Stages Of Change With Drug Addiction

The Stages of Change model is widely used among drug rehab counselors to help people identify where they are in the recovery process.  This model was developed in the 1970’s and 1980’s by two researchers, James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente.  It was originally created when Prochaska and DiClemente were studying smokers and their ability to give up cigarettes and handle their habits.

A person progresses through the stages and different rates.  People can stay at one stage for long periods of time and even go backwards (relapse).  Most importantly, transition between stages is completely the decision of the individual.  Circumstances may be bad, but that alone will not prompt an addict to progress forward towards recovery.  They must make the decision for themselves.

Stages of Change With Drug Addiction

Precontemplation - As the name indicates, a person at this stage has not yet considered that they have a problem requiring change.  If you told an addict you thought they had a problem, they would be defensive and deny it completely.

Contemplation - A person at this stage can admit to having a problem but doesn’t want to take any action yet.  They can recognize the fallout their addiction has caused, but they would be hesitant to go to drug rehab or attend an AA meeting.

Preparation/Determination - At this stage, the person prepares themselves to make necessary changes in their life.  They most likely have a plan to start drug treatment soon, attend a meeting, have a real heart-to-heart with their family about what will be happening.

Action/Willpower - This is the stage of actual change.  The addict is taking an active part in making a sober life by attending drug treatment, staying in touch with their sponsor, actively avoiding bars or using friends, and practicing healthy choices.

Maintenance - People at this stage keep up the behaviors that created positive change.  They continue to do make the healthy choices they did in the beginning, may possibly be a sponsor, may have finished formal drug treatment a while ago, may have many months or years of sobriety.

Relapse - A person entering relapse has left behind the positive changes they made, returning to previous addiction behaviors.  This can happen anywhere along the progression of stages, even maintenance.  Changes in a person’s life can suddenly make them vulnerable to relapse.  If they go back to their old ways, they will start back at the precontemplation stage.

Drug Rehab and Recovery Very Personal

Drug rehab is a key part of drug addiction recovery.  But for it to be effective, you can see that an addict’s readiness for change can really make a difference.  Just showing up for drug treatment isn’t enough.  But all it takes is a small crack in the facade, just enough willingness to get the process started.  Sometimes the addict can move quickly past acceptance into preparation and even the action phase.  Others have trouble getting past denial.

Recovery is a very personal process marked by stops, spurts, and personal evolution.  Understanding the stages of change will make you a better support person for a loved one needing drug treatment.

Drug Addict Wont Listen If They Dont Want To

Cant Force Person To Learn From Drug Rehab

You need to know a few things about drug addiction to understand the answer to this question.  First, the very most frustrating part is that you cannot force a person to truly get better.  Only they have that power.  You can say all kinds of things to them.  But if they haven’t yet experienced enough deep pain from their drug addiction, your words won’t find a crack in their defensiveness to crawl through.   They will fall on ears that don’t want to hear.

There are ways to declare a person incompetent, they might be in legal trouble, they may have to answer to a mental health board.  They may attend an entire course of legally required drug treatment and say a lot of the right things.  But here’s the important part.  No matter how stringent the authority and accountability, the person must be ready to hear the message for them to truly begin recovery.

Arguing With Drug Addict About Drug Rehab Doesnt Work

Until they are ready to hear the full meaning in your words of advice and caution, you will probably feel like you are beating your head against a wall.  Arguing won’t do any good here because an unready drug addicted mind has plenty of ammunition to shoot back at you.  They have excuses, addiction thinking that convolutes their logic, a sense of self-centered survival, blame, plenty of emotional pain, and possibly a few legitimate gripes about life.  They are more comfortable being where they are than turning from their addiction and seeking drug treatment.

The best course of action is to seek professional help of some kind.  Speak to a therapist who does interventions.  Ask questions about drug rehab and outpatient drug treatment.  Get some help and support for yourself if you have lived with this situation closely (Alanon or possibly counseling).  Do what you can to involve your drug addicted loved one, but understand that your influence has a limit.

Get Support For You Even If They Skip Drug Rehab

You cannot control them like a robot, you can only show them the big picture and the choices.  And even at that, they may not want to hear or see any of it, much less take a step toward drug treatment.  That’s perhaps the most important reason to seek support for yourself.  If your efforts don’t get your loved one moving forward, you may need help dealing with your feelings and how to handle the situation.

Kids Search During Your Drug Addiction

Looking for Love When Parent Is Addicted

Imagine yourself getting high for several hours and crashing at some odd hour of the day.  Your daughter seems to find you passed out or with a headache most of the time.  She just wishes she had a dad who looked out for her.  She starts hanging out with an older boy who drives her around town and lets her cry on his shoulder.

Like many teen girls, she easily confuses sexual affection for real love.  She has filled the empty hole in her heart with something that makes her feel better.  It isn’t what she needs, but it’s what she can get.

