate you need help with addiction.

You Can’t Stop Thinking About It

You’re reminded constantly of your cravings, and you want to satisfy them, to the point that if you’re not thinking directly about the high itself, then you’re thinking of ways to get to that moment. And if that’s not the case, then you’re in the middle of executing those thoughts. It’s even worse when you decide to limit yourself to a certain amount (only gambling with a set budget, or cutting down your alcohol use to a specific amount of alcohol) but then end up completely blowing that limit apart.

The pattern is clear – those who have an addiction will first be able to notice it by how:

They’re often preoccupied with their addiction, even when they should be doing something else.
They avoid making plans with family, friends or other loved ones.
They appear anxious, sad, or irritable if they don’t get their fix.
Their previous activities and enjoyments are less enjoyable or take a total backseat to their addiction.

If you no longer devote any time to the things you used to enjoy doing and deliberately go out of your way to lie to friends and family about your compulsive behavior, get caught and still can’t stop, then you have a severe problem. It’s then time to get help with addiction.

You Exhibit the Physical Symptoms

The trouble with physical symptoms are that they are numerous, and depend highly on a person’s drug or behavior of choice. There are a few common threads indicating you need help with addiction, however these could be signs of pure overwork or stress, as well. For example:

Being physically exhausted, and getting little sleep.
Massive weight loss/weight gain.
Bloodshot eyes.
Signs of malnutrition.
Frequent nausea and/or headaches without a fix.
Bad breath.

While these symptoms are not always indicative of addiction, exhibiting one or more of these symptoms should be a cause for alarm, and can be a sign of other problems. you may consider seeking help with addiction if these symptoms are common for you.

You’ve Tried to Stop Yourself, But Need Help with Addiction

Emphasis on “tried” – an addiction can be characterized as a type of compulsive illness, wherein you’re either constantly returning to your old habit (a chronic symptom) or you’re unable to break away to begin with (relying on the addiction in moments of stress or discomfort, including withdrawal). In those cases you might need help with addiction recovery to make it stick for the long term.

The basic concept behind an addiction is that a certain behavior elicits a powerful reward, powerful enough to motivate continuous use. If you try to stop, withdrawal sets in, putting you in a situation wherein eventually, your brain is desensitized to any sort of pleasure aside from escalating behavior/drug use, and stopping the behavior completely puts you under extreme amounts of physical and emotional stress (further encouraging a relapse). Seeking help with addiction can put you in an environment better suited to dealing with the process of recovery, such as a Houston sober living community .

Even for people who make it through the initial stage of recovery, cravings can be powerful enough that they preoccupy a person’s mind for months and even years to come.

It’s important to think of addiction not as something you need to eliminate day one, but rather as a compulsion within your brain that first must be suppressed, with much effort, for months and months before things start to truly revert to normal. Don’t beat yourself up for “failing” (relapsing) now and again – the idea is to get back on the horse and keep pushing towards your first long-term sobriety, even if you require help with addiction.

You’re Struggling with Mental Illness

No one wants to paint a picture of mental illness immediately condemning someone towards addiction, especially as it is an inaccurate picture. But the correlation cannot be denied. Among those struggling with drugs, an overwhelming 40% tend to have a mental illness of some sort.

Self-medication – the act of using prescription drugs or illicit substances to cope with the symptoms of a mental illness – is a common initiator and contributor to the growth in addiction. A poor focus on mental health care and a lack of public understanding regarding the nature of common mental illnesses contributes to this, as it creates a hostile environment for people who struggle with a mental illness.

If you’re prone to episodes of severe depression, anxiety, have panic attacks, or have been diagnosed with a mental illness, then consider whether any of the other signs apply to you as well. Some people struggle to keep their depression in check without medication – that does not constitute an addiction. But being emotionally dependent on antidepressants after months of use, to the point that they become your only way to be happy not only constitutes as an addiction, but hinders your progress towards coping with depression without meds.

These drugs are prescribed as a temporary solution, not a life-long crutch – an addiction could be the result of a lack of alternative therapies, highlighting the need to treat mental illnesses and addictions with a more comprehensive treatment that covers both issues.

If you have numerous symptoms of either addiction or mental illness, visit a therapist or doctor to see if you need a diagnosis.

