Detox Recovery

Posts Tagged ‘treatment’

Professional treatment of alcohol and drug problems can start someone on the road to recovery, but a few weeks of treatment should not be mistaken for long-term recovery.

If you have severe alcohol and other drug problems, you should know that successful recovery from these problems involves significant changes over time in:

• personal identity and beliefs
• family and social relationships
• daily lifestyle

It is about where you live, how you work and play, who is included and excluded from your life, and how you cope with the stresses of daily life. Recovery is more than just not drinking or using drugs; it is about putting together a new and meaningful life in which alcohol and drugs no longer have a place. Recovery from addiction is not like getting over an infection for which we can rest and take medication for a week or two and then get back to our otherwise unchanged lives. Those who view treatment for addiction in this way make up the group for whom treatment does not work. Recovery from addiction is closer to how someone successfully manages diabetes or heart disease – conditions that require sustained decisions and actions for life.

The Good News

• The positive effects of addiction treatment are substantial, as measured by sustained sobriety (about one-third of those treated) and decreases in substance use and substance-related problems.
• Active participation in treatment aftercare meetings and recovery support groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous can significantly improve your chance of permanent recovery, improve your quality of life and prolong your life expectancy.
• Combining professional treatment and attending recovery support meetings improve your chances of recovery better than either activity alone.
• Lifetime recovery rates of people with a substance use disorder approach or exceed 50%. There are millions of individuals and their families in long-term recovery from the effects of severe substance use problems.
• There are multiple pathways and styles (secular, spiritual, religious) of long-term addiction recovery
• Recovering people can go on to lead lives of significant achievement and community service

The human brain is an extraordinarily complex and fine-tuned communications network containing billions of specialized cells (neurons) that give origin to our thoughts, emotions, perceptions and drives. Often, a drug is taken the first time by choice to feel pleasure or to relieve depression or stress. But this notion of choice is short-lived. Why? Because repeated drug use disrupts well-balanced systems in the human brain in ways that persist, eventually replacing a person’s normal needs and desires with a one-track mission to seek and use drugs. At this point, normal desires and motives will have a hard time competing with the desire to take a drug.

How Does the Brain Become Addicted?

Typically it happens like this:

• A person takes a drug of abuse, be it marijuana or cocaine or even alcohol, activating the same brain circuits as do behaviors linked to survival, such as eating, bonding and sex. The drug causes a surge in levels of a brain chemical called dopamine, which results in feelings of pleasure. The brain remembers this pleasure and wants it repeated.
• Just as food is linked to survival in day-to-day living, drugs begin to take on the same significance for the addict. The need to obtain and take drugs becomes more important than any other need, including truly vital behaviors like eating. The addict no longer seeks the drug for pleasure, but for relieving distress.
• Eventually, the drive to seek and use the drug is all that matters, despite devastating consequences.
• Finally, control and choice and everything that once held value in a person’s life, such as family, job and community, are lost to the disease of addiction.

What brain changes are responsible for such a dramatic shift?

Research on addiction is helping us find out just how drugs change the way the brain works. These changes include the following:

• Reduced dopamine activity. We depend on our brain’s ability to release dopamine in order to experience pleasure and to motivate our responses to the natural rewards of everyday life, such as the sight or smell of food. Drugs produce very large and rapid dopamine surges and the brain responds by reducing normal dopamine activity. Eventually, the disrupted dopamine system renders the addict incapable of feeling any pleasure even from the drugs they seek to feed their addiction.
• Altered brain regions that control decisionmaking and judgment. Drugs of abuse affect the regions of the brain that help us control our desires and emotions. The resulting lack of control leads addicted people to compulsively pursue drugs, even when the drugs have lost their power to reward.

The disease of addiction can develop in people despite their best intentions or strength of character. Drug addiction is insidious because it affects the very brain areas that people need to “think straight,” apply good judgment and make good decisions for their lives. No one wants to grow up to be a drug addict, after all.