Kids Escape With Drugs And Alcohol Too

Your son has lots of questions about life.  His friends are fickle sometimes, he gets stumped by his math homework, and he feels uncomfortable about his looks.  He just wants to know he’s OK and feel better when he gets stuck in a bad mood.  But you rarely come out of your room in the evenings.  You drink all night and watch TV most of the time.  Other times you feel pretty sick and go to bed early.

He feels like no one understands him except a group of kids who get together on weekends and drink.  They don’t have very happy homes either, so they commiserate with each other as they drink their bad feelings away.  He wants a parent he can count on, but for now, he can count on his friends and their drinking to get him through.

Drug Rehab Can Put You Back In Active Parent Role

Drug rehab isn’t going to fix the fallout from a long parental absence.  There are some things you just can’t turn around very easily.  But kids value having a parent in their life regardless of their age.  Any steps you take towards sobriety will help your chances of being a positive loving influence in their life.  You can encourage your kids to attend a support group for family members of a drug addict or alcoholic.  They’ll meet other kids who understand what they’re going through.

No matter what you are going through with your drug addiction, your kids will need to turn to someone.  Go to drug treatment or alcohol rehab, get sober, and let that be you.

Job Hunt Challenging For Recovering Drug Addicts

Negative Stigma Difficult For People In Drug Addiction Recovery

Advocates for recovering drug addicts do their best to keep this issue out in the open.  They continue to fight the negative stigma that comes naturally with something as serious as drug addiction.  It’s not the same thing as recovering from cancer and keeping your job while you are in treatment.  Drug addiction turns your mind inside out and can damage your reputation for a long time.

Getting a job after being in drug rehab can be dicey.  You have greatly improved your honesty and directness through your recovery, yet you are understandably hesitant to admit you’ve been to drug rehab.  Employers often don’t want to take a risk on someone who has such a history.  Taking on a new employee takes time, energy, and can be less productive for a while.  The current economy doesn’t help.  Business already take on plenty of risk just surviving.

Dont Get Disappointed By Trouble Getting A Job

Going through drug rehab and staying sober can bring new hope to a recovering drug addict.  But that doesn’t mean the tough road has been made smooth.  Getting rejected by employers can feel like a real punch in the gut.  It’s a time when discouragement can set in easily.

It’s not time to give up, though.  Perhaps you need more support during the early stages of your drug addiction recovery.  A sober house or halfway house can be a good in between place.  They offer some structure and encourage employment.  Also, you may need to consider getting a different type of job than you may have had before drug rehab.

Career Path Might Be Different After Drug Rehab

Of course, look for jobs that you strongly qualify for.  However, you may need to be willing to take jobs with fewer expectations if you have trouble finding something at first.  Be willing to consider part-time employment to get the ball rolling.  Better to have just an OK job rather than no job at all.  Once you establish a good history with an employer, you may feel ready to take on something more challenging.  And remember, the longer you are in recovery, the better your chances of sticking with it without relapse.  Your reputation can stand on its own merit and you are more likely to keep it positive.

As you can see, going to drug rehab is such a small part of the picture.  However, it can start the ship sailing in the right direction again.  And if you do relapse, even after you have gotten a job, drug rehab can still be an opportunity for growth.  You will likely discover important things about your addiction that can help you do even better the next time.

Drug Addiction Damages Your Spouse

Drug Addiction Prevents You From Being A Competent Life Partner

Your spouse married you to have a competent partner.  When you are addicted to drugs or alcohol, you don’t hold up your end of the bargain.  You can’t when you are stoned or drunk.  Your addiction keeps you like a kid who doesn’t want to have parents hovering over them.  You don’t want to give much if anything because it’s all about feeding your addiction and coping with your emotions.  Your spouse doesn’t get to have a competent adult as a life partner.

Drug Addiction Prevents You From Being A Good Companion

Your spouse married you to have a companion in life.  Your spouse picked you to be the most important special person in their life.  Drug and alcohol addiction strips you of your ability to be loving to your spouse.  You addiction keeps you focused completely on yourself and your own needs.  Your addiction thinking says that you aren’t doing anything wrong, your spouse is just being too needy or annoying or critical.  This leaves your spouse empty handed and lonely.

Drug Addiction Prevents You From Being Loving and Intimate

Your spouse married you to to share love and intimacy between you.  Love is more than just a warm feeling. It is the behavior you take towards someone you are devoted to and care about.  Your emotional and sexual intimacy makes your marriage different from any other relationship in your life.  When that void becomes a cavern because you can’t have a healthy sex life and mutual emotional support, your spouse feels unimportant and rejected.

Drug Rehab Can Help Restore Your Marriage

You are the architect of your own life, which is good news.  You can act how you choose when you are single.  But when you are married, you are morally obligated to bring your best healthy self to the relationship.  Drug rehab is a way for you get sober and do just that.  You and your spouse will see the difference if you take that step.

