VistaTaos

The above title means precisely what it says. You may think it means that you can’t sleep through your recovery because you’ve got to be motivated and vigilant about working it. We actually mean that many people experience very poor sleep quality during recovery.

Why is that? You would think that finally facing your demons and taking the steps you need to get some help would bring relief from all the stress in your life. Sleep disturbances, however, remain a very common part of early recovery.

• Do you have difficulty getting to sleep?
• Do you wake up in the middle of the night and find yourself unable to return to sleep?
• Do you experience racing thoughts that keep you from sleeping?
• Do you feel drowsy and exhausted during the day?
• Do you actually fall asleep during the day?
• Are your dreams disturbing?
• Do you find that, all counted up, you spend too many hours in sleep mode?
• Do you awaken feeling unrefreshed?

When you begin the recovery process, whether you’re in outpatient therapy or at a center for substance abuse treatment, sleeplessness ranks high among the post-acute withdrawal symptoms. Your whole body misses the effects of the drugs or alcohol you were using, and it takes a while to establish a sleep cycle without them.

Intense Dreams

In another article on these pages, you may have read about way that dreams intensify when someone stops using marijuana. That’s because the active component in marijuana (THC) interrupts the rapid-eye-movement (REM) cycle of sleep, which is when you dream. If you’ve stopped using marijuana, you experience a rebound effect that results in increased amounts of dreaming. For alcoholics, the biochemistry is a little different because alcohol suppresses dreams, but the end result is the same.

Both types of dreamers can expect dreams to seem intense and even colorful. You may dream of using again, with the plethora of emotions that may come with that.

Re-Learning Natural Sleep

Give your body time to learn how to sleep naturally once again. It can take many weeks or even months, and your actual sleep requirements may revise themselves. Do not make the mistake of taking an over-the-counter or a prescribed sleeping aid. Give Nature a chance. You can assure yourself that your sleep problems during this time of early recovery are very likely to resolve themselves without any kind of medical intervention.  While you wait for your body to adjust, follow these guidelines:

• Be certain your sleeping area is quiet and comfortable. You may even want to pamper yourself by redesigning your bedroom or at least buying some new sheet sets. Keep the temperature and air circulation at comfortable levels.
• Get into your bed at the same time every night, even on the weekends.
• No fair taking naps during the day.
• Avoid or reduce the amount of caffeine you take in. If you really like coffee but hate decaf, try mixing both leaded and unleaded versions of your favorite brand. That way you’re at least getting less caffeine.
• While exercise is good for you, avoid exercising in the hours before your bedtime.
• Invest in a good on guided imagery so that you can learn some relaxation techniques.
• Begin a night-time custom of saying prayers, meditation, or reading from a self-help book.
• Avoid a huge meal close to bedtime. Small snacks only should be heavy on carbs, such as a bowl of cereal and milk, a muffin, or some cookies. Protein is not recommended for this unless you put a small amount of peanut butter or cheese on some crackers.
• Bed is for sleeping, not tossing, not working, and not doing other activities (no, we’re not talking about that). If you haven’t fallen asleep after a half hour, get up and read a little or listen to music and then return to bed. Avoid using your handheld devices because the light from computer screens is believed to interrupt the generation of melatonin, which is the body’s natural sleep chemical.

If you’re thinking that you’re ready to quit drinking—or if you’re reading this because someone you care about is going to try to quit—then the message here is that any journey starts with the first step. The journey toward recovery doesn’t begin in an alcohol rehabilitation center. It begins when you realize it’s time for a change and you read the first step of Alcoholics Anonymous and you recognize that it’s meaningful for you:

                  We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

If you feel angry when you read those words, it’s understandable. Nobody likes to consider the idea that as he has no control over some aspect of his life. Thinking that your life has become unmanageable is—well, unthinkable.

There’s always some final precipitating event, some last straw that brings someone to the realization that he needs help to stop drinking alcohol or using drugs. Whether you found this post on your own or whether someone led you to it, you’ve probably experienced being powerless in one or more of the following ways:

• The alcohol or chemicals you’ve been using have placed your life—or the lives of others—in danger. Maybe you’ve driven your car while intoxicated. Have you thought about wrecking the car and killing yourself or some innocent bystander?

