Addiction Recovery Can Be Empowering

Addiction is many things. Addiction destroys your health, interrupts your life, and breaks relationships with those you love. Addiction harms your job, changes your home life, and takes control of everything. Addiction steals your personal power to live and manage your life.

Thankfully, addiction to any substance can be overcome. You can enter into recovery and rebuild your health, your relationships, and your life. You will enter an addiction recovery center powerless and leave that same center in control.

Addiction Recovery is a Form of Empowerment

Drug rehabilitation is a comprehensive treatment program to help individuals overcome their dependence on a substance. Most drug rehabilitation programs are a four-part process. First, they focus on helping you overcome the physical addiction to the substance. Second, they address physical and mental health issues that may have contributed to the addiction or result from that addiction.

Next, the substance abuse counselor you are working with will start teaching you how to overcome these problems and regain control of your life. This is where empowerment begins. With each new thing that you learn or discover about yourself when you are in recovery, you will gain more control of your life. This empowerment is what allows you to succeed at breaking your addiction and rebuilding your life.

The final step is learning how to remain empowered once you leave the program. Your counselor will help you establish a support network so that you can remain empowered by your recovery and start a new life addiction-free.

Becoming Empowered is a Process

Although these four steps are easily described, it is important to remember that entering into recovery is a process that is different for each person. It will take a different amount of time for each person for each step, which is okay. You want your recovery process to be as personal as possible because it will have more meaning.

When you enter an addiction recovery center, you want to go to one that will address your specific needs. Addiction recovery is not a cookie-cutter solution; it must be tailored to each individual.

Each step will be different in the time it takes to move to the next step. For some, physical addiction is the hardest part of recovery. For others, addressing physical and mental health conditions takes time. Some people may find becoming empowered a little scary because they have not enjoyed control in their lives for a long time, and they have to learn how to love controlling their life again.

Some people may also have difficulty approaching the last stage because they fear going out on their own. Your recovery center would also be able to address these concerns by helping you “re-enter” into normal situations without being under the influence of a substance. Teaching you how to go out to dinner or an outing without being under the influence of your addiction may be something you need to discover.

The beauty of recovery is that it does not matter how long it takes to enter into recovery; it only matters that you eventually do enter. Going through each step until you are prepared for the final step will help you succeed in being addiction-free.

What Empowerment Is Not

Becoming empowered is a way to regain control of your life and your future. It is a way to remain in control when things get tough because you have created a new support system for yourself instead of turning to a substance for relief.

Empowerment is not an excuse. It is not a way to “allow” yourself to casually use the substance you were formally addicted to or any similar substance because you feel you are in control and will not abuse the substance now. Empowerment is not a way to justify actions that are not good decisions for yourself because you now feel that you can rebound from bad events.

Empowerment is a great thing that can help you overcome adversities in all areas of your life. It is a way to make good decisions, and it is a way for you to feel good about making those decisions. Empowerment can help you stay sober, and if things get rough, empowerment will help you overcome the problem.