South LA County, South Bay, Hollywood Thanksgiving Holiday Sober Events

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Thanksgiving can be the beginning of a season which is a challenge to early sobriety. Seeking recovery from addiction, people new to sobriety may find it difficult to avoid using or drinking while others celebrate.

 

Practicing the avoidance of the first use of alcohol or drugs is important but the temptation to rationalize that “it’s just one” is often too great. Sober support systems and activities where people new to sobriety relate with others who have been there is a vital ingredient to long-term sobriety.

 

Many Alano Clubs and sober groups sponsor events during the holidays which provide support for people who are engaged in a sober lifestyle. South LA County, South Bay and Hollywood are locations for the following events for a sober Thanksgiving Holiday.

 

Long Beach – MWA Alano Club – 1pm Pot Luck on Thanksgiving and all scheduled meetings

 

Paramount Alano Club (Snake Pit) – Marathon meetings 8am – 11pm

 

Cypress– Twin Town Alumni is hosting a “Tired of Turkey BBQ  on Saturday 11/24/18 12pm – 4pm at Veteran’s Park in Cypress – Corner of Ball Rd. and Denni St. under the pavillion

 

Hermosa Beach–  The South Bay Alano Club is provides dinner for those without family or Thanksgiving Plans. 1:00pm, 703 11th Pl, Hermosa Beach, CA 90254; 310.374.2131

 

Hollywood– Van Ness Recovery House, 1919 N. Beachwood Drive, LA, (323) 463-4266 is hosting a Thanksgiving Day Open House from 1pm-5pm to include food, drinks and fellowship. It is free of charge and open to all

 

 

 Twin Town Treatment Centers is immediately accessible to all Los Angeles and Orange County residents, is accredited by The Joint Commission, and is certified by the California DHCS. All network HMO/PPO/EPO insurance plans contract with Twin Town Treatment Centers to provide drug and alcohol rehabilitation. Our phone is answered by real people. We can see people on the same day you call. (866) 594-8844

 

 

Orange County Thanksgiving Holiday Sober Events

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Thanksgiving is the beginning of a season of celebration, yet a season which can be threatening to early sobriety. Maintaining a plan of recovery while others “party” can be challenging and strengthening if successful.

 

The seduction of trying “one drink”, “one toke” or “one line” can be overwhelming to someone new to recovery who hasn’t had the practice of avoiding these circumstances and using buddies. Building relationships with others in recovery and practicing recovery enhancing relationships is essential for establishing long-term sobriety.

 

Many recovery (Alano) clubs sponsor sober events during the holidays. Following are events in Orange County for this Thanksgiving Holiday, provided by the Orange County Alcoholics Anonymous Central Office:

 

 

Twin Town Treatment Centers is immediately accessible to all Los Angeles and Orange County residents, is accredited by The Joint Commission, and is certified by the California DHCS. All network HMO/PPO/EPO insurance plans contract with Twin Town Treatment Centers to provide drug and alcohol rehabilitation. Our phone is answered by real people. We can see people on the same day you call. (866) 594-8844

Drug Epidemic and Death is MORE than Opoids

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A recent article by the Los Angeles Times

By Melissa Healy

September 20th, 2018 | 11:50 AM

Americans have long construed drugs of abuse as choices. Poor choices that can cost users their lives, to be sure, but choices nonetheless.

But what if drugs of abuse are more like predators atop a nationwide ecosystem of potential prey? Or like shape-shifting viruses that seek defenseless people to infect? If public health experts could detect a recognizable pattern, perhaps they could find ways to immunize the uninfected, or protect those most vulnerable to the whims of predators’ appetites.

In a war against drugs that has yielded few victories and spawned plenty of unintended consequences, these are radical ideas. But a comprehensive new study of drug-overdose deaths aims to give researchers the data they need to discern previously unrecognized patterns in the widening epidemic of drug abuse — and, maybe, to devise policies that really work.

The new research makes clear that over close to four decades, the collective toll of drugs on Americans has followed an upward trajectory that looks less like a steady rise and more like the chain reaction that builds to a nuclear explosion.

