It is easy when attending a drug and alcohol rehab center to slip into the trap of fixing everything else except what you really came there to fix.  You listen to a lecture and you know your sister needs to hear the imformation presented.  So you phone her and e-mail her and tell her how this change, or that change, would make such a huge difference in her life.

The rehab program then has a discussion about how couples or partners should communicate.  You phone your parents and tell them all the exciting ways they could change their communication style with eachother, and all the wonderful differences it would make it their realtionship.

You start to look at the rehab itself, and you see all the wonderful "improvements" you could make to the program.  You might even want to form a peer group of some sort to involve others in the quest to change all the things you see as a problem in the rehab. 

This is not the reason you went to rehab.  It is very satisfying to help other people.  It may seem like a noble gesture to want to improve the lot of the clients who follow your steps in rehab.  This is however just a deflection to keep you from working on the changes you need to work on within yourself.  Don't try to change your sister, your family, or the rehab program itself while you are there.  Just get the absolute most you can out of the program for you.  Several months after you have completed a program and with the gift of months of sobriety and practice, you can make all the suggestions you want to others or the facility you went too.  Just do the hard work first, change yourself.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 24th, 2007 at 3:41 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.