Forging Lifelong Friendship In Recovery

Posted on October 5, 2017December 22, 2017 by JohnAdmin

Drug recovery might sound like the last place to find everlasting friendship, but it could very well be one of the best places for meeting people interested in real connection. Forging lifelong friendship in recovery happens more often than you might expect.

Here’s a quick overview of why you shouldn’t be surprised in the slightest at the possibility of newfound friendship in recovery:

#1. We Seek Help in Dire Times

Humans are social animals – we survive in a pack, not in solitude. In fact, exile and rejection are so deadly to us that we feel real physical pain when someone pushes us out of our social standing. It is ingrained within us to fit into a group.

Today more than ever, finding a group that matches our personality and perceived emotional needs is easy. In the past, conforming to society or seeking to change it was the only way to survive – today, we can move in and out of social circles and find new ones through the Internet.

But this also comes at a price. The transient nature of connectivity in the modern world makes real connection harder to come by – “social networking” is superficial, and often wrought with half-truths. We tend to isolate ourselves instead of finding new groups to belong to. While seeking a community, we drive each other into solitude.

Addiction is sometimes seen as linked to this problem. When people have problems, they seek help – and when they have no one to turn to, they might turn to alternatives such as drugs. But when drugs are the problem, the only solution to turn to is people. And it is from friendship in recovery that we find our way towards sobriety.

Friendship in recovery can be the people you attend meetings with, other people in your sober living building, or the other patients in a rehab clinic. It can even be the other people you talk to about addiction online. Treatment brings people together, and creates the perfect environment to open to one another.

#2. Treatment Encourages Us to Be Real

You cannot treat yourself without being honest about yourself. You can maintain sobriety through sheer will for a while, but if you don’t examine the cause or effects of your addiction, you won’t make much progress towards long-term sobriety.

Some people get addicted because of a tough time in their life. One thing led to the next, and after a few months, it became an unmanageable problem. Others found themselves medicating a deeper issue, such as a case of childhood trauma, or severe depression. And others yet had no obvious reason to turn to drugs other than unfortunate circumstances, yet find themselves struggling with symptoms of anxiety and paranoia due to their drug use.

Beyond being honest with yourself, successful sobriety requires you to be honest with others. There is little room for secrets surrounding your addiction in a recovery community – the key to helping one another stay motivated and sober is friendship in recovery as well as trust.

#3. Sobriety is A Common Cause

The first step to friendship in recovery is finding something you have in common with another person. In a recovery community, everyone has something in common. And while addiction and sobriety is not enough to ensure a bond of lasting friendship, it can be the perfect first step needed to test the waters and make new acquaintances. It all starts with talk about challenges, temptations and goals, and from there you might find out that both you and your next-door neighbor share a passion for sports, or music, or Indian food.

You may be surprised at who you’ll find friendship in recovery with if you keep an open eye and an open mind.

#4. Beating Addiction Together Is Friendship In Recovery

To beat an addiction, you have to become a good friend. That may sound like a strange statement, but upon further examination it quickly makes a lot of sense. Firstly, addiction is not something you can overcome without changing.

Here’s how you would have to change: To remove the emotional aspect of addiction, you have to dedicate yourself to living a new kind of life, one you can enjoy without psychological detriment. Depression, anxiety, fear, stress – life is full of instances wherein we are filled with dread, uncertainty, doubt and anger. People with a history of drug addiction need to know how to deal with these issues without falling prey to a relapse.

As such, beating an addiction means learning how to deal with yourself, be in control of your emotions, and return to a state of fulfillment even in dire and complicated situations. It also means understanding self-love. Self-love is knowing what you are worth as a person: it’s neither narcissism nor self-deprecation, but rather a security in knowing that, flawed as you are, you have the potential to be and do whatever is necessary.

Effectively, an addiction treatment program teaches you how to be secure with yourself and it teaches you to control and manage your emotions. Right off the bat, that gives you the potential to find friendship in recovery. Friends are there to support each other: they are sympathetic to each other’s struggles, and encourage each other to do better in life. Good friends don’t jump in and rescue each other at the slightest sign of danger – they toss a lifebuoy and yell “swim harder!”.