The drugs that exact this toll have changed: Methamphetamine, cocaine, prescription narcotics and heroin have all dominated the killing fields of American drug use at some particular time and place.

Put those disparate trend lines together, though, and the curve representing fatal overdoses grows sharply steeper between 1979 and 2016. The death toll from drugs has doubled every eight years, according to the report published Thursday in the journal Science.

“Inexorable,” Dr. Donald Burke, the study’s senior author, called the trend. And frightening, too, since it appears that drug overdose deaths will continue unabated.

That a single, regular pattern of exponential growth would emerge from the combined death tolls of so many distinct drugs was an “aha moment,” said Burke, who studies global public health issues at the University of Pittsburgh.

“It came as a surprise,” he said. But the insight also reinforced his longstanding suspicion “that there are other patterns out there that we sometimes can’t see when we’re standing too close.”

Opioid abuse claimed 49,068 American lives in 2017, and the spreading crisis has galvanized the country. But the new analysis makes clear that prescription painkillers, heroin and synthetic fentanyl (which killed more than 29,000 Americans in 2017) represent only the latest chapter in a history of drug-related deaths that reaches back decades.

Add in the deaths due to cocaine, methamphetamine and a growing number of other drugs and the death toll from overdoses last year reached 72,306. That’s more than the number of American lives claimed by breast cancer and prostate cancer combined.

With greater resolution than ever before, the new research chronicles a scourge of drug-related deaths that has ping-ponged across the country, ravaging new communities from year to year and sometimes abating just as mysteriously — only to explode elsewhere in a different form.

Between 1999 and 2003, for instance, an early spike of cocaine deaths appeared in New Mexico’s north-central counties surrounding Albuquerque. By 2004 to 2007, similar pockets of outsized cocaine-related death rates had metastasized in Florida and North Carolina. And by 2012 to 2016, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Massachusetts and Rhode Island had become cocaine-overdose hotspots.

Heat maps show that from 1999 to 2016, cocaine overdoses exacted their heaviest toll on black men between the ages of 30 and 60, and began surging again in a slightly older population of African American men in 2016.

Unusually high rates of deaths attributed to methamphetamine show up first between 2004 and 2007 in New Mexico, this time in counties to the southwest of Albuquerque, as well as in Nevada and Northern California. By 2012 to 2016, pockets of methamphetamine death would also erupt across Southern California, western Arizona, Oklahoma, and parts of Montana, the Dakotas, West Virginia and Kentucky. These deaths tended to be concentrated among rural white men in their 30s, 40s and 50s.

The birth of the prescription opioid epidemic is evident as early as 1999 to 2003, again scattered across New Mexico but concentrated in the counties surrounding Albuquerque. By 2004 to 2007, hotspots had broken out across Nevada and Northern California, and in Oklahoma, West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. By 2008 to 2011, virtually all of Nevada was suffering a disproportionate rash of opioid deaths, and outsized overdose rates had erupted in pockets across Washington state, the desert counties of Southern California, Florida, southern Ohio and Maine.

Prescription opioid death rates have clustered heavily among white rural men over 40. Of all drug abuse deaths, only prescription opioids — and more recently, heroin and synthetic opioids such as fentanyl — have bitten deeply into the lives of women.

The earliest deaths from synthetic opioids such as fentanyl were seen between 2004 and 2007, almost entirely in West Virginia. By 2008 to 2011, clusters cropped up in eastern Oklahoma and in California’s Lassen County. Between 2012 and 2016, hotspots broke out across northern California, Maine and the midwestern Rust Belt.

Among whites, synthetic opioids in 2016 claimed higher death tolls among men in the prime of their lives — those roughly 25 to 45 years old. But among African Americans, synthetic opioid deaths cut deeply into men between 50 and 60 years old.

The study relies on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Vital Statistics System, which has not required consistent details of drug-related fatalities to be reported. As a result, county coroners or medical examiners did not always specify the drug or drugs involved, or only listed it as an “opioid” drug. To reflect such cases, Burke’s team lists deaths due to “unspecified drugs” and “unspecified narcotics” as separate categories.

Linda Richter, director of policy research and analysis for the Center on Addiction, said the study results are a stark testament to the failures of the U.S. response to substance abuse.