Co-occurring Addictions: Compounding Complexities

It is not unusual for an addicted person to be addicted to alcohol, nicotine and illicit drugs at the same time. Addiction to multiple substances raises the level of individual suffering and magnifies the associated costs to society. No matter what the addictive substance, they all have at least one thing in common – they disrupt the brain’s reward pathway, the route to pleasure.

What is the best way to treat people who are addicted to more than one drug?

• Medications. In some cases, medications developed for one addiction have proven useful for another. For example, naltrexone, which can help former heroin users remain abstinent by blocking the “high” associated with heroin, has been found to be effective in treating alcoholism.
• Behavioral therapy or other psychotherapy. Behavioral therapies do not need to be specific to one drug and can be adapted to address use of multiple or different drugs. It is the disease of addiction that the therapy addresses.
• Combined medications and behavioral therapy. Research shows that this combination, when available, works best.
• Multipronged approach. Treatment for multiple addictions should be delivered at the same time. This is especially true because there are always triggers, such as trauma, depression, or exposure to one drug or another, that can put the recovering addict at risk for relapse. In addition, treatment must consider all aspects of a person – their age, gender, life experiences – in order to best treat their drug addiction. Although the type of treatment may differ, it should always strive to address the entire person through a multipronged approach that tackles all co-occurring conditions at once.

Relapse: Part of Addiction as a Chronic Disease

Despite the availability of many forms of effective treatment for addiction, the problem of relapse remains the major challenge to achieving sustained recovery. People trying to recover from drug abuse and addiction are often doing so with altered brains, strong drug-related memories and diminished impulse control. Accompanied by intense drug cravings, these brain changes can leave people vulnerable to relapse even after years of being abstinent. Relapse happens at rates similar to the relapse rates for other well-known chronic medical illnesses like diabetes, hypertension and asthma.

How is relapse to drug abuse similar to what happens with other chronic diseases?

• Just as an asthma attack can be triggered by smoke, or a person with diabetes can have a reaction if they eat too much sugar, a drug addict can be triggered to return to drug abuse.
• With other chronic diseases, relapse serves as a signal for returning to treatment. The same response is just as necessary with drug addiction.
• As a chronic, recurring illness, addiction may require repeated treatments until abstinence is achieved. Like other diseases, drug addiction can be effectively treated and managed, leading to a healthy and productive life.

To achieve long-term recovery, treatment must address specific, individual patient needs and must take the whole person into account. For it is not enough simply to get a person off drugs; rather, the many changes that have occurred – physical, social, psychological – must also be addressed to help people stay off drugs, for good.

Repeated drug exposure changes brain function. Positron emission tomography (PET) images are illustrated showing similar brain changes in dopamine receptors resulting from addiction to different substances – cocaine, methamphetamine, alcohol, or heroin. The striatum (which contains the reward and motor circuitry) shows up as bright red and yellow in the controls (in the left column), indicating numerous dopamine D2 receptors. Conversely, the brains of addicted individuals (in the right column) show a less intense signal, indicating lower levels of dopamine D2 receptors.

by Nora D. Volkow MD from HBO.com

Addiction Alchemy is a holistic, self-help pathworking system for addiction recovery, based on the Medicine Wheel model. The Medicine Wheel can help anyone regardless of race, culture, gender or belief system to transform the process of addiction at the core level. It works with any addiction and most especially “hidden” addictions, attachments and other issues that may not be readily recognized as addictions such as codependency, negative/compulsive thought and behavioral patterns, high functioning autism/Aspergers, physical and mental illness.

The power of the Medicine Wheel is in its shape; It is a circle. Life is cyclical, it is not a linear process. Consequently complete recovery isn’t about just getting from point a to point b. The wheel makes recovery an organic process, helping you to master your life by giving you the keys to bring into awareness the interconnectedness of all things through the very process of life itself. Addiction Alchemy and the Medicine Wheel is a portal to the place beyond sobriety.

