You’ve gotten in too deep. Long-term, it doesn’t matter whether it’s alcohol abuse, substance abuse, gambling, mental illness, or some other self-destructive addictive behavior. Whether you are a first timer who recognizes your own problem and need for help, whether you have had the problem before and relapsed, or whether you have faced an intervention, formal or informal, you are in it. You need help. You need to find a place where you can take your first step toward recovery.
One suggestion would be an inpatient, residential treatment facility. They are all strictly sober live-in health-care facilities that provide therapy for rehabilitation from mental illness or addiction, or some multiple diagnosis disorder. You, or someone you trust, can investigate which type of residential care facility would work best for you. There are several types of residential care facilities, each with their own distinctive “personality.” Each, in some form, has the same characteristics or program.
First, if you require it, they provide detoxification. Detoxification is the first step in the management of substance abuse. It is a medically supervised period of withdrawal. During this time, a medical professional will often administer medications to control symptoms, and the individual is watched by medical professionals to see to his or her safety.
Each resident is treated as an individual, with his or her own strengths and weaknesses. They are evaluated for their own individual problem, or set of problems, with an eye toward what they want to accomplish and how to best go about it. To that end, individual goals are set by the patient and his or her counselor.
In addition to being treated as an individual, the patient is also introduced and welcomed into the facility’s community. This is a group of all of the professionals, volunteers, and patients of the facility. With this community, the patient will learn about structure in life, about being truly independent, about giving back to the community, about the meaning of stability in life, about what habits are good in life, about making and sustaining relationships, about group activities, and about the 12 Steps, how to work through them and how to make them have meaning in your life. This is, after all, community living, so all meal are taken together, there will be roommates, and the rest of the patients will be in roughly the same boat.
To get on the path to sobriety, the patient will be given individual therapy and individual projects to do. He will begin to make a plan for when he is discharged from the facility. Also, in a group setting, the patient will learn about the 12 Step program, and how it applies to all of them, or should. He will also have an opportunity to hear about the stories of the others, how they have learned to manage their addiction, and offer his own story and what he envisions his future to be. Working together, being entertained together, eating together, struggling together, and supporting one another… all make for a basis of new, healthy relationships.
This healing environment, and so much more, is what you can receive in a residential treatment facility.