Health officials have stigmatized addiction, underfunded treatment, and haphazardly responded to the emergence of crises like the epidemic of opioid abuse. That has fueled the unrelenting rise in drug deaths documented by the study, and in the geographic eruptions of drug-related crises it reveals, she said.

“To prevent new drug epidemics, we can’t keep focusing on one drug or another or wait to respond until overdose deaths reach epidemic levels,” said Richter, who was not involved in the study. Something has to change, she added, and this new way of looking at overdose data can shed some light on what should be different.

Burke and his colleagues cited “push” and “pull” factors that may prompt overdose deaths of certain drugs to wax and wane. Experts widely believe, for instance, that the development of abuse-resistant formulations of prescription painkillers, along with depressed prices for street drugs, led many addicted people to abandon prescription drugs in favor of heroin. Meanwhile, “sociological and psychological ‘pull’ forces may be operative to accelerate demand, such as despair, loss of purpose, and dissolution of communities,” the authors wrote.

What clearly emerges from the data is that something profound has happened in the United States since the 1980s to make its citizens more inclined to self-medication and its dangers.

“There’s a treasure trove of information in there,” said Dr. Steven H. Woolf, a physician and public health expert at Virginia Commonwealth University who was not involved with the new study. Researchers will be able to draw on this data to explore the effects — intended and otherwise — of drug trafficking policies, and to decide where in the country to concentrate resources, he said.

“Those details are very valuable,” Woolf said. “But we shouldn’t miss the forest for the trees. The larger question is, why is it that Americans have been dying at greater rates of drug overdose since the 1980s?”

In his own research, Woolf has documented a pattern of declining U.S. life expectancies and linked it to what have been called “deaths of despair,” a powerful confluence of rising rates of suicides, drug overdoses and deaths linked to alcohol abuse. Those trends “all point to this larger issue of Americans reacting to some kind of stressor and some sense of desperation in their lives. And we won’t get control of the drug overdoses unless we identify the root causes that are driving the behavior.”

From Sensation and Avoidance to Serenity

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Addiction creates heightened needs for sensation. Its consequences produce the need for avoidance. What was once a short-term thrill or remedy, becomes a repeated pattern of running to and from. Attachment to the chemical solution becomes increasingly strong.

In the turmoil created by using short-term solutions over a long span of time, medium to long-term reward is sacrificed for immediate satisfaction and relief. Financial, work and legal problems, interpersonal conflicts and/or isolation, and emotional distress build.

Only after the consequences become insurmountable do people caught in the addiction-cycle seek help. Taking a pill to solve an addiction is very seductive for both the consumer and the
pharmaceutical manufacturer. Ironically, we seek another drug-induced solution for what proves to be a destructive practice over time… immediate reward and remedy.

Many alcoholics and opioid addicts prefer taking naltrexone or buprenorphine in the absence of counseling or therapy.

We invest enormous amounts of research time and investment seeking the magic pill- our cultural gears are synchronized to physical fixes. Personal or psychological change requires laborious and unattractive learning, effort and practice.

Moving away from home into a sensational treatment center seems much more interesting than commuting to and from counseling sessions on a daily basis. When change actually needs to be made at home with family and friends, people seeking recovery often prefer to seek relief from their problems by moving somewhere that feels remote. The problems at home wait.

At what point does someone engaging in recovery detach from the immediate reward/ relief cycle?

When do we start to pursue intermediate and long-term solutions and appreciate incremental gain?

When does recovery become its own reward?

Biological, psychological and social effects of substance use disorders subside at different rates for each person. The length of time spent in an addictive cycle, personality, social and occupational support, and access to effective treatment all influence the rate at which a person may engage and progress in their personal course of recovery.

There is a point at which a recovering person realizes that they are no longer looking for a quick fix and instead find themselves satisfied with the present. More will come and regardless of our expectations, recovering people become excited at seeing change.

Beauty is found in the simplest things. Love and respect are shared not only with family but with other people around us. Trust replaces fear. Humility replaces looking better than the next guy. We become comfortable where ever we are standing.