Few challenges are as substantial as overcoming addiction. Addiction strips people of their control and self-love, and regaining those two things takes time. But once you have found a place in life where your past is no longer a threatening force that looms over you, but a series of unfortunate circumstances and mistakes you have learned from, you can begin to appreciate what it means to achieve something substantial – and you can sense when it’s time to encourage someone, and when it’s time to step in and help them with all your might.

Good friendships aren’t just forged through fun and social amicability. Good friendships are forged through hardship. And addiction is a hardship you cannot overcome alone. The social aspect to recovery can never be understated, because it is imperative that people realize they are not alone in their struggle. Others have beaten their addiction before you, and you’ll have the power to help others continue to evade their old habits and maintain a sober life.

Ultimately, you are responsible for your life and your sobriety. But recovery is a team effort, and you’ll likely find many people among your team whom you’ll be honored to call friend.

A Bird’s Eye View Of The Recovery Process

Posted on September 28, 2017September 28, 2017 by JohnAdmin

The addiction recovery process is meant to be a comprehensive treatment, one that addresses the issues most commonly found in cases of addiction. There is no strict system to it, as that would too heavily restrict what needs to be an individual, unique approach every single time.

The addiction recovery process, just like most health issues related to mental health, cannot be “fixed” through a cookie-cutter approach. There are several specific treatment models designed to facilitate the recovery process, but they are all built to achieve the same end-goal: long-term sobriety. A state of living wherein someone who used to struggle with drugs not only completely abstains from them, but can comfortably live a contented life without major cravings or fear of relapse.

For some, getting to that point is a very long road. For others, it’s a journey, but one that may take a few months rather than a few years. However, the general structure of the journey remains the same; and it always starts with the first step.

The First Step

In the addiction recovery process, the first step to recovering is to stop. And to do that, you need to acknowledge and understand that you have an addiction to begin with. The first thing most people must fight against when starting their road towards getting better is the denial that they have a problem to begin with.

Some people insist that their behavior is normal, controllable, or based in choice rather than compulsion. There is usually a strong element of fear that must be overcome before the realization truly kicks in that a problem has been growing for quite some time.

Overcoming denial means overcoming fear, and to do that, you must dispel that fear. That’s where modern-day addiction science can take its first shot at helping you. Many people struggle with the idea of being addicted because they don’t want that label attached to themselves – there is an extreme negativity surrounding drug addiction, to the point where it is treated as a status of personal failure rather than a medical condition requiring treatment. The stigma around addiction is still alive and kicking today, and dispelling it is the most effective way of beating denial.

By telling people that getting addicted is not a matter of choice, but that they have the power to get better if they so choose to, you can empower them to see addiction not as a moral failure but as a challenge in life.

Come Out To Friends And Family

If your realization was not already fueled by a staged intervention, then it is important that you come out to your family and closest friends and explain your drug addiction. This isn’t just to have a clear conscience, rather, it’s to seek support. Without support, sobriety cannot last very long – regardless of whether you find it in your friends or your family, you need to surround yourself with people who believe in you and your ability to get better.

Coming out to your friends is also an effective way to find out just what relationships you should dearly hold onto, and what relationships you should let go. This is especially true if the people you hang out with are a contributing factor to your drug addiction. Good friends don’t let other friends get on the slippery slope to dependence, and you need as many good friends as you can get in the early recovery process.

Explore The Options

Once someone accepts that they are struggling with an addiction, it’s time to find out what to do about it. Often enough, addictions are coupled with other things, such as different substances, behavioral addictions such as sex addiction or gambling addiction, or mental health issues such as mood disorders and anxiety. It may be worth going to a psychiatrist to talk about your family history and recent history of mental health, just to ensure that you have a full understanding of what you’re dealing with.

Addiction treatment facilities exist all over the country, but to effectively treat someone, they need to understand what issues they face. A sober living community can be highly effective, but it might not be helpful to someone who experiences deep anxiety and panic attacks. Supplementing a sober environment with regular therapy can be a much more effective approach, addressing both issues without causing further detriment.

Some cases of addiction and/or mental illness require medication, while most do not. The addiction recovery process is a combination of individual and group therapy, sobriety-oriented experiences (rehab, inpatient treatment, sober communities) and a focus on developing new interests and cultivating hobbies.