The strength of the Medicine Wheel lies in its ability to provide immoveable context to help you “track” your life experience. North, South, East, West, Up, Down and Center are inarguable guide markers and yet remain relative to YOU! You are the center of your universe and you are the one making this trip. Addiction Alchemy allows you to meet yourself where you are at on the map of your own consciousness, and as such can help you navigate your life with a better sense of direction and momentum in time and space.

Each new direction on the wheel will fine tune your awareness, alerting you to signs along the way to help keep you on path, giving you often hidden information about yourself and your world, validating that you are exactly where you should be in your process and most of all that you are making progress! As you work with your own energies, environmental energies, unseen forces and most importantly other people the wheel helps you to remove negative influences and increase the flow of positive energy into your life. Through your power of choice as you make better decisions you develop greater peace, clarity, focus, courage, wisdom and understanding.

As we travel the wheel we become ever increasingly aware of how to get present to our life, transmute our past, re-script our future, by living in the now, we transform our life by becoming centered within our Self. We heal our lives on every level as we heal our relationship to our self, to others and to the world. Addiction Alchemy helps us to reconnect to our center and integrate all that we are, not in spite of our addiction(s), but because of them. Exploring our addictions can bring us into contact with parts of our psyche and our potential that we would otherwise have never known existed.

We ultimately come to understand as we come full circle that as bad as it might have been, the seeds of our own greatness have lain dormant within our darkness and those things we could not face. We see the whole truth about ourselves and that we do have the courage to face the truth, integrate it into the light and own our legacy because that is where our true fulfillment lies. Every human being that heals the process of addiction within themselves heals the world. This, in fact, is one of the key messages of addiction: Physician Heal Thyself.

Addiction Alchemy helps us work through addictions, not around them. Paradoxically, as we travel the wheel we find that our addiction and the pain it has wrought in our life has actually served us. It opens inner doorways to places within ourselves that have been hidden from view. The good news is that through this time of restriction as we work in our process, the true power of our ability to create our life may come into sharper focus than ever before and as we own our choices we begin to understand the depth and breadth of our creator skills.

As we begin to take more and more responsibility for ourselves, we start to get a glimpse of the possibilities and the magnitude of who and what we truly are. We may come to know that our ability to create through the power of love is even more potent than our ability to create out of suffering. For many of us this realization is the beginning of a new level of consciousness, a new way of being, and a whole new way of life, nourished and nurtured from within and not helplessly bound to something outside of our highest desires for ourselves.

Addiction is our bodies way of letting us know that something is amiss and out of order. If we suffer from addiction our body and mind is making a cry for help and a call to be heard. Humans are incredibly self-healing beings. Our bodies are designed to be self-healing. Many people who suffer from addiction think that they are weak willed. In reality, it is that personal boundaries have been drawn around a set of mistaken or distorted beliefs that may be fostering the need for the addiction. In other words, the will is very strong, just misdirected and protecting an illusion. I believe it is a case of mistaken identity and we often become trapped because of this mistake.

In a sense, it is like we have ventured into quicksand. In fact, it is my personal theory that addiction comes from a misguided attempt to create balance and to raise our vibration and energy levels, much like a moth mistakes the light source of the flame for it’s true geomagnetic guide, the moon; or the whale is lured to the beach by underground sonic disruptions.

It doesn’t matter if it’s shifting tectonic plates or Naval sonar that causes the disturbance, we need to find out what is rocking our world. For it is through the discovery process of our unsolved personal mysteries that we are able to re-establish the flow of the blocked energy and create a life that naturally sustains and maintains the higher energy and the healing that we have been seeking, in a way that supports and enriches our life. And there is only one way to accomplish this and that is with some help. It is absolutely vital that we exercise our power of choice and seek and ask for help. There is no way out of quicksand without assistance. That’s just the way it is.