“Today” is a gift of recovery. Rather than chasing for the next sensation or remedy, people in recovery know that the solution is in the present, taking the best next step.

Twin Town Treatment Centers is immediately accessible to all Los Angeles and Orange County residents, is accredited by The Joint Commission, and is certified by the California DHCS. All network HMO/PPO/EPO insurance plans contract with Twin Town Treatment Centers to provide drug and alcohol rehabilitation. Our phone is answered by real people. We can see people on the same day you call. (866) 594-8844

EAPA San Fernando Valley

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EAPA San Fernando Valley
August 24, 8:30am Networking 
9 – 11 am 2 CE Presentation (without break)
Managing and Understanding the Angry Client/ Employee
Anita Avedian, M.S., LMFT, CAMS-IV, Certified v  Anger Management Specialist IV, Director, Anger Management 818 
 
Meeting Location: Foundations Los Angeles
For details, special accommodations or to RSVP, please contact Naheed Awan (240) 381-8154 naheed.awan@gmail.com. 2 CE Credits provided through CEPA #13918 CAMFT approved continuing education provider for MFT, LCSW, LPC. $15 members, $20 nonmember fee (refund policy at door). Please notify of ADA accommodation needs. 
EAPA SFV meets the fourth Friday at each month for 2 CE presentation.
 

Learning Objectives:
•Understand anger versus aggression versus rage
•Learn the characteristics of an angry person
•Identify when anger is a problem in the workplace
•Recommendations for HR or EAP when dealing with employees who are at risk

 
The Mental Health Organization launched a report in 2017, regarding “Boiling Point” which focuses on the problem of anger.  In this report, they state that 64% say that the world is becoming an angrier place and almost a third of the people reported that they have a close friend or family member who has problems controlling anger. We have seen employees “lose it” with a burst of anger in the workplace, however, when does it cross the line into a serious situation where we need to take action?  In this seminar, we are going to get a better understanding of anger versus aggression and examine the signs of anger problems in the workplace.  It is important for HR and therapists to recognize the difference between appropriate and inappropriate expressions of anger in the workplace and how to intervene. 
 
Anita Avedian is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (Licence # LMFT 38403) and has been in practice since 2001. Anita has offices in Sherman Oaks, Hollywood, Glendale, and Woodland Hills. Her specialties include working with relationships, anger, social anxiety, and addictions. Anita is the Director of Anger Management 818, with 10 locations, helping both self-referred and court-ordered individuals seek help with their aggression. Anger Management Essentials is an approved NAMA model which is used for anger management certification. Moreover, Anita is an Authorized NAMA Trainer and Anger Management Supervisor for certifying anger management specialists. She is a Certified Anger Management Specialist IV and a Diplomat Member of NAMA. She offers monthly training throughout the West Coast to certify counselors in anger management. She authored Anger Management Essentials, a workbook for aggression, which has been translated into Spanish, Armenian, and Hebrew. Anita is the co-Founder and President of the California Chapter of the NAMA which is the California Chapter of Anger Management Providers, and the Founder of Toastmasters for Mental Health Professionals.Anita recently appeared on Good Day LA discussing Road Rage. 

CLICK HERE TO RSVP/CONTACT US

Real Time Recovery in Real Life

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When you find yourself with an addiction or alcoholism, do you move away or do you change in real life? External remedies are often sought to solve internal matters. Eventually, change has to happen in real life in real time.

A safe and comfortable retreat where all needs are met sounds like a great idea and some can actually afford such luxuries. Most of us find that engaging in recovery happens best during life’s activities and challenges. Recovery skills can only become effective when they are practiced with common day problems in real life.

A brief respite may help but long-term avoidance creates new problems. Avoiding work difficulties, conflicts with others, financial challenges, and craving triggers postpone the practice of recovery. Recovery only occurs when we face our skeptical coworkers and boss, become honest with our resentful spouse and children, set out a payment plan for the accumulating bills and debts, and when we walk past the bar or a using buddy on our way to a meeting.

Families with addicted loved ones often want to send them out for repair. A new changed person is expected after a couple of months in residential treatment or rehab. We hope that whatever happens behind those walls “takes” and magically changes years of well-practiced drug seeking and chasing the high.

