Beating Addiction and Finding Recovery

Beating Addiction and Finding Recovery by Patrick Meninga

Beating addiction is a journey, not an event. Any recovering alcoholic or addict will tell you that overcoming addiction is a process that unfolds before you for the rest of your life. But what exactly does this process entail, and how can we go about pursuing it successfully?

Surrender

Before you can even attempt to beat any form of drug or alcohol addiction, you have to surrender fully to the disease. What exactly does this mean?

It means you have to stop fighting with yourself in terms of trying to control your use. You have to give up the idea that you might one day be able to drink or use drugs like a normal person can. If you are hanging on to the idea that one day you might be able to control your drinking or drugging and thus use successfully, then you are setting yourself up for failure.

Surrender is a process. It just happens; I’m not sure that you can really initiate it if you are truly not ready to give up. Most people would say you have to “hit bottom” first. If you are still having fun with drinking and drugging, then chances are not good that you can surrender to the disease. It is only after addiction has caused you a lot of misery that surrender becomes possible. It is only after the fun times are long gone that a person might consider the idea of recovery.

Beating addiction is a tough road and it takes a monumental effort. The alternative is to continue to self medicate and that is so much easier, even in the face of grave consequences.

Supercharge your recovery with a holistic approach Because addiction attacks a person’s mind, body, and spirit, the solution must also address each of these areas of your life. That is what makes a holistic approach so useful in recovery. So often in recovery I have seen people focus heavily in one area and neglect the others. This always leads to relapse.

A holistic approach addresses these problems. You physically abstain from chemicals and start treating your physical body much better. At the same time a successful recovery program will push you to grow spiritually. You’ll also mature emotionally as you repair relationships, and also socially as you develop a sober network of friends in recovery.

Don’t just eliminate….create a new life

Beating addiction requires you to replace an entire lifestyle. It’s not just the drugs and the alcohol that was ruining our lives; it was the lifestyle that went along with it all.

When we get clean and sober, there are a number of different holes in our life. One of the main holes is the time and activities associated with actually using the drugs and the alcohol. Maybe we went to certain bars, hung out with certain people and used drugs, or whatever the case may be. We all had our “watering holes.” And we spent a lot of time at them.

So really what we are faced with in order to beat addiction is to fill those holes. We can’t just sit around and expect to stay entertained…this is a recipe for relapse. Instead we need to create a new life in recovery. This is a whole topic in and of itself that can be expanded on a great deal.

Find a passionate replacement strategy

Another one of the “holes” in early recovery is the spiritual void that is left when we remove the drugs and the alcohol. Beating addiction requires you to fill that hole—be it through spiritual, religious, or natural means. But there is definitely a need for purposeful and passionate living to replace the fervor with which we pursed chemicals in our addiction.

There are a number of creative replacement strategies that can be used to grow spiritually, and there are a number of ways to start exploring the creative life in recovery. Beating addiction can be purposeful and exciting.



I now invite you to learn more about beating addiction with the creative life in recovery.
http://www.spiritualriver.com/

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Addiction: A Holistic Approach To Recovery

Addiction: A Holistic Approach To Recovery by Patti Desert

Those suffering from addictions habitually engage in compulsive behaviors to avoid feelings of depression, anxiety, and other distressing mood states. Holistic Therapy offers opportunities to safely experience painful emotions while learning ways to manage destructive thoughts and behaviors.

Many addictions recovery treatment programs focus on the distorted thinking and destructive behavior of the addict with less attention to the underlying depression and anxiety that drive negative thoughts and behavior. At best addicts in treatment might attend lectures and participate in groups where speakers and participants talk about and share these feelings, but they seldom offer sufficient opportunities for addicts to directly and safely experience what they are feeling and to creatively manage their feelings.

Holistic Therapy incorporates methods that do just this. Through a skillful blending of eastern methods of healing with western methods of psychotherapy Holistic Therapy teaches recovering folks how to use their senses to assess what their emotions are telling them and how to effectively manage the associated distress.

We have at least seven senses--touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight, balance, and internal sensations. Every second of every day our senses are picking up information, sending it to our brain, with our body consequently responding depending on how the brain interprets the data. Short of some kind of brain damage our responses will always include feelings.

Surprising to many recovering addicts is the idea that we cannot feel a thought. They are additionally surprised to learn that depression and anxiety and other uncomfortable feelings are always physical sensation in some form. However, a thought can elicit a great deal of physical distress in the body if the brain interprets that thought as some kind of threat to the body.

For example, a worry of any kind usually has some kind of thought attached to it. But it is not the thought that a person is feeling but the body's response to that thought.

Through a complex process the brain interprets the "worry" thought as a threat to the body and immediately begins preparing it to defend itself by pouring adrenalin, cortisol, and a host of other chemicals into the body to prepare it to fight, flee, freeze, or hide. That is how the brain responds to any stress. And the felt sensation of those changes and many others is tension, tightness, pressure, heaviness or a host of other physical feelings. These changes are commonly although not always consciously experienced as depression and/or anxiety. At their most powerful, these changes can elicit the excruciating pain associated to a heart attack. With no means to slow this process down it is not surprising that recovery fails.

Holistic Therapy teaches us how to effectively and consistently ease those distressing physical sensations by noticing what each of the senses is picking up. By helping to identify what thoughts are occurring and how the body is feeling Holistic Therapy gives recovering folks the power to manage the depression and anxiety that fuels addictive behavior.

As human beings we think, feel, sense, and do. We also have a mind-body-spirit that needs careful tending if we are to live peacefully and productively. Recovering from addiction, healing from the destructive consequences of addiction requires a treatment program to engage all these parts of Self. Otherwise, what results is a temporary respite with relapse following on its heels.



Ms Desert is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in Baltimore, MD with a holistic private practice and specializes in the treatment of depression, anxiety, trauma, and associated addictions. Read more at http://www.singular-pathways.com


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