One of the easiest things to lose while in a drug or alcohol addiction is your respect. As drug use escalates boundaries and personal ethics go down hill. Over time often someone finds themselves doing behaviors that a short while before they never would have considered. Once you lose respect for for boundaries and what is legal and what is not, losing your personal self respect follows very quickly. Again as the drug or alcohol addiction progresses lying and other unwanted behaviors drive away friends and family. Usually by the time one enters a drug or alcohol rehab for treatment there is no self respect left.

If time is’nt taken to rebuild and improve what has been lost the risk of relapse is great. Not liking and respecting oneself will lead to a lot of stress in one’s life. It leads to a feeling of “fraud” about one’s self and a wondering if “people only knew the truth about me”. Respect however is one of those strange commodities, like love, that can only be obtained by giving it away. While you are in a drug rehab program you can achieve this by giving respect to everything you encounter. Other clients and the staff at the rehab center are obvious but there are many smaller ways to show respect. How clean and organized you keep you room is a sign of respect. How you handle the program materials given to you in a rehab is about respect. Do you read the materials and underline the important parts to go over and study later, or do you doodle and deface them? Do you respect the resources available to you? Do you leave common areas neater then you found them? Acts of these types will build disipline. Disipline over time leads to self respect. A large degree of self repect will lead to a more organized and less stressful life. This leads to sobriety and the life you desired when you entered a drug rehab program.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 25th, 2006 at 9:41 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.