Addiction is a shortcut to pleasure and relief from discomfort and pain. The immediate result of ingesting a chemical replaces the social and occupational activities normal people employ to take care of themselves. We lose our social, occupational and personal management skills.

What is learned in comfortable and safe surroundings need real-world practice to become useful. Eventually, we as recovering people eventually need to face our own capacity for choice. We cannot continue to be monitored and contained in an observed treatment center forever.

Recovering alcoholics and addicts label moving to avoid problems, “taking a geographic”. It is avoidance of responsibility and magical thinking. The problem remains through space.

Wherever you go, you eventually find yourself… you take your problems wherever you go. Treatment and rehab should not be another “geographic” escape from the problems and the consequences of a life that has become unmanageable. Facing the wreckage, triggers, and problem behavior at home is required if a solution is to be found.

Recovery starts with avoiding the first drink or drug… abstaining from addictive substances one day at a time. That beginning may be inside a safe and supportive rehab or treatment center, or the beginning could be at home with the direction, instruction and support of an intensive outpatient program. The practices of recovery must be established at home in the long term… postponing may feel comfortable but avoidance becomes its own bad habit.

Intensive outpatient drug and alcohol treatment provides an “at home” process of learning, understanding, becoming increasingly aware, practicing new skills, and monitoring personal ideas, feelings and behaviors. In intensive outpatient treatment, people discover at home, with loved ones and at work, with coworker a new way of acting. An openness to learn and understand new ideas, and to practice new behaviors and skills is developed naturally, where it is needed the most. An outpatient support group and professional helps find new ways of facing triggers, people, places and things which were once part of the addictive lifestyle.

New friends and acquaintances who understand and support sobriety are gained, and can be maintained over the long-term in outpatient treatment. Leaving outpatient treatment or rehab doesn’t mean losing all the supportive relationships and practices that may be fragmented when leaving a residential program.

Intensive outpatient treatment can be as or more effective than residential treatment as demonstrated by research. It is also much more affordable and accessible, especially if insurance coverage is to cover the costs of treatment.

Twin Town Treatment Centers is immediately accessible to all Los Angeles and Orange County residents, is accredited by The Joint Commission, and is certified by the California DHCS. All network HMO/PPO/EPO insurance plans contract with Twin Town Treatment Centers to provide drug and alcohol rehabilitation. Our phone is answered by real people. We can see people on the same day you call. (866) 594-8844

Freedom from Want for Christmas

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For Christmas, I want to be freed from my wants.

Rather than fantasizing about and striving for things and events which bring pleasure and relieve discomfort, in recovery we act to give, rather than to receive. Our motives shift from feeding an appetite toward higher purposes and being one with others.

Recovery grants fulfillment, not by giving you all of the things you want, but by diminishing your unreasonable drives and appetites.

Addiction firmly establishes a physical, emotional and mental attachment to people, places and things. Finding and maintaining the object of our desire becomes a demand- we are slaves to our own hungers and habits. Our focus and activity narrow to accessing a few sources of satisfaction.

We abandon many of the people and activities which once broadened our experience and interests. As variety in life shrinks, our need for satisfaction from a few things grows.

How do my wants change in sobriety?

Attempting to satisfy our hunger for satisfaction and relief from discomfort, we use faulty solutions even harder. Our actions briefly satisfy a hunger that grows stronger as it is fed. We feed the wolf that harms, rather than the wolf that serves us and our loved-ones.

If we are fortunate, we find a moment to abandon this pattern of feeding the raging fire and turn to better direction and purpose. At this point of change, we feel a great deal of anxiety and craving. Support and connection with others help us during this shift. Slowly we become grateful for supportive others and for the opportunity to change.

Eventually the freedom to choose and to change creates new found peace and satisfaction. Our primary sense of purpose and meaning changes from self-satisfaction to generosity and integrity.

How can I relieve discomfort or achieve pleasure? What will satisfy my needs?

Treatment for addiction help to reconsider our motives and objects of desire. We try new behaviors which strive for longer term goals rather than immediate satisfaction. Tolerating hunger is assisted by sharing with, helping, and connecting with others.