Maybe you’ve put your health at risk.  Some alcoholics experience high blood pressure the day after they’ve been drinking. Alcohol can cause stomach problems such as severe acid reflux. Snorting chemicals like cocaine or meth also burn the stomach. People develop fatty liver or cirrhosis. Even dental issues can stem from drug or alcohol abuse. If you’ve passed out from your substance abuse, then your body has shut down as a safety measure—and you’re lucky to be alive. And that’s just for starters.  Maybe you’ve gotten into a physical fight. drugs you think you’re buying.  

• You’ve lost your self-respect. Even if the people you love don’t know the worst things you’ve done, you see it in your eyes when you look in a mirror.

• You’ve caused your family to disrespect you. Okay, now you’re looking beyond the mirror and seeing the way the people you love look at you. What are some of the things that you’ve done to make your loved ones lose respect for you? Maybe your wife or mother hides her purse when you’re around. Maybe your husband can’t believe you if you say you’ve paid the bills, because he knows you’ve taken the money and used it to buy your next high. You lie, you steal, and you’re disrespectful.

• You’ve caused harm to others. If you’ve injured someone as a result of your drinking or drug abuse, that’s the worst-case scenario. There are lesser injuries, too, and they still harm the people in your life: Is your job in danger? Without a job, you’ll have no health insurance, and you’ll fall behind on your mortgage and utility payments. You owe your family clothing, food, and shelter, and your substance abuse may be putting those basic necessities at risk.

Once you take that tentative first step toward recovery, those are four of the areas that you’ll be asked to face initially. How is your health? Where do you stand legally? Do you still have loved ones around you? A long-term residential drug or alcohol rehabilitation center will place you away from everything else in your life—the people and things you’ve been harming—so that you can focus on moving toward recovery. Recognizing what you’ve lost and that it happened because of your inability to stop using your drug of choice literally is the first step.

For many people, the first and hardest thing to achieve is abstinence. If you quit drinking, then you are in recovery, isn’t that right? Treatment for addiction starts with abstinence, but recovery takes you many steps beyond that.

Pretreatment. You can actually enter into the pretreatment stages of recovery when you have a crisis that forces you to recognize the need for treatment. When you have an event that compels you to accept the idea of going into treatment for addiction of some kind, then you are in the pretreatment stage of the recovery process.

Stabilization. As you enter treatment, you will be abstinent from your drug of choice—from all drugs—and you will go through a period of detoxification. At this time your addiction treatment counselor will help you to recognize the patterns that lead you to use, but you will be focusing on stabilizing yourself both physically and psychologically. You can expect this phase to take up to 30 days.

Early Recovery. In this phase, you are still working on acceptance of the need for treatment and the importance of remaining abstinent. This is where you take an in-depth look at the way you are living your life and how alcohol or drugs is affecting it. This stage is when you acknowledge that you are an addict and you begin to consider the lifestyle changes that will be necessary for recovery. It may be discouraging to learn that this stage can take up to a year, but once you engage in it you will find that there is so much to learn. This is also the stage when your brain biochemistry will begin to restabilize.

Middle Recovery. You will not reach this stage until you accept the need for long-term treatment. It’s normal to feel very demoralized up to and including this stage, but your counselor can help you deal with negative thoughts and face the consequences of past behaviors. This is the stage at which you must face yourself honestly and accept that you truly need long-term help. You will be working many of the stages of the 12 Steps, and you will also formulate the beginning of a structured sobriety plan. It takes 6 months to a year to get through this stage.

Late Recovery. By the time you reach this stage you have stabilized the problems in your life that relate to drug or alcohol use. However, treatment for addiction also requires you to focus on other life problems that are not necessarily addiction-centered but which affect your everyday ability to function. Putting your life back in order is a huge part of eliminating future triggers. You will also learn to identify how drug-centered values are different from sobriety-centered values. From there you begin to create better coping and stress management skills that will strengthen you in all aspects of life. Your relationships with your family members will begin to heal, and you will see the path ahead of you for a normal life. It takes another year or two to center yourself and work your way through this penultimate stage.

