Yesterday I discussed the value of social support in the treatment of drug and alcohol addiction. Today we will go through the types of social support and how to start to work it into you life to prevent relapse.

Emotional support: People who are emotionally supportive tell us they are concerned about us, trust us and think well of us. The value of this type of support is very large. Emotional triggers are probably the single largest cause of relapse, as well as one of the driving forces of the cause of the substance abuse in the first place. Without quality emotional support, the addiciton will return or continue.

Sharing information: Family, friends or counsilors give us factual and insightful information about a particular important decision, idea or stressful event. Addiction and drug abuse are conditions of isolation. As such they lend themselves to distortions in thinking as someone doesn’t get much input from others to get balance in the information used to make decisions. Quality, factual information is vital to disrupt addictive cycles, and one of the main functions of a good drug rehab is to help provide and discern this type of input.

Practical help: People who care about us assist us with practical day to day help such as gifts of money or food, assistance with cooking or help with a car repair. Life bumps can often escalate into the emotional conditions of frustration, anger and overwhelm. All of these again are often precurssors to drug and alcohol abuse. Controling and limiting them are again vital.
Sharing points of view: People offer their opinion about how they view a particular situation or how they would choose to handle it. All too often it is easier to see the solution to someone else’s problem, long before you can see the solution to your own. Addiction leads to thinking patterns that often result in poor decisions. Getting outside input is of great assistance in broadening our problem solving tool kit. Again in a quality drug rehab this process should be started, but once you leave rehab, it is you social support group that will continue and expand on this.

The next step in the process in to think about how many people are required for an adequate support system. Tomorrow will deal with how to find and build the size that is right for you.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 19th, 2005 at 6:07 am and is filed under Drug Addiction, Drug Rehab. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.