Often in drug and alcohol rehab programs many people want to tell their “story”. This is especially true of people who have remained sober for a good period of time. The feeling is that it is beneficial to those going through drug and alcohol rehab to hear how “others made it through”. They like to recount the depth of their despair and all the bad experiences of the past. This is followed with their particular path to sobriety, finishing along the lines of follow this example and you too will be sober like me.

There is inherently a couple of problems with “stories”. One is that over time usually the story tends to change. The bad times tend to get a little darker with each repetition. The success tends to get over dramatized as well. This is not an attempt to deceive, but more a what keeps people interested while I speak sort of thing. Instead of the truth, it becomes more of a “dramatic representation of the truth”. Also a person’s recollections of the times they were high and out of control, are distorted simply because they were high and out of control.

The other main problem with stories is they tend to over emphasize the path to sobriety of the storyteller. There are thousands of ways to sobriety, and for those whom they worked, they are all valid. Storytelling tends to limit choice of techniques and skills that may be used to move past drug and alcohol addiction. Addiction needs to be dealt with in the present and in the future. You cannot beat your addiction in the past.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 20th, 2006 at 6:06 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.