Maintenance. By this stage your life is centered around sobriety. Your lifestyle is healthy and balanced. Remember that you may have difficulty reaching this stage because as you advance from simple abstinence to a well-thought-out recovery plan, there may be stumbles and relapses along the way. Maintenance for addicts is the same as maintenance for diabetics: It’s something you will have to work on your entire life. But by this stage, you will be sharing what you’ve learned with other addicts who have just entered the process of recovery. Treatment for addiction is an ongoing process that will take you to a healthful, productive lifestyle.

Doctors have known for some time that prescription drug abuse in Colorado and other parts of the western United States is getting worse. Law enforcement officials, however, have been running a little behind the eight ball, so to speak. They’ve been putting their primary focus on other illegal drug activity while prescription pain killer abuse has escalated out of control.

In Colorado, for example, the primary concern has been battling methamphetamine addiction, and it’s true that meth poses serious health hazards for its victims. However, officials have failed to recognize the other big problem, that prescription pain killers that are being produced by the so-called “pill mills” flourishing in California and Nevada, are making it easier for people to obtain them without a prescription.

People are easily susceptible to pain medication addiction because of the way it works on the brain. Normally, when you experience pain or discomfort, the brain sends out endorphins as its natural way of providing the body a level of relief. If you go to the doctor, however, and ask for a prescription for pain pills, the brain responds by manufacturing more and more receptors for that type of drug. It then decreases the amount of endorphins that it produces because it’s gaining relief from the medication. Opioids, including pain killers, actually stimulate a rush of euphoria when taken. It’s doubly intoxicating because this all happens in the part of the brain that helps us to set priorities in our lives. But over repeated use, the nerve cells in the brain begin to deteriorate, and the person cannot feel pleasure or relief unless he is taking the medication.

Many people who become addicted to pain killers experience a haphazard descent into addiction. It’s not that they set out to use drugs illegally, hanging out with shady characters from the underworld or chasing after bongs like the comical characters in the old Cheech and Chong movies. They begin by taking pain killers to help them while they recover from an injury, and then they find that it’s difficult to stop taking the medication.

Officials fighting prescription drug abuse in Colorado, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and other states need to follow the example of legislators in Florida. When legislators joined forces with the state attorney general to clamp down on pill mills and also to enforce use of the state’s database for monitoring prescription drugs, the state saw an actual decrease in the number of prescription-drug-related deaths for the first time in over ten years.

Polls show that people who oppose the use of prescription drug use databases argue that there are no funds to support such a database. Some physicians and pharmacists don’t want to be bothered with compliance issues.

Nobody can argue that fighting drugs like methamphetamine (meth) isn’t a good cause, but Colorado lawmakers really need to turn their attention to prescription drug abuse. A whopping 6 percent of people are abusing pain killers in that state, putting it in second place right behind Oregon. Arizona ranks sixth, with 5.66 percent of its population abusing pain killers, and New Mexico holds tenth place, with 5.45 percent admitting to non-medical use of prescription pain killers.  The statistics for these figures included people as young as age 12—a sobering reality.

Recovery from prescription drug abuse is so difficult because it involves withdrawal from the medication and also pain management therapy and behavior modification to help the person deal with his pain—the reason why he began using the drugs in the first place. It’s best to contact professionals at a drug rehab center to get the best treatment for this kind of addiction, who are best equipped to apply this two-pronged approach.   For more information on recovery from prescription pain medication addiction contact Vista Taos Renewal Center at 1.800.245.8267.

What did staffers of golf courses and drug rehab centers in Oklahoma share in common earlier this year? All of them were reading in amazement a story of a methamphetamine lab that exploded on a golf course. According to Oklahoma City news sources, personnel working a golf course located in Purcell, Oklahoma, called the police when they noticed sports drink bottles left inside a porta-potty. There were three bottles that looked as if they still had chemicals inside, and two of them exploded before police arrived on the scene. The third bottle was neutralized by police.