Find Ways To Maintain Sobriety

The recovery process begins by getting help. Rehab facilities, inpatient/outpatient treatment, sober living homes: these treatment models are meant for early recovery, when getting back into living life without drugs requires guidance, structure, and support.

However, after a while you are expected to be able to live on your own again without the fear of a relapse. That is the second phase of the addiction recovery process, and the phase that technically lasts for the rest of your life. The goal is simple: don’t use drugs again. To be more specific, live life in a way that makes drugs unnecessary. Many people turn to drugs due to stress, and the overbearing complications of living in an abusive situation, within poverty, or in some other struggle. Others turn to drugs because they’re young and young people often make mistakes.

Either way, long-term abstinence means incentivizing yourself never to use drugs again. To that extent, people often get into new and old hobbies, dedicated themselves to their career, or turn their attention towards family, cultivating responsibilities to keep themselves accountable, and cultivating pride in their own work and ability to create or perform.

Getting Back To The Addiction Recovery Process

Relapse rates are quite high, due to the nature of addiction’s chronic effect on the brain. Until your brain has reversed the effects addiction, the potential for relapse is there. All it might take is one particularly personal tragedy.

When that happens, when you relapse in the middle of recovery, then beating yourself up about it will only make things even worse and destroy even more of your recovery process. Instead, pick yourself up and get right back to staying sober. Relapses need to be avoided, of course – and if you do relapse, then the guilt you feel may be justified. But that does not mean you should give up now.

Live Again

Ultimately, the bird’s eye view of the recovery process trails off into unseen distances after the initial recovery period, when life has achieved a post-addiction balance that doesn’t involve any drugs.

Addiction cannot be replaced by another obsession. But it can be replaced by an appetite for life.

Is It Possible To Tackle Multiple Addictions At Once?

Posted on September 26, 2017September 26, 2017 by JohnAdmin

Addiction is a tough nut to crack – there are an estimated 25 million people in the US struggling with addiction in some shape or form, and while our ability to treat multiple addictions has massively improved, we are still far away from making it a painless process to follow and stick to. It gets especially tough when you run into cases of people who have multiple addictions, creating a need for better recovery practices.

There is more to beating addiction than going to rehab and saying sorry to a few people – it’s a personal and reflective journey through the things you’ve done in life, and it’s an opportunity to change yourself. However, that change takes time, dedication, and will often be beset with issues and speed bumps.

It stands to reason that when someone must fight multiple addictions at once, then their struggle will be exponentially harder as they go through quitting and recovering from the effects of each substance. But the reality is a little bit different.

The Reality Of The “Drug Of Choice”

It is not uncommon to be addicted to two or more things. Some people struggle with alcohol and other drugs. Some people couple an eating disorder with their substance abuse. Some people struggle with sexual addiction, as well as compulsive gambling. Some people self-medicate and are addicted to video gaming. However, it often isn’t until people begin trying to treat one thing that they discover the potency and reality of their other “thing(s)”.

The way multiple addictions can creep up into your life is not necessarily as a set of substances, but as a set of symptoms exhibited through one or more substances. Your drug or drugs of choice do not necessarily reflect why you became susceptible to multiple addictions in the first place, and getting hooked on one kind of drug does not make you immune or disinterested in other narcotics or influential substances.

The substance you are addicted to greatly affects the physical treatment plan necessary to help detox you, ensure a safe withdrawal period, and help undo the damage possibly dealt by your multiple addictions – but at the end of the day, addressing the mental consequences (and potential causes) of an addiction will always require a similar path, one determined not by what you take but by why you take it.

Co-Morbidity Is A Single Challenge

Co-morbidity is the existence of more than one mental illness in a patient. In addiction, a co-morbidity is often the combination of addiction with anxiety, or depression, or trauma. Typically, co-morbidity implies a relationship between the addiction and the mental health diagnosis – and in all cases where such a relationship exists, the treatment that is prescribed needs to address both issues rather than simply focusing on one.

In the case of multiple addictions, it is much the same. The risk of developing multiple addictions is not just a theory, and treating someone struggling with more than one form of addiction still requires a comprehensive, all-encompassing treatment that molds to their circumstances and issues, and addresses all vices and negative coping behavior as part of a single list of symptoms related to environmental factors and psychological/emotional concerns.