Addiction Alchemy is not just about the healing of your addiction to ‘some thing or some one’, it is about the healing of YOU and the recovery of your hi-jacked personal power! Not only can Addiction Alchemy and the medicine wheel help facilitate the healing of addictions, it can actually help you go beyond healing and into a true fullness of life, acting as a gateway to the fulfillment of your highest and finest good and laying the groundwork for the realization of your deepest callings and desires in life.

Many people maintain sobriety at great cost: their ability to have a full experience of life. They still are not truly free, because now their addiction is fear. Haunted by a pervasive fear of the addiction recurring, they tip-toe through life. Although it is crucial to recovery, the prize is not sobriety. The ultimate prize is life and the ability to experience it in true freedom. If you have been sober for a significant amount of time, yet still struggle with fear and anxiety, the Medicine Wheel can help you work through and release your fear by actually treating it as an addiction. The wheel can help you go deeper in your process and become aware that there is more, much more to discover and explore.

Addiction Alchemy will help you explore the shadow and light of addiction. We all know about the dark side of addiction all too well, the shadow and specter of pain and suffering that looms over every addicts head, but have you ever thought about what separates addiction from passion?

If we take the personal energy out of the process of addiction and look at it’s archetypal energy (an organized pattern of behavior), the Addict (which resides in us all) has much to teach us. For at the opposite spectrum of the path of pain, suffering, destruction and the imprisonment of our Free Will, lies the absolute freedom and peace to create an amazing life through the positive forces of love, passion, devotion and choice. Energetically speaking, the slave can become the master.

Depending on where you are now, it may be difficult to believe that a habit that is destroying your life can be shifted into a miraculous, healing, renewal of the spirit that creates magical transformation in your life. I can tell you that it is possible. That’s where the alchemy comes in: You will learn, see, smell, taste, hear, feel and experience the answers to your questions and the darkness will be revealed by the light. You will become a light worker, shaman and an alchemist in your own life and you will come to understand that the power of the light is carried forth through the medium of truth. The alchemists most powerful tool is the truth.

Addiction wreaks havoc not only on our bodies and minds, but attacks and cripples our Will – bringing darkness to the part of us that drives our ability to create a beautiful life, filled with peace, joy, love and light. Addiction Alchemy can help you to restore the function of your Will Center to it’s rightful owner: YOU. In order to do this it is important to understand that your center, your inner flame, which is at your core and encompasses ALL of you is already complete. You are not flawed. That’s why it’s called addiction recovery. You can’t recover something you don’t already possess. Your connection to your core has simply been cut off or suppressed for one or more of all the various reasons that thoughts, feelings and beliefs can distort our ability to connect with our power center and consequently robbing us of our ability to be truly free to stand in our own power. Re-establishing that connection and that flow of information is our main goal.

Once that connection is restored your Will Center can be clean and clear to inform your life so that you can create a new reality or you will see your existing reality in a new light and you will regain your freedom. Some people report a feeling of the addiction being “taken from them” as the Will Center is re-integrated. If there is no void, there is nothing to fill. When you are operating from your core you are connected to all that is and your highest and finest good will take you out of sorrow and suffering and into grace and gratitude, wellness and wholeness. As your cup begins to overflow, your healing and empowerment will naturally serve all those around you. As you heal, you will notice those around you begin to heal, as well.

The best way to experience the power of the Medicine Wheel is to take a journey on the wheel. After all, no two people have the same experience of life and no two journey’s are the same. Yet, this is precisely what empowers the Medicine Wheel journey. When the diverse energies that are brought forth by a group of people who are journeying together is co-mingled, powerful healing, enlightenment, consciousness, transformation and massive openings of creativity ensues. The wheel is the mechanism that releases these energies and allows the members of a group to heal each other by healing their own self.