These small bottles were used as one-pot meth labs—which has no reference to them actually being left in a potty. These one-bottle affairs  are also known as shake-and-bake labs because the users put small amounts of cold pills into the bottles along with an assortment of some very hazardous chemicals and shake them up to start a chemical reaction. The addict—we say addict because it probably wasn’t a golfer doing this—must revisit the bottle every few minutes to vent and swirl it over the course of an hour or two.

Surely that would lead police to wonder if a neighbor in the vicinity of this particular golf course was the perpetrator, since this course was right across the street from a residential neighborhood. Fortunately or not, depending on your viewpoint, the plastic fragments of the two bottles that exploded yielded fingerprints for the police.

The shake-and-bake meth labs use a frightening assortment of chemicals that will individually and collectively cause much harm to human tissues and skin. Besides the cold pills, ingredients include lye, drain cleaners, lithium strips taken from batteries, and plenty of other harmful toxins. When combined, the resulting liquid will appear to roil and boil and the resulting explosions can be small ones or very large ones that damage entire buildings.

In fact, the CEO of McKinley, Inc., real estate developers throughout the southwest United States as well as areas in New England and the southeast, have also been in the news for abandoning plans to expand in Oklahoma City. The meth labs in apartment rental units there have been so numerous and so dangerous that this huge company would rather just not take the risks. Not only are the fumes a serious problem, says CEO Albert Berriz, but also there are also extensive problems relating to fires and decontamination from meth labs.

Drug rehab centers in Oklahoma and New Mexico such as Vista Taos Renewal Center are adept at treating methamphetamine addiction, which requires more extensive therapy in residential drug treatment programs than other drugs.

Researchers feel that the same therapies work with methamphetamine addicts compared with alcoholics or other drug addicts, but treatment does take longer. The effects of meth on a user’s system can last up to six months, and the addict really can’t assimilate treatment benefits until he improves physiologically. Once detox has been achieved, cognitive therapy can begin. A minimum of 30 days’ treatment is required for a meth user to recover his ability to make good decisions and healed thought processes. If you or someone you know is using meth, it’s time to call a substance abuse treatment center and find out how to get that person into treatment.  For help call 1.800.245.8267.

Whoever would have imagined that the great state of Texas, the stronghold of Republican conservatism in this country, would ever approve the use of medical marijuana? Just such a bill (HB 594) was filed by Democratic Texan legislator Elliott Naishtat in January 2013. The bill was lovingly passed on to the State’s Public Health people on Valentine’s Day. According to The Partnership at DrugFree.org, the bill has backing from representatives of both parties.

Eighteen states as well as the District of Columbia have approved legislation approving the use and/or the distribution of medical marijuana, or medicinal cannabis as it is called officially. They include Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, DC, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. Of all those states, the two states that approved it within the past 12 months were Connecticut and Massachusetts. It’s well known, of course, that Colorado and Washington have gone beyond the constraints of medicinal cannabis and approved recreational use of marijuana.

One Texas legislator made an impassioned plea for passage of medical marijuana in Texas stating that if any of his loved ones were to contract a dreaded, painful disease, he’d be out on the streets without hesitation looking for some street weed for his affected relative.

Naishtat stated in April in the Dallas Morning News that his bill doesn’t decriminalize marijuana, but it makes it legal for someone to possess marijuana if he is diagnosed by a physician and this has been documented. The bill also protects physicians who want to discuss cannabis as a therapeutic alternative for their patients who suffer from debilitating illnesses. Up until now, many physicians have refused to treat such patients because they risk losing their license if they discuss medical marijuana with their patients in the state of Texas.

A Dallas Morning News reporter wrote in early April that over half the people support medicinal cannabis, a change from decades gone by. Other groups such as the Texas Eagle Forum oppose passage of this law because they recognize its potential as a gateway drug.

The statistics about marijuana’s status as a gateway drug are staggering. TIME Magazine reported in 2010 that according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a person who smokes marijuana is 104 times more likely to use cocaine that someone who has never used drugs. Even so, many people are laughing off the dangers of marijuana—this is a time like Prohibition, they say, and eventually marijuana will be decriminalized in all states. It’s no worse than alcohol, they say.

