What about the drug and alcohol rehab center itself? What should it’s goals ultimately be? My personal opinion is that a rehab might want to consider the goal of zero/zero. By the first zero I mean a rehab center would have zero tolerance to alcohol or drug possession and use, as well as zero tolerance of violence or sexual behavior. Zero tolerance implies you are removed from the rehab center for violation of these rules. No suspensions or extra duties as these are the core safety boundaries required for clients to feel safe.

At the same moment the next zero implies no clients are actually removed. By this I mean the policies and procedures are so tight, so clear and intrusive, that no one actually gets removed from the center. People are coached and helped before they use or cross any lines. Is the really possible? Most likely in today’s world, not. Good reliable fast drug testing has really helped. High tech security systems are another major help. Just because a goal may be impossible to achieve at the present doesn’t mean it is not a worthy goal. Most worthy goals are not really achievable when first imbarked upon. You may think a Goal for a rehab center should be about how many clients stay sober when leaving. This is a valid statistic and an important one. However, if a rehab was truly zero/zero and the clients stayed for 90 days, the results would be impressive.

Sometimes in alcohol and drug rehab, clients get downright frustrated when you talk about their purpose in life. Many times I have heard, who cares about my purpose? I just want to stop using drugs and screwing up my life. For the first few weeks to a month, that is the purpose of their life. Soon though, if someone is to stay sober they have to make the switch from a negative goal to a positive goal. If your only goals are NOT to do something, it is a very difficult road. You are always focused on depriving your self.

If you have positive goals which you are striving to achieve something, it is easier and a lot more fun. Fun is sometimes a commodity that is in low supply in a drug rehab center. We need to ad it wherever we can. A person’s purpose in life may be found in the common ground in the answers of three questions. Healthy addiction is found in this common ground as well.

What are you passionate about?

What talents or skills do you have that you can get paid for?

The people in the world who answer the same thing to these three questions are truly the most blessed. At drug rehab why not start down the road of aligning all three? What better time to replace poor values and goals with great ones then when you are taking the time to refocus your life. Drug rehab is about change, and drug rehab is about these three questions.

In drug and alcohol rehab one of the most difficult things to do is predict outcome. Being able to objectively say after completing a drug addiction program who is going to stay sober and who is going to slip. The data seems to suggest that even the most skilled of counselors have a poor ability to guess who is going to move past their addiction. That is why leangth of stay is so critical to success. It is one of the few controlables we have on outcome. The longer you stay at a rehab towards the three month target, the better chances of sobriety.

There are things we can see however, in clients that do make the change to a better life. Someone who during their stay at a alcohol or drug rehab center finds something bigger in their life, than their own problems, seems to more often find the key to staying clean. Having a larger purpose in their life makes the difference. During rehab if someone can truly connect with something, they want far more than their drug of choice is the key. Building something of value or leaving a legacy in your life is what it is all about.

Again it boils down to spending enough time in the safety of a rehab center to start to believe you can make a difference. You can’t get through the mental cloudiness of withdrawl, learn new skills in managing cues, commmunication, relationships, goal setting, and suddenly find your purpose in life, in 30 days. Even for the most motivated of clients that seems a rather tall order. When you are going to rehab, a foundation is being built to become a person of high character, a person of high standards. Take the time to build it well. Then take the time to find the purpose that will allow you to make a difference in life, and keep you sober.

Our drug and alcohol rehab site mainly deals with adults. We have many listings in our directory for rehab centers for kids, however most of the infomation I discuss here is for clients over 18 years of age. Lot’s of the information is useful for people under 18 if you are considering rehab for their addiction, though it is very clear that teens and the very young adults do present a unique set of problems. If you are dealing with a child or teen that has an addiction you need all the resources and help you can lay you hands on.

Because kids and teens don’t have the level of maturity of adults their level of impulsivity is even higher than for addicted adults. This complicates rehab and treatment. The same is true for the ability to judge the consequences of their actions. In adults with drug and alcohol addiction this is always impaired. In kids it is usually non-existant. Kids are also much more vulnerable than adults with addiction problems. Kids on the street are subject to many, many levels of abuse.