It’s not to say that multiple addiction can be solved with a cookie-cutter approach. Rather, troubles with someone’s mental health and physical health must be seen as joint issues related to one another rather than entirely separate. In this case, several addictions must be treated as one person’s struggle towards sobriety.

Multiple Addictions And The Mind

No, this does not mean that there is such a thing as an “addictive personality”. A person’s personality does not tie into their likelihood of getting addicted, unless they have a diagnosed mental illness or other environmental factors such as loneliness, trauma, family issues and peer pressure. However, what it does mean is that people with a predisposition towards multiple addictions (not any specific kind, such as with a genetic predisposition) will likely develop an addiction from any highly addictive substance – and often enough, people use more than one kind of drug. It’s not uncommon to abuse both alcohol and stimulants, for example, or marijuana and pain medication.

The substances you struggle with and the reasons you became addicted to them directly affect the kind of treatment you will have to seek to get better and stay sober. The danger becomes keeping you from developing an overt emotional attachment to something potentially very dangerous and damaging.

For example: going from a heroin dependency to becoming a fitness fanatic is a positive change. There are many ways to indulge yourself in long hours spent at the gym if you eat right, and recover properly. Meanwhile, an addiction to food can become problematic. Stress eating to deal with the newfound problems of your sobriety will lead to added pounds, a miserable mood, and many unfortunate symptoms of rapid weight gain, as well as the dangers of obesity down the road.

Replacing you love for alcohol with a love for coffee can be dangerous, but typically is not. Black coffee, or coffee with minimal additives is rarely dangerous even in atypically large dosages – however, chugging several extremely caffeinated drinks with highly concentrated amounts of caffeine within quick succession can very rapidly and adversely affect the heart and even cause arrhythmia.

The list goes on and on – there are many things you can indulge in to satisfy your cravings for pleasure, but nothing can replace an addiction and still be considered healthy. In moderation, there are countless substances and behaviors that can make life interesting, fulfilling and enriched. But when abused, anything can hurt you. And drugs, given their addictiveness, are easily abused.

The key here is not to think of a thing capable of replacing your multiple addictions – it’s to replace addiction with life. Instead of struggling to regain control over yourself in the face of a substance, it’s about living life and enjoying it in its entirety again. It’s about using recovery as an opportunity to express gratitude and realize self-love. To put it differently, addiction must be tackled as a situation that requires replacement, rather than a vice requiring another source of gratification. A men’s sober living in Houston is a good option to consider for that reason.

How To Make Your Addiction Recovery Stick For The Long-Term

Posted on September 21, 2017 by JohnAdmin

Drug addiction is not a matter of choice, but it is a matter of survival. Addiction recovery is not just about deciding not to follow an unhealthy lifestyle – it’s about prolonging your life in general, and making yours a happy one again.

But getting there – to the point where it seems possible to live without drugs again, and stay satisfied – is tough. It’s a long road, and not everyone makes it. However, there are many ways to ensure that you’ll stay on the right track, even if you fall off the horse now and again.

Before we can go into how to make your addiction recovery stick for the long-term and work on your sobriety, it’s important to first understand why addiction is so hard to beat; especially if you haven’t had to suffer through it.

Why Addiction Recovery Is So Difficult

Addiction is a combination of different physical and psychological symptoms, which appear in tandem but rarely in their entirety. Each case of addiction has its own unique factors, its own unique causes and inherent risks, and its own ideal method of treatment. Some people suffer from a highly emotional addiction, one where the issue lies more in their pre-existing mental condition rather than a neurological issue. Others suffer through an addiction that runs in the family – some alcoholics tend to have an inherent risk towards developing an addiction towards alcohol, and this risk is hereditary. Addiction recovery needs to be approached differently depending on the circumstance of the addiction in the first place.

There are different risk factors concretely tied to developing an addiction. While substance use does not necessitate any pre-existing conditions, and all addictive substances carry the inherent risk of creating a physical dependence, some people are at far more risk than others. Here are some of the more common risk factors:

Mental health disorders: Depression, anxiety, ADHD and post-traumatic stress are all tied to an increased risk of addiction. When coping with the massive stress tied to mental illness, many people see drugs as an effective short-term solution, despite their long-term consequences. There is also a higher risk of abusing medication.

