The first stage begins the moment you seek help for your drug or alcohol addiction. Whether you seek help voluntarily or are forced by circumstances to go into rehabilitation, your recovery process begins with the beginning of professional treatment. Once you've fully committed to treating your addiction, you're in the second stage of recovery, known as early abstinence. During the early stage of withdrawal, your addiction counselor will begin teaching you the skills needed to cope with a sober lifestyle.
The tools you learn during this stage will help you throughout your recovery. Even though your recovery never really ends, going through these four stages of addiction recovery teaches you how to live a healthy and sober lifestyle. Part of living this healthy life is continuing to work on your program, which may involve attending 12-step meetings, attending regular counseling sessions, or joining a support group. If you suffer from drug or alcohol addiction and think it's time to fix your act, you should enter a professional drug or alcohol treatment program.
In this program, you will learn that rehabilitation recovery consists of four stages that you will learn to develop to lead a clean, healthy and sober lifestyle. In the initial stage of treatment, clients may be in the pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, or early action change stage, depending on the nature of the group. Regardless of their early recovery stage, customers tend to be ambivalent about ending substance use. Even those who sincerely intend to remain abstinent may have a weak commitment to recovery.
In addition, cognitive impairment of substances is more severe in these early stages of recovery, so customers tend to be rigid in their thinking and limited in their ability to solve problems. For some scientists, it seems that the “addicted brain” is abnormally conditioned, so the environmental cues surrounding drug use have become part of addiction (Leshner 1996, p. During early treatment, a relatively active leader seeks to involve clients in the treatment process. Clients from the outset “generally respond more favorably to the group leader, who is spontaneous, 'alive' and participatory, than to the group leader, who takes the more reserved stance of technical neutrality associated with the more classic approaches to group therapy (Flores 2001, p.
The leader should not be too charismatic, but must have a presence strong enough to meet clients' dependency needs during the initial stage of treatment. In process groups, the leader pays special attention to feelings in the initial stage of treatment. Many people with a history of addiction aren't sure what they're feeling and have great difficulty communicating their feelings to others. Leaders begin to help group members move toward affective regulation by labeling and reflecting feelings as they arise at work in.
The leader's subtle instruction and empathy allow clients to begin to recognize and own their feelings. This essential step toward managing feelings also leads clients toward empathy with the feelings of others. Cognitive ability usually begins to return to normal in the middle stage of treatment. Frontal lobe activity in a person addicted to cocaine, for example, is dramatically different after about 4 to 6 months of not using it.
Even so, the mind can play tricks. Clients can clearly remember the comfort of their substance past, but they forget how bad the rest of their lives were and the severity of the consequences that occurred before they went into treatment. As a result, the temptation to relapse remains a matter of concern. As the mental, physical, and emotional capabilities of the recovering client strengthen, anger, sadness, terror, and pain may be more appropriately expressed.
Clients need to use the group as a means to explore their emotional and interpersonal world. They learn to differentiate, identify, name, tolerate and communicate feelings. Cognitive-behavioral interventions can provide clients with specific tools to help modulate feelings and be more confident in expressing and exploring them. Interpersonal process groups are particularly useful in the intermediate stage of treatment, because authentic relationships within the group allow clients to experience and integrate a wide range of emotions in a safe environment.
When you decide to enter a drug or alcohol rehabilitation program, you will begin a journey through four distinct stages of addiction recovery as you learn to develop a clean and sober lifestyle. . .