Perception Of Control Off Base With Drug Addiction

The perception of control could not be more different from the reality when it comes to drug addiction.  However, many drug addicts are in deep denial of this seemingly obvious problem.  Logic takes a back seat to emotions.  Rational viewpoints get pushed aside in exchange for whatever makes the whole picture fit together for the drug addict (even if it doesn’t make sense to anyone else).

Taking in high amounts of drugs or alcohol causes damage to a person’s thinking processes and judgment.  In some cases, drug treatment and well maintained sobriety can do much to reverse the problems with thinking and judgment.  Emotions are amplified, which causes more difficulty with assessing reality because emotions are irrational and erratic.

Reality Is Tough To See When Emotions Rule

Ever felt like you woke up on the wrong side of the bed, or you didn’t get enough sleep, or you’re dealing with your fifth day of a nasty cold?  Any of those situations could bring up some feelings of tension and frustration.  If you ride those emotions all day long, regardless of the events, you could make one pretty lousy day for yourself.  In reality, your frustrations may not be devistating.  But in that frame of mind, nearly anything could make you miserable.

To make up for this, a person who’s highly emotional might make up excuses or justify their reactions to make things feel logical.  Unfortunately, they are using emotions to make these judgments rather than seeing the big picture.  They want to feel less uncomfortable about the fallout from being so emotional.  They keep justifying things instead of facing their emotionality and behaviors.  Pretty soon, they have a solid habit of keeping themselves in denial about their problem.  All you have to do is add a drug addiction to that scenario, and you have the setup for serious addiction denial.

Drug Rehab Can Help Break Through Denial

Drug rehab can help with deep denial, especially when drug treatment counselors and fellow addicts start picking at the excuses and justifications.  It may seem like a cruel process, but they are helping the addict by poking holes in their facade of denial.  When reality can shine through, the addict has a chance at making some progress with sobriety.  Finally, the addict has a chance of gaining some real personal control.

Methadone Death of Prisoner in Canada

Not that it doesn’t happen in the United States, but the incident reported recently occurred in Canada: one prisoner died of a methadone overdose after his cellie, or cellmate, smuggled methadone back to their cell, methadone that he had been prescribed and received at the jail health center but hadn’t swallowed.

The Unlikely Sad Result

The cellmate who provided the methadone in this particular case in Canada which sparked the change in policy was charged and convicted of manslaughter for giving his cellie the drug that ultimately killed him. His sentence? Three (more) years in jail.

While it is necessary for it to be clear that there are consequences for breaking the rules, consequences that are serious enough to want to avoid, it is also important to see the big picture. In this case, as in many others like it, if the original person receiving methadone received a comprehensive detox and addiction treatment while incarcerated, he wouldn’t have been receiving the methadone in the first place. He wouldn’t have been in a position to give the drug to someone else, and that person may not have wanted the drug if he had undergone the same detox and treatment program upon entry.

Again, drug rehab in the prison system would be beneficial for everyone involved, saving lives and money for the state at the same time.

The Resulting Change to Canadian Jail and Dosing Policies

Since, apparently they weren’t doing it before, their solution in the Canadian provincial jails was to institute a policy of watching the inmates take their prescribed medication, actually laying eyes on them as they swallow the pills and then searching them before they return to their cells.

Hmm. Good plan. But this is common policy in jails and prisons across the country and yet it still happens that inmates routinely smuggle their medication back to their cellmates, back into general population.

Recommended Change to Any Country’s Drug Policies

The solution seems obvious: drug rehab in the prison system. I know plenty of people who are hardcore addicts who somehow manage to stay clean while they’re inside. They don’t want to be ‘that guy.’ They want to keep their edge and remain alert. They don’t want anything beyond the prison system itself in control of their lives. Why not reinforce this positively with a regimented drug rehab, something that provides them with relapse prevention tools to stay clean when they get out? It’s another way to choose control and to give them the ability to maintain this desire for control when they leave. And for those who don’t break their addictions when they’re inside and live off of the smuggled medications and dope that they get at any cost, drug rehab offers them a way out.

What’s your recommendation? What would you do differently?

Tompkins jail in upstate New York is the only jail in the area to use meds to help heroin addicts kick dope while they are incarcerated, according to Stacey Shackford at The Ithaca Journal. They are using the most recently FDA-approved opiate addiction treatment, buprenorphine, to treat heroin addiction in jail.

Human Rights Watch, a nonprofit organization, has pointed to Tompkins’ buprenorphine program as a successful approach to the issue of drug addiction in jail. They say that more states would benefit from following suit.

Tompkins’ Drug Addiction Treatment Program

If Tompkins is any indication, treating heroin addiction while inmates are incarcerated not only decreases the number of problems and trafficking inside prison walls but also serves to cut back the recidivism rate when they are released.