Addiction Alchemy supports integrative medicine and holistic recovery. Not only is it a complimentary modality in and of itself, it can play an important role in the world of self help in treating addiction by guiding us into accurately reading and charting a course for our own deeply personal and profound menu of care, assisting us in forming a complete integrative medicine plan for our own recovery and empowerment. It takes an army to move through our own personal Armegeddon and integrative medicine can help us draft that army into service! Integrative Medicine is the marriage of mainstream medicine with energy medicine and alternative practices. Integrative medicine is slowly becoming recognized and introduced into mainstream healthcare. Why? Because it works.

Consider adding Addiction Alchemy to your Addiction Treatment and Recovery Plan now. If this is your first time delving into your addictions or if you are not even sure you have an addiction, Addiction Alchemy is a great way to explore all your options. Beyond healing there is peace, purpose and passion. Get on the Recovery Medicine Wheel: Let your life speak!

Source: Addiction Alchemy

Support groups

One of our biggest stumbling blocks is that we try to manage our pain and addiction by ourselves. The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous states, “Without help it is too much for us.” In moving toward a solution, the book also states, “Our very lives, as ex-problem drinkers, depend upon our constant thought of others and how we may help meet their needs.” There are many people who have suffered as you are suffering, and whose very lives depend on helping people who are where they used to be, such as you. There are thousands of Alcoholics Anonymous/Narcotics Anonymous meetings scattered throughout the United States. There are also Chronic Pain Anonymous groups, although they are usually found in larger cities, being that they are fairly new.

There are many pain support groups that are not twelve-step in nature, but they offer the support we need from other people who also suffer from chronic pain. Treatment centers will usually help you locate these meetings, and can sometimes provide you with the name of a person who can help you get started.

The dawn of a new day

 Reading this  may have made you angry or sad. Many of us who are taught the tools of recovery initially think that we will be enslaved by it, that recovery is a prison sentence where we have to carry a ball and chain the rest of our lives. We do not realize that recovery is a quality way of life that can provide us with many rewards that most people do not receive. The Big Book states, “We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us. We will know how to handle situations, which used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.”

These are known as the Promises. They are not called “maybes” for a reason. These are not things that might happen to you if you enter recovery, they are things that have to happen to you… I promise!

Facing the fact that someone you love is not only suffering from drug addiction, but now must receive help to overcome the addiction, is difficult for anyone. Where should you start? Who do you turn to? What questions do you need to ask about drug treatment programs? Perhaps, you may have been at this point before, and you now feel a sense of hopelessness in finding a residential treatment center that will work this time around. Maybe, though, this is the first time you’ve had to take these steps to help someone you love. The process can feel overwhelming.

Ultimately, you want your loved one back. You want that person you love free from drugs. You want that person to live a healthy and productive life. By asking the right question on each of the following areas when choosing a residential drug treatment center, your chances of making this happen for your loved one will increase.

1.Success Rate –
What is the success rate of the residential drug treatment center? Obviously, the higher the success rate, the more likely your loved one will succeed. Ask to speak with graduates of the drug rehab facility or their families. Get real opinions from real people.

2.Methods –
What method does the drug treatment center use? Ask yourself if they are addressing all aspects of your loved one’s addiction, including what led them to drugs in the first place. Methods that only deal with one aspect of addiction are more likely to fail. Remember addiction results from a combination of many factors, including a lessening of morality and integrity and an increasing burden of guilt and shame. The life of an addict includes bad habits, poor health and difficulty facing problems. After speaking with the facility, ask yourself if they are handling not just the psychological aspects, but also the physical and mental aspects of addiction as well. Are they providing practical skills that will help your loved one succeed once the drug rehabilitation program is completed?

3.Services –
What services does the residential drug treatment center offer? This is not only for your loved one, but for you as well. Will they help with legal issues? Will they assist in an intervention? In other words, to what length will they go to make certain your loved one gets the drug treatment they need?