Peer pressure: Teenagers are susceptible to this, as they are inherently less aware of risks and tend to ignore dangers in the face of high social rewards (i.e. fitting into a certain social circle).

Loneliness: A lack of personal connections with others can turn people towards drugs to escape many of the mental consequences of long-term loneliness, such as depression.

Family problems: Being on bad terms with your family tends to increase the risk of using drugs, due to a lack of support.

Genetics: Family history of addiction tends to correlate with a high risk of addiction, especially for specific substances.

Chronic illness: People struggling with chronic pain have a higher likelihood of becoming dependent on painkillers, especially due to the prevalence of opioid prescriptions in cases of chronic pain.

Each of these risk factors have their own hard counters – chronic illnesses can be addressed through alternative treatment methods, genetics can be used as a warning to avoid certain substances, families can be replaced by a strong network of life-long friendships, and dedicating yourself to being open and meeting more people can cure loneliness.

Even mental health issues can be addressed with modern-day psychotherapy and other forms of therapy – and in many cases of addiction, they must be addressed to truly help someone overcome their drug dependence. Besides treatment, much of which takes place during rehab, the hardest part of addiction is sticking to sobriety long after you’re done with a residential program or outpatient treatment program.

This process, often hardest in its “early recovery” stage, requires a system of commitment and a proper understanding of how to steal back the reward system of your brain after addiction hijacks it.

The Science of Commitment

Psychological health is really all about learning how your mind works, and then tricking it into working as well as possible. As humans, we’re subject to all sorts of psychological problems – we tend to avoid pain and suffering for good reasons, but that also means we at times rob ourselves of opportunities to grow by avoiding rejection, and instead suffer the ire of loneliness. Sometimes we experience so much pain and misery that we develop a trauma.

Sometimes, all our ills compound into a dependence on the immense short-term high of a drug. Our minds begin to rely on things like alcohol, cocaine and opioids to forget about all the things that worry us and instead just be satisfied, or even happy. Our mind becomes committed to drugs – in our brains, drugs rise to the top of the agenda and take over everything else.

Taking that drive back to develop a commitment towards something else isn’t quite so easy, because drugs come with an inherent abnormally high pleasure factor. There’s nothing else on the planet as immediately satisfying as a dangerous drug. So, you must utilize some discipline to get to the point where the commitment really sticks and you can begin your addiction recovery.

Commitment in the scientific sense, that is, sticking to one partner and making things work, is part of the essential toolkit we humans carry around to make and raise babies. We commit to a partnership at least long enough to ensure that our offspring survive in this world, and that takes years. This is because ultimately, it’s worth it – it’s natural, and we’re inclined to do so.

Trick Yourself into Sobriety

The trick is not committing yourself to sobriety. Sobriety isn’t fun by nature. We’re not inclined to deny ourselves the pleasure of drugs (that’s the whole problem). It can be fun, but not because of what it is – rather, because of what you can make of it. Instead of making a commitment to sobriety, make a commitment to something you really enjoy. Pick any hobby you feel passionate about, and use it as a replacement for drugs – turn to it in times of stress, hone your craft or your ability, get better and better and use it to release stress when things get a little much during addiction recovery.

The take-away point is this: learn not to focus solely on your sobriety.

Instead, learn to focus on living again. Drugs rob you of the ability to really live, to feel and love and focus on others and the things you enjoy the most. They make life dull and boring, they take out all the things that make it worth living. You must bring those things back through your addiction recovery, and remind yourself of how awesome sobriety can be, not how awesome it’s supposed to be from the get-go (you may be disappointed).

Can Love Cure Addiction?

Posted on August 31, 2017August 31, 2017 by JohnAdmin

It’s known that love is the greatest emotion of all of them – but can can love cure addiction, one of the most tenacious illnesses there is? In a way, it can – or in the very least, there is a convincing argument for love being a central part of the best treatment for addiction.

Addiction as a lack of connection is a theory that says that most cases of addiction are due to a deep disconnect between the person struggling with addiction and the rest of the world. When someone loses hope for finding a role in the world – whether in society in general or just at home – then addiction becomes something to bond with and soothe the pain over. Just as chronic pain is sometimes linked to addiction, so can emotional pain become a gateway to a destructive habit.