Information is always king when you have decisions to make. Understanding what to do is often half of the battle. The National Institue on Drug Abuse has a really great site. Lot’s of unbiased information. It is for drug and alcohol problems for kids and adults. The section for teens though is very large and informative. The beautiful thing about the internet is that it conatins the answers to most of out questions. The tough thing is sometimes it’s not that easy to find the best sites. This is one of the best sites, in my mind. Click here to check it out.

While you are at drug and alcohol rehab you will not solve all your problems. The main focus of rehab is to change the behaviors that are endangering your future. When you stop using drugs and alcohol you can deal with the other things as they arise. If you unable to stop, you may not get the chance to solve the other issues. Obviously in rehab you have counselors to guide and assist you. You also have the other clients to help. The program will help. Another area is “self-help”. Books or programs designed to be used by yourself. They all can help.

Sometimes it is easier to be totally truthful will a self-help program. At least in the beginning there may be things you are just not comfortable discussing with someone. A great little resource that is availble on line is Psychological self-help by Clayton E. Tucker-Ladd. It’s Free and is really quite extensive. It is a nice adjuct to any drug rehab program. Click here to check it out. It’s really useful after you leave as well.

We seem to be getting more and more questions about clients coming into drug rehab on buprenorphine, and then wanting to taper off. Some are starting to feel this is a superior drug to methadone to stabilize someone and to deal with heroin or other opiate addiction. Time will tell for sure but any new treatment aid in addiction is more than welcome.

The key to a sucessful taper is to be stable before going to a rehab center. Drug and alcohol rehab is expensive and to be most cost effective you want to deal with as many medical issues as you can before you enter. Even if it as a facility that does both detox and rehab, the more than is dealt with before you enter, the more you will be able to listen to and follow the program.

Obviously then you will require a physician with experience in this drug before you enter drug rehab in most instances. As it is common for many physicians not to be able to prescribe this it can be frustrating trying to find one. Thankfully there is a locator service available on the internet. It is within the government’s Samhsa site. Here’s the link for Buprenorphine Physicians. If this is a route you are considering along your path to sobriety it may be a good place to start to look.

When someone is in an alcohol and drug rehab center at times it may seem like the whole family is involved. Honestly for many clients, all the siblings and parents pull together, to do the arranging and financial commitments necessary for it to happen. It always amazes me the length people will go to help another person. Doesn’t matter how many “bad” stories are on the news about human beings, the are far, far more stories of courage and kindness out there, they however don’t make the news.

Sometimes it is hard to know exactly what to do to support someone in rehab. When do you pull back and let the person deal with reality or fail on their own? One suggestion I have for people is to only deal with and comment on what you know for sure to be true. Don’t deal with what might be true, don’t deal with “there’s a slight possibility it is true”. Don’t deal with “Everybody deserves the benefit of the doubt“.

Those of us that thankfully don’t have an addiction controlling our lives routinely give others the benefit of the doubt. Giving this to people in a drug and alcohol rehab center or those with a severe addiction may be harmful and certainly won’t help them. When you are trying to change harmful behavior in yourself, you need to hold yourself to a higher standard.

Let me give you and example. Suppose you sibling is in rehab. They seem to be doing fairly well. Then you receive a call that they are being suspended or ejected from the facility for failing a drug test. You talk to your sibling and they tell you, it was because of an antidepressant or herb they took. Or is was a faulty test. Drug tests today are very reliable. Yes in some instances false positives might occur. Are you supporting your sibling by getting on the phone and demanding something is wrong with the test? Personally I don’t think so.

