A Primary Step to Overcoming Addiction

desperate dadA writer sent us a message asking for the number one tip for overcoming addiction. This is a very powerful question. While there are many aspects to consider, our years of experience enables us to offer an answer many families have found vital when trying to save an addicted loved one’s life.

Very often, a family trying to help their loved one with an offer of rehab is rebuffed. Why would he (or she) ever refuse the help? Because he’s his own worst enemy, locked into the guilt over the harm he’s done and depression connected with the destruction of his life. Hope can begin to grow if he can glimpse his own true worth once again.

Believing that one’s life is worth saving is a vital step to overcoming an addiction.

How Does Someone Lose Hope?

In most cases, the addicted person has been trapped in this situation for a number of years. The spouse may have left with the children, a number of jobs have come and gone, the family is partly or totally estranged. Valuables have been stolen from friends and family and maybe the person has gone to jail a couple of times. He might be staying with family who are willing to give him another chance or maybe he’s crashing wherever he can.

Many addicts get to the point that they don’t care if they live or die. They know the heartbreak they have caused family and dear friends and it crushes their spirits.

But all that is the addiction talking. Drugs have a deadening effect on the heart, the mind and the soul. It’s possible to feel like you’re worthless and not worth saving when drugs have deadened your feelings. Continuing to use drugs or drink feels like the only way he can survive.

So How Can He and the Family Turn this Situation Around?

By reaching out to him when he is most likely to be reasonably sober, the family can remind him that they know what he is like at heart. They know that he is still the good and loving person they have always cared about. Only the drugs or the drinks have come between them.

dad and daughterWhen he gets help to lift the mental, spiritual and physical burden, he can be that person again, he can once again have the family he cherishes back in his life. His self-respect is not gone forever, it can be restored. He can again have a productive, enjoyable life, no matter how impossible it looks in the dead of night when the needle and the powder or the bottle sit on the table in front of him. He is valuable, he has worth, and he deserves to be saved from that hell.

When he glimpses that truth, many things are possible. He can accept the help the family offers and together, they can select a rehab program to put him back on his feet.

Choosing a Rehab Program

They should be looking for a program of longer than 30 days, because those years or even decades of addiction are seldom overcome in just a month. He should insist on a drug-free program so that he is not chained to a substitute drug that will have its own effects and side effects on his mind and body. If possible, they should look together for a program that offers to help the person rebuild his body with nutritional support so that his damaged health does not sap his spirits. Life skills training is another key factor which will help a person leave addicted habits behind and replace them with healthy sober living skills. For fifty years, the Narconon program has used these principles to help the addicted recover the enjoyable life they lost.

Making your way back to sobriety after addiction is one of life’s great challenges. Thousands have accomplished this and recovery is possible.