Real Time Recovery in Real Life
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
