What is the main purpose of going to a drug rehab?

What can a rehab offer that can make the difference? You can get good counseling outside a rehab. You can find good support groups outside a rehab. You can find good information about addiction treatment outside a rehab. I personally think the most important thing a rehab can offer is safety. That’s the main reason to go.

Rehabs offer safety from temptation from drug and alcohol for a while. That’s the obvious thing. They also offer a safe enviroment to try new things. Outside of a rehab, the consequences of making mistakes are far greater. The greater the consequence, the less likely someone is to attemept to try a new behavior. The more at stake, the more likely someone is to stay with the regular way of doing things. Because in a rehab everyone is there to learn new ways of dealing with things, no one is going to care if the first few times you try a new technique to handle something, it is clumsy or poorly done. They will actually cheer you on.

Outside of a drug or alcohol rehab program if you appear clumsy while trying a new way to relate to people, embarassment or ridicule may keep you from trying it again several times until you become proficient. Everyone in rehab is going through the same things, feeling the same clumsy moments. In rehab you can actually stop in the middle of something and ask others around you what isn’t working. In real life, while it would be nice if we could do this, most times we cannot.

Rehabs offer the safety of enough time to actually think about what you really want in life. Sometimes living life and coping with everything gets in the way of figuring out exactly what you want. Rehab is a place removed from all that. If you are truely trying to make changes in your life and stop substance abuse, but can’t quite make it, maybe the safety of a rehab might make the difference.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 16th, 2005 at 5:52 pm 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.