Drug and alcohol rehab centers do not have a 100% success rate. Over a longer period of time the rate is much lower than that. There are many reasons for this. It may be a bad fit for the type of program. It may be the client didn’t stay in the rehab for a long enough period of time. I think some of the relapses and lack of success may be attributed to going for the wrong reasons.

Don’t go to rehab, if for you it is simply the best of a group of distasteful options. By this I mean if you are going to rehab only to avoid going to jail, and not because you really and truly want to quit, is a bad reason. You will most likely fail. Going to rehab because you felt “pressured” by everyone in your family to go and you felt you had no other alternative is another senario which will lead to a lower success rate.

If you find yourself agreeing to go to rehab, but them fantasizing about ways you could still obtain drugs and alcohol in rehab, your commitment level needs to be looked at. Anytime you are looking at ways that you could get around the system, you are not really ready for rehab. You will waste most of your time doing these activities instead of looking for ways to become and stay sober. If in your heart you cannot say, I am willing to do whatever it takes to get sober and stay sober, your odds of success go down. Rehab is a place to find the tools and safety needed to become sober. While a good rehab center can add to a clients motivation to become clean, it cannot provide it. To hope it can miraculously get someone to change who really doesn’t want to pay the price of change is folly.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 29th, 2006 at 2:51 pm 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.