Recovery is the process detaching from things which own and control you. Changing the ideas and behaviors which create dependency on people, places and things allow us to discover the qualities of freedom and choice.

Connection to others and higher principals replace alcohol and drugs.

“Attachment” or dependency on things such as drugs and alcohol can be replaced by connection to others, gratitude and generosity.

When you find yourself stuck in the snow, it’s easy to spin your wheels harder. Deeper in the rut you find yourself. Treatment for addiction gives you the tug to move ahead and build momentum to get away from your traps. Detaching from those things that are controlling you needs to be replaced by recovery sustaining practices.

Treatment for addiction and recovery boosts you out of your ruts and sets you on a path away from dependency and toward freedom and choice.

Twin Town Treatment Centers is immediately accessible to all Los Angeles and Orange County residents, is accredited by The Joint Commission, and is certified by the California DHCS. All network HMO/PPO/EPO insurance plans and Medi-Cal contract with Twin Town Treatment Centers to provide drug and alcohol rehabilitation. Our phone is answered by real people. We see people on the same they you call. (866) 594-8844`

Ethical Informed Consent: “Medically and Financially Unnecessary?”

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Is it ethically necessary for providers to inform the consumer and/or payer that medically and/or financially unnecessary levels of SUD treatment/ rehabilitation are optional or at best, elective?

Looking through the ASAM Criteria for Addictive, Substance-Related and Co-Occurring Conditions (SUD) levels of care, it is impossible to find equine therapy, yoga, psychoanalysis, five-star dining, massage or oceanfront views. Similarly absent are justifications for expensive and extended residential/ transitional housing beyond measured continued stay criteria.

Unnecessary deluxe accommodations, accoutrements, attractions, and “innovative” treatment practices are absent from healthcare indices and criteria. In such settings, seeking sobriety can become confused with a luxurious and pampering vacation. Egos are inflated rather than right-sized.

“Community standard pricing” is a ludicrous concept which no one comprehends when reviewing the extraordinary reimbursement some programs demand. Many times, the demand for unseemly dollars comes without prior notice or consent. “We’ll accept your insurance and whatever they don’t pay, we’ll give you a liberal payment plan.” What is unsaid is that the insurance will cover ten thousand of your sixty-thousand-dollar bill.

Purveyors of treatment services to the “high earning class” do so with high regard for themselves and their peers regardless of the worth such services provide to the community at large.

Consider the despair and disappointment of a father who spoke of losing forty thousand dollars to a rehab which refused to refund his “deposit” after his bipolar son decompensated and ran at day three from the out-of-state residential program. His son only encountered danger and no benefit from his brief three-day stay. The treatment program justified their no-refund policy and packaged prepaid “deposit” as a disincentive for early discharges…

The son was fortunate enough to be arrested rather than becoming lost in the urban jungle many young adults encounter when their out-of-state residential treatment program exhausts their insurance coverage and boots them to the street.

What are the ethical boundaries in the SUD residential treatment market? Do the parameters of informed consent include medical and financial necessity? Should patients and their families be informed that the expense, the level of care, and the forms of services provided are unnecessary or at best “elective”?

The shame surrounding drug addiction and alcoholism commonly create an atmosphere of secrecy for everyone involved. Families would prefer not to seek professional guidance; prospective patients avoid the terms of treatment altogether. Entrepreneurial providers can leverage this secrecy and shame to their financial benefit.

Shame indeed.

As any entrepreneur, treatment providers find innumerable ways to sell luxurious and unnecessary treatment venues and remedies. Sometimes the buyer has no capacity to measure or judge alternatives. Is it the providers responsibility to coordinate and procure informed consent?

Opposite from the entrepreneur on the addiction healthcare pendulum is an insurance industry which often pretends that weekly outpatient sessions with a psychotherapist should resolve but for the most severe substance use disorders.

Missing from this scene is regulatory agency oversight and professional standards.

Watching this process are families, prospective patients and patients who need someone trustworthy to help them engage in recovery. The tragedy of “elective ethics” and alternative standards is that vulnerable people are being harmed by those who could otherwise help.

