Therapy Coupled With 12-Step Work Key to Recovery
When a drug addict or alcoholic finally hits their emotional and spiritual bottom, an absolute must for anyone wishing for the willingness to get and stay clean and sober, they increase their chances for success if they immediately engage in 12-step work.
Meetings and working the 12-steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, or any number of the programs based on AA’ steps and traditions, are paramount and widely considered to be the equivalent to taking the proper medication for diabetes or other life-threatening diseases. Without it, you are not getting well from the inside.
But there are many layers to be uncovered, once an addict or alcoholic makes the choice to turn their lives around and get help. As they begin to develop life skills that do not involve the same old pattern of drinking or drugging their troubles away, they also begin to feel emotions they may have been stuffing down for years. Like an onion, they are peeling back these layers and as they do, they uncover truths about themselves and their history that often 12-step work is not enough to help them understand or permanently heal from.
This is where substance abuse therapy can be very useful. A trained therapist that is also very familiar with 12-step work and philosophy is equipped to offer a patient an additional arsenal of resources that may include pharmacology and psychotherapy that deal with emotional issues that lead a patient to drinking and drug use.
Alcoholism and drug abuse are indiscriminate: They do not care how much money or education or social status a person has. They are insidiously moving in and out of cultural circles all over the globe and can destroy the lives of individuals and their families any time anywhere.
But among AA and other 12-step programs is a set of different people with one common goal: the desire to remain free of abuse of alcohol and/or drugs in order to achieve a state of temporary relief from emotional pain. Temporary is the key word here, as we have already mentioned that emotions are driving many of the underlying fears that make being drunk or high seem like the only way out.
Many drug abuse counselors and other professionals who understand addiction and are involved in substance abuse treatment are highly knowledgeable about the kinds of issues that lay beneath the addicts’ emotional layers of pain. These may included all kinds of co-occurring disorders, such as bi-polar, schizophrenia and more, as well as pain from physical and sexual abuse; traumatic events from childhood and other issues that may have cause scars or fears that lead to shame, remorse and secret keeping.
In order to stop alcohol and or drug abuse a patient also may need help with medication, which is where a licensed drug and alcohol therapists comes in. But in addition to medication, therapy also helps patients build a patient’s confidence and self esteem in order to help make it possible to work on areas that are damaged and scared.
The goal of AA or other 12-step programs is to provide a safe community for recovering addicts where they can hear and share their stories of personal struggle and support one another, using spiritual-based steps and principals for long-term recovery.
The job of any licensed drug and alcohol therapist is to help a patient is to guide those in recovery from addiction through the process of uncovering and discovering those things about themselves that they previously blocked out or suppressed through substance abuse.
With proper care and solid support, it is possible for any addict to face their fears and begin healing from the scars of a childhood or other periods in their lives. Learning to overcome fears is the first part of getting and staying sober, but this letting go is often very difficult to sustain over any length of time if those underlying causes and conditions are not looked at and dealt with.
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