Leaving in the first few days in alcohol or drug rehab, because someone just can’t quite make it, I feel profoundly sad and disappointed. So much work hope and effort has gone into arranging the chance for someone to change their life. Yet the very first few days in rehab are for most people the toughest and the hardest to make it through. Having seen how many people start to turn after a week to ten days, it is so important to give someone the tools to make it through those rough and discouraging moments.

I believe that success or failure in alcohol and drug rehab, especially during the first phase of addicition treatment boils down to questions and focus. Some people think that questions and focus are the same thing. It boils down to what you try to keep your mind on and how you can turn your mind back to what you want when it strays off target. At the beginning of rehab treatment it is absolutely essential that you focus on the future and what you want to achieve. If you let you mind focus on your drug of choice and how much you miss it, it will be a very rough ride. If you focus on all the times you tried to quit in the past and failed, again your stay in rehab will be tough.

You need to keep turning your focus to what you will gain in your life by choosing a drug and alcohol free life. The way you do this is by the questions you keep in you mind. This is accomplished by repeatly asking “good” questions in your head. When your mind wanders into unproductive territory, of how much you don’t want to be in rehab and how you are sure to fail, refocus with a question like, “What are all the things I will gain by removing drugs from my life?”
Her’s a list of good re-focusing questions:

How will my health improve with a drug free life?

What will I accomplish in my life with drugs and alcohol gone?

How will I spend all the extra money I wasted on drugs and alcohol?

Who can I talk to for the next hour to re-focus and stay on track?

What activity can I do for the next hour to re-focus and feel better.

Who is depending on my to succeed and what can I do to make them proud?

As simple as it sounds, if you work very hard at removing the negative questions, and keep replacing them will the focused questions about what you are going to accomplish with sobriety, your first few days in rehab will be better, much better.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 14th, 2006 at 9:58 am and is filed under 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.