4.Staff –
Who are the staff members at the residential drug treatment center? The best trained staff will have had experience with drug addiction. They will not have learned about it in a book. Are they qualified for their positions? What real-life knowledge do they have with drug addiction? What is their reason for working in this field?

5.Follow-up Program –
What type of follow-up program does the residential drug treatment center offer? This is important. Sending a newly rehabilitated drug addict back into the world without any follow-up can be disastrous. Make sure that there is a program of this type in place. Good programs keep in touch over the phone regularly after one leaves the program.

6.Location –
Where is the residential drug treatment center located? A residential drug treatment center should be protected. Ask how easy it would be for your loved one to leave. Many addicts when first coming off drugs want to leave. Ensuring that this is difficult, while not seeming like a prison, increases the chances that the person will stay to finish.

7.Length –
How long does the residential drug treatment center take? Although the standard program is 28 days, if the residential drug treatment center offers a longer program, it is more likely your loved one will succeed. However, if the residential drug treatment center allows your loved one to work at his or her own pace, without imposing time constraints, your loved one has an even greater chance of overcoming drug addiction.

8.Price –
How much does the residential drug treatment center cost? Before eliminating any program because of its price, ask yourself this: What are they offering? Look back at the points above and determine what the drug rehab is truly giving to the one you love. Yes, the more it offers, the more likely the price will be higher. However, your loved one will have a greater chance at becoming a healthy productive member of society. How much is that person worth to you?
Choosing a residential drug treatment center can be difficult. Dealing with a loved one suffering from drug addiction is devastating. By breaking the process down into what is important and finding out the answers to the questions above, you will be able to make an informed choice as to which residential drug treatment program can best help you and your loved one. Drug addiction can be dealt with and overcome.
By John Frank

Channel 5 news reports live about Florida’s Pain Medicine Addiction and Detox from http://sunrisedetox.com

Recent research indicates that as many as 50 million Americans suffer from drug addiction and/or alcoholism. Many of these people seek help in rehab programs and addiction recovery centers, but the rate of success is unfortunately quite low. The reasons behind this unfortunate truth are vast and varied, but typically it comes down to two fundamental factors: the level of commitment to healing from the patients, and the totality of the treatment they receive.

There isn’t much that can be done to alter the attitude of addicts; they cannot truly be helped until they decide they are ready. But once they adopt this mindset (usually after they have hit rock bottom), they must receive comprehensive care that treats all of their issues, from the core cause through to the symptom. Quick fixes simply do not work.

Medical detox is an important first step in addiction recovery. When a person has been habitually exposing his body to certain substances over a long period of time he can become chemically dependent on them. When he is denied his fix he will get extremely sick; vomiting, excessive sweating, seizures, muscle pain, anxiety and insomnia are common symptoms of this withdrawal. This process is so unbearable that addicts who try to quit on their own almost always relapse. That is why it is crucial for patients to enter a medical detox facility where they can be helped through this ordeal under the supervision of trained health professionals.

Once the drugs have been cleansed from the addict’s system, he must undergo psychological analysis to determine the cause of his addiction. 75% of people who become dependent on drugs or alcohol do so because they have an accompanying mental disorder of some type. This is known as a dual diagnosis. Dual diagnosis treatment is critical because without proper identification of the root of the problem, recovery is impossible. For instance, a patient may discover he has subconsciously turned to marijuana as a way of self-medicating his anxiety disorder. When he learns how to deal with his fears and emotions in a healthy way, the chances are good he will no longer need to rely on the drug.

Dual diagnosis treatment is critical because without proper identification of the root of the problem, recovery is impossible. For instance, a patient may discover he has subconsciously turned to marijuana as a way of self-medicating his anxiety disorder. When he learns how to deal with his fears and emotions in a healthy way, the chances are good he will no longer need to rely on the drug.

When a comprehensive approach to treatment, one that considers all scientific, medical and mental variables is followed, effective addiction recovery can be possible.

by Allison Savage