The truth is that the dangers of marijuana have taken a back seat to the spreading popularity of prescription drugs, including painkillers and ADHD meds. Those who can no longer get painkillers move on to cheap heroin. Party drugs like ecstasy are popular.

The fact that people forget marijuana does have dangers renders it all the more dangerous. Use of marijuana not only takes people down the path toward more serious addiction issues, but it also carries its own risks. Teens who use it can suffer impaired cognitive brain function. Adults who use it experience decreased natural production of serotonin and norepinephrine. It can exacerbate someone’s susceptibility to mental health issues. Traffic accidents from marijuana are creeping upward. And, no matter how many states pass it, the fact remains that it’s still illegal on the federal level.

As medical marijuana in Texas and other states becomes increasingly widespread, families of loved ones with addictive personalities must be prepared to respond proactively by seeking out treatment for the person who continually abuses marijuana. Treatment with a licensed, certified drug counseling center can help the person to look at his motives and form a plan that will help him to stop using, once and for all.

Many people who need some kind of help at a substance abuse treatment center feel shame from the fact that they have not been able to stop drinking or using drugs on their own. There is a very real stigma attached to substance abuse, because the person who is intoxicated acts out, demonstrating behaviors that hurt the people he cares about.

For some, there’s a past history of wrongs they have experienced at the hands of others. They have turned to substance abuse as a way to mask their hurt and pain. There is little that’s positive for them within the context of their daily life, and so they reach out for a substance that activates the pleasure centers in the brain. It’s the only way they can hide what they hate and experience any kind of comfort.

The negative feelings that the person experiences from his past are multiplied by the shame he feels from using his substance of choice. Sometimes he doesn’t even understand, logically, why a past event continues to haunt him. It makes him feel as if he’s a bad, ineffective person who deserves little happiness in life. If he’s like many addicts, he has so many secrets that he can never imagine becoming sober.

But the person who actually seeks treatment really doesn’t need to feel any kind of shame.  A substance abuse treatment specialist is aware of all the many ways that addiction can affect a person and his family. He understands that a person who uses may be compelled to keep using because of a biochemical component to his addiction. The counselor recognizes that the addict may be suffering from a co-occurring mental health disorder. He knows that many addicts cannot stop using because the substance abuse has become a pattern ingrained deeply into his life.  He knows that the addict is haunted by secrets of the past, nightmares and monsters that tell him he will never achieve recovery. But the counselor can help with all of that.

When a person enters into substance abuse treatment, whether it’s for alcohol or drugs, there is not some kind of abrupt immersion into therapy. The counselor moves the person gradually toward working on his recovery. The initial phases of treatment will most likely include time for the recovering addict to get to know his treatment team. If he is in a residential substance abuse treatment center, he will also need to become acquainted with the other people who are seeking services at the same time he is.

The counselor will take the person through a series of exercises. A common exercise involves a model called Use-Consequences-Secrets. In this therapeutic exercise, the addict writes down the first time he used, what he used, what were the consequences, and what secrets he kept as a result.  He includes on this list all the times that stand out in his memory, when his addiction deepened, as the consequences worsened, and as the secrets became more and more complicated in his life.

It takes time for the person in recovery to break through the pain of the past and move forward. An inspirational writer named William Arthur Ward said, “If you can imagine it, you can achieve it; if you dream it, you can become it.”  It’s time to believe that you deserve a better life.  If you feel haunted by things that have happened in your past—or this applies to someone you know—it’s time to begin the struggle to overcome those things and move forward.  It’s more than drug rehab; it’s life rehab. The substance abuse counselor knows how to help.

Heroin in New Mexico is selling at 1977 prices, says The Partnership at Drugfree.org in a 2012 study. If you’re looking for your fix you can still find it for about ten bucks, basically unchanged from the price of product sold thirty years ago. Unfortunately, the drug is more pure than it was back then, which means it’s more deadly.

In an interesting side note, the cost of funerals has dramatically increased from less than $6,000 ten years ago to about $10,000, excluding headstone. That means even if it costs you less in 2013 dollars for your heroin high than it did thirty years ago, dying from an overdose will cause your family to pay more for your final send-off.

