Millions of Americans suffer from many types of drug abuse. There are those that are abusing opiate painkillers on a daily basis in order to try (unsuccessfully) to escape from old injuries and accidents. There are teenagers experimenting with street drugs for the first time in order to seem cool to their friends or to make their parents angry. There are also the many alcoholics that can’t go even a day without getting drunk on beer or hard liquor.
What all of these substance abusers have in common is that they’ll never escape from this abuse unless they enter rehab and start to recover. Without rehabilitation, they will never be able to live happy, normal lives again. While recovery is vital for these addicts, many people actually don’t even understand what that term means. Since September is National Recovery Month, it’s a fantastic time to examine recovery and what it takes to achieve.
Achieving True Recovery from Drugs and Alcoholism
The first misunderstanding that many Americans have about drug abuse and alcoholism is whether or not these conditions can even be treated. It has become vogue in America to call addiction a disease (and an incurable one, at that.) It’s not surprising that addiction is given this description. It does involve physical and mental problems, after all.
The reason that term causes so many misconceptions is because many diseases like cancer or AIDS can’t be controlled by the person who has them. Once they develop, you are on your own without life-saving medical treatment.
The main reason that addiction is different from these actual diseases is because you can’t catch it and because it doesn’t develop on its own. You have to actively seek out alcohol or drugs to use in order to become an addict. Once you have become dependent on those drugs it may feel like they are out of your control, but the truth is that the drug user himself had to create the addiction in the first place.
Truly recovering from drug abuse thus starts with the awareness that people cause themselves to become addicts through the decisions that they make. No one can become an addict without their own permission. Once this is acknowledged, the addict can make the opposite decision and start the journey back toward sobriety.
How is Recovery Achieved?
There are two parts to true recovery. The first is the addict no longer using alcohol or the drugs that he was addicted to. Many rehab programs fail because the individuals in their programs are never even able to achieve this step. The second part of recovery is having the mindset and the training needed to never even want to go back to using drugs.
As testimonials from graduates of Narconon Arrowhead have proven, these goals are definitely capable of being achieved. It simply takes a program that is designed from start to finish with the actual goal of complete recovery. Just stopping the use of drugs for a while is not enough. The addicts in a program have to actually stop using drugs forever in order to be completely recovered.
When a program like Narconon Arrowhead’s utilizes the New Life Detoxification, this actually isn’t difficult to achieve. The detoxification regimen helps to cleanse the body of residuals from past drug and alcohol use. After completing this step, Narconon students often comment that the cravings which, previously had driven them back to abusive substances, are greatly diminished or gone, completely. Participants in the Narconon Program come to realize that they are no longer being compelled to use by powerful physical cravings. They realize that they are in charge of their lives and their recovery, and they leap at the chance to finally be released from the shackles that have kept them down for so long.
References:
RecoveryMonth.gov: http://www.recoverymonth.gov/
Youtube.com: https://www.youtube.com/user/narcononarrowhead
