Drug Detox Central

Drug Addiction Detox

There are a lot of websites out there who will tell you how to detox off drugs quickly. There are websites to show you how to beat a drug test. There are even sites devoted to home detoxing. This site is none of those things. For me it is all about recovery. It’s about sobriety — living a clean, healthy, meaningful life. You can’t do that if you are high, strung out or in between. You have to get clean, stay clean and learn to love it. When you crave sobriety in the same way you used to crave alcohol or heroin, then you are living recovery.

The first step to living that sort of life style is getting detoxed. You have to flush the drugs from your system before you can see your way to learning to live clean and sober, right? Don’t think of it as “detox”, think of it as drug addiction detox. You are detoxing from the addiction. Choosing to do a drug rehab detox is smart. You want trained professionals there to help you through this journey.

Doing the drug detox away from home, out in the world where it is visible is an important part of the recovery. You have to be open and honest about your addiction. You cannot hide the recovery like you hid your using. That makes sense right? Part of addiction help is owning it. It’s not like you need to put up a billboard or anything, but the people in your life need to know what’s happening because it is happening to them, too.

Once the drugs are out of your system, once the physical detoxification is done, the real work can begin. This is where you learn to live life in a different way. You will spend time in rehab and with family counselors learning coping skills and communication techniques. As you know a lot of addictions begin as coping issues. Another part of the detox is shedding old routines and, sadly, old friends. The people you knew when you were using can’t be in your life anymore. This is one of the harder things about recovery — replacing the social network of your old life with a new set of friends and activities. It depends on how deep down you were before, but for some people their whole lives revolved around getting and using. If that’s not there anymore, what is going to replace it?

Loving What Is

I just finished reading Byron Katie’s book Loving What Is and it had a profound effect on me. As I was reading, I kept on thinking about addiction. We think that we’re powerless over these chemicals; I have come to believe that addiction help is just a thought away.

If you are not familiar with Byron Katie and her work, here is the basic premise: if you believe your thoughts you suffer. When people come to her for help, she asks them:”Who would you be without your story?” She calls her process “The Work” and it has four questions. You think a thought. You think: “I can’t stay sober.” That’s a thought you thought. And your Work is to question that thought.

The first question you ask is “Is it true?” Is it true that I can’t stay sober? You might immediately say Yes! It is true because past experience has shown that you’ve not been able to stay sober. The second question is “Can you absolutely know that it is true?” Can you absolutely know that you can’t stay sober? No. You know lots of people who have stayed sober for years! So it is not physically impossible. It’s not like you are asking if you can walk to the moon.
The third question is “How do you react when you believe the thought? ‘I can’t stay sober’? This question, and its answer, allow you to examine all the ways that that one little thought has motivated you to take all sorts of actions. Destructive actions, like binge drinking, self loathing, violence and anger.

The last question is this: “Who would you be without that thought?” Just this question is radical. You may think it’s silly or a psychology student trick, but it is amazing. Think it through: who would you be if you didn’t think you could never stay sober? If you stopped believing that sobriety was unattainable, who would you be? Probably, you’d be sober. And you’d stay sober easily because you have replaced that negative belief with a positive belief.

That’s “The Work” and I can see it having this huge impact on my life. I don’t know if it could cure something like Bipolar Syndrome, but I know for addiction, so much of it is mental. Getting past what we believe are our limitations is most of the battle. Most people, and I’m as guilty as anyone, have this river of negative thoughts running through their minds all day, every day. If you can catch even one of those negative thoughts and put it through the four questions, you can begin to shift your life.

Addiction Help is on the Way

One of the hardest things about addiction is recognizing it for what it is. Whether it’s your own struggle or a loved one’s struggle, it hard to know that you’re really truly seeing addiction and not something milder. Who wants to face addiction? So much better to chalk it up to a stressful time or a “small habit” that you can quit at anytime.

Here are some symptoms of addiction. Please note that these symptoms could be attributed to something else, something not as severe as drug addiction. Only you are going to know the right answer. Some parts of the list are targeted particularly to friends and family members as ways to help you figure out if someone in your life is struggling with addiction.

Restlessness, combined with insomnia.
Slow speech or reaction time (associated with downers.)
Sudden weight loss.
Excessive sleep cycled with manic periods.
Continuous sinus troubles and/or nosebleeds.
Severe dental issues (associated with meth use.)
Changes in clothing, usually wearing long sleeves to hide needle marks.
Persistent cough that worsens instead of improving with time.
Apathy about life.
Increased irritability and an increased tendency to violence.
Paranoia.

Addiction is a tragedy and there are lots of reasons for why it happens. First and foremost: if there is a history of addiction in your family, the odds are higher that you will become addicted. Genetics plays its part in this equation as does the fact that many people use drugs to self-medicate. So if you have mental illness in your family tree, that might have been the trigger for the drug use and abuse for other family members as well as yourself. One final addiction factor that has to be mentioned is physical pain. Especially these days, you read about people being addicted to pain killers, opiates or opiate-derivatives like Oxycontin.

Once you think you’ve identified that there is truly addiction, there are several treatment possibilities. We’re very lucky to be living in such an enlightened age — addiction is seen for what it is: a medical problem.

First, there is Residential Treatment. This means that you (if you are the addict) or your loved one lives at a treatment facility.  It’s intensive treatment so it only lasts from 30-90 days.

Second we have Medical Detoxification. Any addiction help is probably going to involve some level of drug detox because the drug needs to be out of your system as soon as possible. Many people begin their recovery journey in this way because of an overdose or time spent in the emergency room. A medical professional, during assessment, recognizes that detox is required.

Third, Partial Hospitalization. This is often used as relapse prevention. You go to the hospital 4 or 5 times a week for about 6 hours a visit. Think of it as outpatient addiction treatment.

Fourth, an Intensive Outpatient Program. With this type of treatment, you usually meet 3 days a week, for 2-4 hours. What’s nice is that a program like this can be scheduled around work or school so there are no conflicts and, more importantly, no excuses.

Next, Counseling. This works best when paired with another kind of treatment or as a support structure. Being able to talk with a trained professional, about your life and struggles, about the choices you’ve made that have lead you to this here and now, it’s invaluable as a way to stay clean.

Last, Sober Living Program. These facilities are particularly good if your home life could be a trigger for relapse. You live in a house with other recovering addicts, getting support, some counseling and most importantly, an alcohol and drug free environment.

Drug Detoxification with 12 Step Programs

The best way to define a 12-step program is that it gives you a roadmap for recovery from addiction, compulsion, or other behavioral problems. The original 12-steps were first published in1939 in the book, Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How More Than One Hundred Men Have Recovered From Alcoholism.

These are the original Twelve Steps:

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Alcoholics Anonymous (4th ed.)

Over the years many groups, wanting to address behaviors besides alcohol addiction, have reworded the language to fit their groups’ focus as well as any differentiating religious or cultural identity. The Steps have a chameleon like ability to become what a group needs them to become.

There are as many ideas about recovery as there are stars in the sky, but the Steps work. Over and over and over, the Steps show that they work. It’s not a painless way to get over your heroin addiction, but it has the best chance of working. Once you deal with just getting the drugs out of your system, once you detox and get your head clear, then you can begin to replace the hole in your soul. Because that’s really the question, right? Why did you start using in the first place? When you get to the 4th Step…. the moral inventory, that’s when healing can really begin.

So take some time to visit the AA website and see what I mean.