A better response, and one that has a greater chance of helping your brother might be something like this. Yes there is a possibility of a mistake in a drug test. However it is a very small one and not very likely. The more likely possibility is that you consumed some drugs. I am going to assume it was the second possibility. The reason being if it was the first one and you are clean, things are going in the right direction , this is just a small bump in your journey. However if it is the second and you are consuming again the is a very real chance of a relapse and harm coming to you. I don’t know how you got a positive drug test, but I do know it is a warning sign I will not ignore. I love you and will not put you future in danger on the small chance there was some sort of mistake.

People stay in an addicted lifestyle far longer than necessary because those arround them, give them the benefit of the doubt. It is harmful for them. Give them something far more important, the ability to live in the truth. The is vital during and after a program in a drug or alcohol rehab center.

Non controlled stress after drug rehab is the largest cause of relapse after completing an addiction program. Research has shown that 75 % of relapses are associated with 3 situations. They are negative emotional states, interpersonal conflict, and social pressure, (Marlatt & Gordon, 1985, 2000) Learning to cope with these 3 while you are still in a drug and alcohol rehab program will help you to decrease the chance of a slip or relapse.

With these three, and most of the others negative states in your life, it is not so much the state as your response to it that is the problem. It more simply stated is if you let the stress caused by the situation to spiral upward and escalalate, or hopefully, spiral the other direction and contol your response. A great way to accomplish this is through role play and discussing in advance how to handle these situations.

Role playing a social situation is critical to being comfortable enough to firmly say no thanks if presented with opporunities to use. If fact in would be useful to have two or three different strategies to use on each of the big three triggers to stress that lead to relaspe. By sharing and swapping ideas with the other clients at drug and alcohol rehab, it is easy to come up with multiple ways of coping. Most clients do this. Most however do not role play or practice them until they are second nature. Take a few minutes every day while you are in a program and practice. It will be time well spent.

When selecting an alcohol and drug rehab center for your addiction treatment, one thing you might want to consider is how confrontational the rehab center is? This doesn’t mean everyone is standing around yelling at eachother. What I’m bringing up is how quickly do they intercede if they think a client is not fully participating in the program or the client may be considering dangerous behavior. The purpose of going to a drug rehab center is to change the bahaviors that are destroying the progress in your life. It is not to have some counselor stroke your ego by telling you everything they like about you.

Going to rehab is not like a Tony Robbins “improve your life seminar”. Going to rehab is about saving your life. You want staff at the rehab center to be very comfortable about getting in your face about your behavior. If you could change your behavior by someone simply praising you and saying “wouldn’t it be nice if…..” you would have changed it before rehab and be spending your money on a nice tropical vacation by now. That’s not the case. You are going to rehab because your life is not working right now. You are going to rehab because you want change in those core things that are destroying it. You need counseling from assertive people who will not buy into the bullshit you may have danced with in the past. You should really consider a confrontational rehab.

In drug and alcohol rehab, or just about anything else in life, most times you don’t have to re-invent the wheel. Just about every situation we come across, someone, somewhere has already faced it or something like it. Drug addiction treatment is a lot like that. However, every once in a while you come across something which matchs so perfectly you swear it must have been wriiten for specifically addiction, even though it wasn’t.

In Dr. Henry Cloud’s book called Integrity I came across a passage about life which is just so perfect about rehab. He makes the point rather convincingly in life you have the choice of hard, easy versus easy, hard.

“Those are our only two options. We can do the hard work of facing a problem and making the necessary changes to resolve it, and then we will have the easy road of having things right. But the hard comes first and must be endured. Or we can take the easy route first and avoid fixing a problem. Then as sure as the sun comes up tomorrow, the hard life will follow. And it will last a lot longer and a lot harder than if we had chosen the hard way first.” (Cloud,Henry, Integrity, Harper Collins, 2006, p.200)

This in a nutshell and perfectly expressed, is the decision faced by everyone contemplating drug rehab or in rehab. Are you willing to pay the price of today for a better tommorow? It past days I have talked about feeding your mind a healthy diet of good information. Well you couldn’t make a better choice than this book. You also couldn’t make a better choice than choosing the “hard” today by doing the work necessary to have an “easy” tomorrow.