The Partnership cites a story in MSNBC for its details on the increase in heroin abuse. People who began using painkillers to get high in their teens find that those prescription pills such as Vicodin, OxyContin, Percocet and other narcotic painkillers are no longer so easily available, or they may have become costs prohibitive. The increased availability of heroin in New Mexico is due to fact that it comes right over the border from Mexico into the States.

A long-time medical office manager talks about how patients come for treatment of trauma injuries and easily get hooked on prescription painkillers. Not that long ago, she says, a patient initially treated after an automobile accident or injury would go from doctor to doctor complaining about his pain. His family physician and then an orthopedic doctor might both write prescriptions, and next he could go to a dentist to get yet another prescription for a supposed toothache. This ‘doctor shopping’ afforded easy an easy way to maintain a habit.

Even when they sought multiple prescriptions from the same doctor, the patients could be very creative in their requests. She recalls one patient whose outlandish excuses included losing his prescription because it was in the pocket of his jeans laundered by his mother. Another time the same patient reported that he had dropped his prescription down an elevator shaft when a Salvation Army bell ringer scared him. There was very little tracking of pain medication prescriptions through the 1990’s.

That changed in the last decade or so, with computer databases making it possible for physicians and pharmacists to communicate more effectively about how many prescriptions for pain medication a patient had presented with.  There is also more random as well as routine federal monitoring of prescriptions issued for painkillers.

Heroin abuse is not limited to New Mexico neighborhoods. It’s happening in urban centers like Dallas, Oklahoma City, Chicago, and other cities and towns where emergency department visits for heroin overdose rose 288 percent over a decade’s time. It’s happening in rural and small town centers across America.

Today’s drug abusers are getting dependent on painkillers and then becoming desperate when their sources dry up. It becomes easy to make the leap from paying upwards of twenty dollars for an OxyContin bought on the street to about half that cost for heroin.

According to Join Together, a doctor in Columbus, Ohio, tells of an upscale young woman typical of the heroin patients he sees. “Oh, I just went to a party and it was there, and I loved it,” this woman said to the doctor.  In New Mexico, 86 percent of patients overdosing on heroin are age 25 or older.

Treatment for heroin addiction requires combined therapies, including behavioral modification and supervised withdrawal.  It’s also an addiction that requires completely separating an addict from access to his drug of choice, via an inpatient hospital stay or a residential substance abuse treatment center. If you know someone who needs to stop using heroin, call Vista Taos Renewal Center at 1.800.245.8267.

It’s hard facing the struggle within yourself when you’re trying to achieve and maintain recovery. Coping skills are ways you can meet your own personal needs without using drugs or alcohol. We’ve already talked about intrapersonal coping skills, which help you deal with the issues within yourself. There are also interpersonal coping skills that you can use to work through situations in dealing with other people.

Knowing How to Say No. There are too many people in your life who will continue to ask you if you want a drink or whatever your drug of choice is, even after you’ve begun the recovery process. Many recovery programs include group therapy practice sessions in which the group members learn how to refuse a drink or drugs.  It might seem silly the first time you do this, but you will be surprised how it helps. Repeated practice makes you sound convincing to the people around you when you say no.  As many times as someone can say “Come on, just have one drink,” you can also say, “No, I’ll pass.”

Refusing All Kinds of Requests. People with addictive behaviors and the loved ones around them often share codependent or enabling relationship dynamics. That means that your loved ones depend on you to behave a certain way to validate their own sense of self-worth. They may be fearful, even, that once you have stopped using you will no longer love or need them. But you do have to make changes in your life, including those negative family dynamics, and so you have to learn to refuse requests when friends and family ask for favors. You will learn to tell the person that he or she is important to you, and you know how he feels, but you just cannot say yes. Sobriety means you are back in charge of your own world, and learning how to turn people down—gently—is a coping skill you need. It is okay, however, to offer compromises, as long as you are comfortable with them.

Accepting Criticism.  It’s natural for people to bristle when someone criticizes them, and the addict becomes riled even more quickly because he knows he has earned some criticisms. Your addiction treatment counselor can teach you how to respond without getting angry so that you can effectively ask the critic to define exactly what he expects from you or at least to explain his purpose. You can also learn to take care with your own criticisms of others so that you don’t offer hasty, unwarranted criticisms.