Twin Town Treatment Centers is immediately accessible to all Los Angeles and Orange County residents, is accredited by The Joint Commission, and is certified by the California DHCS. All network HMO/PPO/EPO insurance plans and Medi-Cal contract with Twin Town Treatment Centers to provide drug and alcohol rehabilitation. Our phone is answered by real people. We see people on the same day they call. (866) 594-8844

Sober in the World and Leather Soles

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To protect your feet, is it easier to wear shoes or to cover the earth in leather?

Alcoholics and addicts need relief from pain and pleasure. Without assistance, their brains don’t seem to sense relief and pleasure easily. Drinking and drug use has been their solution for discomfort and the pursuit of pleasure.

Recovery is an “inside job”. It is impossible to arrange people, places and things to promote serenity, find relief from discomfort, and pursue pleasure. Sober people instead change the way they think and behave to create a world that promotes their personal recovery.

“Why do people get sober?” and “how do they stay in recovery”?

 Recovery is refuge from the chaos and consequences of alcohol and drug use gone wrong. Common problems of alcohol and drug abuse include:

  • Disengagement from productive activities and relationships
  • Inability to follow-through on commitments
  • Isolating from others; refusing help and support
  • Losing control over impulses and emotional reactions
  • Distorting the truth; concealing drug and alcohol use; minimizing and denying the effects of substance use; denying the effects; lying.

Rather than relying on external motivators such as the demands made by work, home, and the law, recovery is based on pursuing a better life, seeking quality and purpose, and behaving according to higher principals.

Twin Town Treatment Centers is immediately accessible to all Los Angeles and Orange County residents, is accredited by The Joint Commission, and is certified by the California DHCS. All network HMO/PPO/EPO insurance plans and Medi-Cal contract with Twin Town Treatment Centers to provide drug and alcohol rehabilitation. Our phone is answered by real people. We see people on the same they you call. (866) 594-8844

Recovery = Release from Attachment

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You are owned by your attachments and controlled by your needs.

For what are you attached… approval, financial gain, prestige, power, possession, security, relief from discomfort, gratification, pleasure? Perhaps the means to maintaining these attachments create conflict or distress between you and others. Solutions which return you to your attachments could be illegal or unethical. Your route to connecting to your perceived needs could be harmful or even fatal.

Addiction is a harmful and potentially fatal solution for maintaining constant gratification, relief from discomfort and/or pleasure. Your connection to these perceived needs is what maintains the course of your addiction.

I can’t imagine life without constant gratification, relief from discomfort or pleasure. Without them, life wouldn’t be worth living.

 The ideas surrounding what you need, what you own and how you maintain these connections are often exaggerated or all-or-nothing. Treatment for addiction evaluates these thought patterns as well as the behaviors practiced maintaining connection and addiction.

Recovery is the process detaching from things which own and control you, changing the ideas and behaviors which are harmful or threatening, and discovering the qualities of freedom and choice.

Connection to others and higher principals is another benefit of recovery.

At what point does an attachment, its practices and solutions require a personal “overhaul” rather than a simple change in behavior or habit?

When we find ourselves stuck in the same rut despite attempts at changing, we probably need to get help and go deeper. Treatment for addiction helps you understand that you’re not alone, demonstrates that alternative ideas and behaviors exist, and most significantly supports your process of detaching from those things that are controlling you.

Needs change. Treatment for addiction and recovery helps you revise your ideas about what you need. You become increasingly capable of selecting those things which have control over you.

Can you change your ideas and behaviors but continue your attachments to people, places, things and sensations?

For a while. Dissatisfaction and frustration is likely to reemerge since people, places, things and sensations are rarely constant and can sometimes prove to be unreliable.

What is the difference between attachment and connection?

 Connections support your progress and development where attachments tend to control and constrain growth.

Twin Town Treatment Centers is immediately accessible to all Los Angeles and Orange County residents, is accredited by The Joint Commission, and is certified by the California DHCS. All network HMO/PPO/EPO insurance plans and Medi-Cal contract with Twin Town Treatment Centers to provide drug and alcohol rehabilitation. Our phone is answered by real people. We see people on the same they you call. (866) 594-8844`