The Relationship Between Addiction And Isolation

Addiction correlates strongly with feelings of low self-esteem, depression, and guilt. These are all signs of a person who is struggling to find a reason to exist, and is having an existential crisis – typically one that revolves around a lack of belonging. Belonging, to the human psyche, is essential. As much as we glamourize the idea of the lone wolf, the lone wolf is a dead wolf. The pack is what survives, and at the heart of every human being is our instinct to exist and survive among others.

This is why rejection hurts, physically. The pain we experience through rejection – and the fear it instills in us – is part of our inner instinct to fear ostracizing and social rejection. We want to fit in and be a part of society, because that was the only way our ancestors survived. That begs the question: Can love cure addiction and allow us to find that place in society?

Can Love Cure Addiction? Treatment Though Love

Everybody spends a considerable amount of their time figuring out what it is they’re supposed to do, what it is that drives them. The answer is each other. For the most part, what we strive for the most isn’t just self-fulfillment, but status and relationships. We want to be with certain people, be friends with certain people, or be admired by certain people. We value the opinions of others and listen to them. They help shape our self-esteem, and, ideally, they help keep the ego in check without pummeling it into self-doubt and loathing.

In other words, we want to be loved. Typically, we would like a family that supports us, accepts us, and helps us grow. We want a relationship with a person who loves us unconditionally, and is just different enough to keep things interesting and entertaining for the two of you. We want to be respected by our offspring, and typically seek to raise them to have the potential to do better, so we can be proud of them. We want a great many things, but they all usually have something to do with someone else.

When we think about the question, “Can love cure addiction?” the idea then is that when we give a person all these things – a healthy social environment in which they can thrive and pursue the kind of life they want to pursue – then addiction with mostly fall to the wayside. People will abandon drugs and instead work for their families, to be productive, in order to feel proud of their achievements and happy with their lives. This is still true for introverted personalities, as well – even introverts need friends. They just tend to seek out less friends, and bond with them more closely and in different ways.

And when people can’t bond, they turn to drugs. No one wants to be addicted; everyone struggling with addiction is a prisoner of a disease, the hard part is figuring out what toolset they should be using to pick the lock on their cell door.

More Than Just Emotions

Many veterans came back from the Vietnam War and gave up the heroin. Others developed post-traumatic stress, and never felt quite at home again. Some never got off the drugs, and died. While there’s a lot of merit to the idea that isolation and, ultimately, emotional dissatisfaction is behind a lot of cases of addiction, it’s not fair to say that everyone struggling with drugs is simply missing the love and support they need to quit. While the answer to “Can love cure addiction?” is yes, that won’t be the case for everyone.

There are countless cases of families banding together to help their loved one get better against all the odds – one recent case that comes to mind is that of Patrick Cagey, a former high school athlete who turned to prescription drugs after a knee surgery spelled the doom for his dreams at athletics. However, after confessing his heroin use and getting clean at a 30-day drug treatment center, he vowed to get his life together, finding balance through the support of his family, his girlfriend, the 12-step program, the gym, and a potential career in physical therapy. Then, one day, he began to start slipping again, and his father found him overdosed.

Drug treatment comes in many forms, and for a good reason: addiction happens for many reasons. Some people may just need love and the answer to, “Can love cure addiction?” is a resounding yes. For others, medication is more important to saving their life. Our responsibility to others around us suffering from addiction is to understand that real way to deal with this illness is by finding out what works best for you – and that means trying everything, before settling for any one way. The alternative is too dangerous.

Here are a few ways in which addiction treatment can be offered to those seeking long-term recovery, and a way to cope with life:

Cognitive-behavioral therapy
Dialectical behavior therapy
Group therapy
Sober living community
Medication-assisted treatment
Family behavioral therapy
Long-term follow-up
Co-morbidity treatment
And more.

One thing will always be true – addiction cannot be beaten without support. It is true that isolation can and always will sabotage a person’s journey towards beating an addiction forever. We rely on each other as humans to survive, and in addiction treatment, the support of family and friends is important in order to give us the place and the validation we need to know we’re doing the right thing, and still have value in life.

And if some research is true, then severe physical addiction – the kind of dependency that forms and cannot be unhooked through therapy, support and connection – is still less of a problem, and we need to continue to advocate for a world where addiction is no longer met with stigma, fear, and misunderstanding.