Building a Social Network. Many people in recovery report that they are lonely. They can’t hang out with the people they were socializing with in the past, and it’s difficult to make new friends.  Attending a variety of 12-step meetings until you find one that fits your personality is important. Don’t be too quick to write people off as incompatible with you; your social skills are rusty and you need to give relationships an opportunity to develop. Church or neighborhood groups also make great ways to get out there and meet new people.  

Intimacy. When you were actively using, you were not able to provide much of genuine worth as a partner to someone else. Now that your head is clear, it’s time to practice both giving and receiving the emotional intimacy that makes life so worth living.

Many residential addiction recovery centers take their clients through a series of exercises that enhance their ability to share intimacy. Movement classes, massage therapy, yoga, and meditation are all excellent ways for a person to regain experience in opening himself up once again. You cannot share yourself with someone else if you do not know how to explore your own inner feelings. Learning how to admit your feelings to yourself and then to others, developing listening skills, and practicing positive ways to express the negatives in life all contribute to better intimacy in your all relationships, including that single most important one.

People who go into drug addiction treatment face two primary tasks. First, they must understand what needs they have that cause them to use drugs and alcohol. Second, they must find another way to meet those needs. That second area is where coping skills come into play. The goal is to return to a normal life with your family with a clear, strong mind and body.

Knowledge About the Drug

If you or someone in your family is abusing substances, you may be surprised to find out how much you don’t know about that substance. Your substance abuse counselor will provide the means to learn what the drug does to your body, what it does to your mind, how it affects your soul, and why it puts stress on the family.

There are many more physical effects than cirrhosis or cancer. People experience hypertension, cardiac rhythm disturbances, decreased bone density, damage to the nerves in your hands and feet, bleeding in the stomach and intestines, and even strokes. Many people suffer severe dental problems related to drug or alcohol use. Depression and anxiety become a way of life.

Triggers

Do you know what a trigger is? Give a cigarette smoker a cup of coffee and they want to light up: The coffee triggers the urge to smoke. People who abuse drugs and alcohol have triggers, too. Your coping strategies will teach you that you cannot dismiss the triggers that affect you. What you will learn, instead, is how to handle them.

What are the activities that lead up to drinking or using drugs? What are the emotions that lead up to using? You will study them and also, as part of your drug addiction treatment, you will face and study the consequences of those activities.

Emotions

Anger management and negative thinking contribute to drug use. You will learn how to recognize anger before it takes hold of you. You will also increase your awareness of negative thinking processes so that you can combat them. Some people are not even aware that they become angry or have negative attitudes.

Enjoyment

Many addicts have forgotten how to enjoy the good things in life, including their skill areas. When you were younger, perhaps you dabbled in painting, music, or art. Maybe you used to read or go to see movies. As you enter into treatment, you become aware that the search for your next high and the consequences of your last one have occupied most of your time. It’s time to become reacquainted with yourself!

Relaxation and Meditation

Guided imagery, movement classes, breathing exercises—they are just a few of the many ways to relax and meditate. Relaxation helps you to cope with stress, anger, insomnia, anxiety, and cravings.

Making Decisions, Solving Problems

All people, whether or not they are in drug addiction treatment, must learn how to make decisions and solve problems in life. However, people who have been preoccupied with addiction or dependency generally are not very good at these important skills. Classes offered at your substance abuse treatment center can help you learn how to review options and make good choices. You will also learn how to establish emergency plans to help you handle Life’s little curve balls.

Change Your Future Vision

Some people take a solid step into treatment armed with a supportive family structure, financial security, and a clear career path. However, many others stumble into treatment forced by the courts because they know no other way of life. For many, substance abuse is a common rotten fruit on the family tree, and those people can never imagine having a strong family, real security, or a good job. No matter which background you come from, you will learn to envision a future for yourself that’s totally different from whatever you pictured before. 

Here we’ve been discussing intrapersonal coping skills. In another article we will talk about coping skills that the addict can put to use in his interpersonal relationships.