Dr. John Bezirganian is Tompkins’ mental health director. He founded the facility’s opiate addiction treatment program a few years ago. He started by offering the buprenorphine program to inmates about 30 days before they were to be released; new inmates have the option of starting on buprenorphine when they arrive. When they go home, they have a 30-day supply of the drug in their pocket as well as a referral to a provider local to their hometown who will continue their care.

Buprenorphine and Opiate Addiction Treatment

Buprenorphine does not have the abuse potential that methadone does and is therefore a great candidate for opiate addiction treatment, especially in the jail system. You can’t get addicted to it and it has a ceiling on it so you can’t increase its effect by taking more. This also means that there are no documented cases of buprenorphine overdose, either, and if someone tries to abuse it by crushing it and shooting the drug, then they will immediately be thrown into opiate withdrawal due to a component of the drug inserted specifically to protect against such abuse. In the same way, it stays bound to opiate receptors for two or three days after use so relapse will be ineffective. In short, the only person who would want this drug is someone who wants to stave off withdrawal symptoms during opiate detox, not anyone who would want to get high.

What Do You Think?

Do you think that treating heroin and painkiller addiction in prisons and jails is an effective use of funds? Do you think the buprenorphine specifically is a positive choice for these programs? What do you think?

Judgment And Logic Get Lost With Drug Addiction

One of the worst parts of drug addiction is how judgment and logical thinking goes down the tubes. A drug addict can see everything wrong with their life, just like everyone else can. However, they just don’t see the connection between their addiction behaviors and the things going on in their life. Somehow, they keep making the choices that create problems. And before long, they are drinking and drugging to cover the pain from all the problems.

A sure sign of drug addiction is when you know you’re drug use causes big problems, yet you keep using. You may even have some idea of how your drug use has led to these problems. Yet, you keep using. Instead of this information come telling you to stop taking drugs, you push it to the side. This is a clear sign that you have lost control and you truly have a drug addiction.

Drug Rehab Can Stop Downhill Spiral of Addiction

When you are in a downhill spiral like this, it’s easy to think that there is no hope. You may even believe that drug rehab doesn’t really work. And it can’t work if you never go. Thinking about drug rehab can bring up some real mixed feelings. You don’t like the idea of everyone knowing all your business, especially strangers. But what if your friends and family are right? They are all leaving you, they say, because of your drug use.  Would there be anyone left after a while?

Drug rehab can help you do one very important thing to help you get sober — remind you that you have the power of choice every minute to the sober. And when you use that power to be sober, you won’t lose all the things you care about. Your job, your home, your family, your friends, your respect, your dignity. Every day you are sober you have a better chance of keeping all these things in your life. It may be a hard pill to swallow at first, but drug rehab can help you become empowered person with a good life.

Drug Addicts: The Stereotype Is Wrong

The truth is that drug addicts come in all shapes and sizes. It’s not just the crack addict in the alley in a bad part of town. Drug addicts are also the alcoholics who wear suits and successfully function as executives in the corporate world. They may be the very people who dispense and prescribe your prescription painkillers, the ones wearing the white coats. They could be the stay at home mother or father driving the kids to school and baseball practice. They could be the elderly neighbor or the local teen beauty pageant contestant or your kid’s teacher. The stereotype of who or what a drug addict is could not be more wrong.

Drug Addict and Addiction Stereotypes: How They Hurt The Addict

It’s difficult to look at the bedraggled and desperate stereotype that we’ve chosen for drug addicts and stand up and say, “Yup! That’s me!” For professionals, executives, parents and those in public or healthcare professions it is especially difficult to claim that title and get the necessary drug addiction treatment without suffering a great many life changing repercussions. Certainly, those repercussions may not be avoided simply by avoiding treatment; in fact, not getting medical treatment ultimately ends up harming even more people and causing more permanent damage for the addict’s life and reputation. That’s the point: the stereotype can perpetuate the behavior unnecessarily as the addict holds onto the illusion that he or she can keep people from finding out by trying to quit alone.

Drug Addiction Stereotypes: How They Hurt Everyone

Clearly the consequences of addiction reach far beyond the personal life of the drug addict. Everyone on the road including pedestrians are put at risk when so-called “functional” addicts who pass for “normal” get behind the wheel while under the influence. The costs to the economy of fraud and other bad decisions of high ranking corporate and political executives under the influence are in evidence every day. Perpetuating stereotypes and demonizing those who struggle with drug and alcohol addiction make this particular bigotry dangerous and costly to everyone.

If you or someone you love is addicted to drugs and/ or alcohol, don’t let the stereotypes and stigma keep you from getting the medical drug detox and rehab that you need. Contact The Canyon for more information about executive drug and alcohol rehab.