We hear about cocaine and heroin all the time when talking about drug rehab.  Cocaine and crack have taken a huge toll on society.  Meth is the new rising star so the speak in the world of illicit drugs.  What about prescription drugs that get abused?  Which of those are searched about more often than the rest.  We read in the news all the time about oxycontin.  This narcotic pain medication has caused more than a few clients to enter a drug rehab center.  Interestingly though it is not even in the top five searches for legal drugs with adictive potential.  The winner in this category is Ultram or by it's other name, Tramadol.  It holds down the number one and the number two spots on the top ten list.  Interested in seeing them all?  Click here and see the top ten and the next ten that didn't quite make the list.

Drug rehab is not about removing stuff from your life.  If you just remove or take away things, you crave and want them even more.  Drug rehab is about finding things that support and work within your life better and more consistently then drugs or alcohol ever did.  Drug rehab is about adding so many wonderful and new activities to your life there is literally no room left for these negative behaviors.

No matter how poorly your life may have been when you were using drugs and alcohol, they served some purpose in your life.  They were part of the fabric and coping mechanisms you had at that time.  You have to replace them and add new coping solutions if you want a life that is more than simply counting a negative, like 43 days since I have had a drink.  Without new and better stress solutions, there will come a time when you face a new and tough situation, you will want to revert back to your old solution, drinking and drugs.  When faced with tough situations people tend to go back to their oldest and most trusted methods. 

Just taking away things in sobriety will mean your only recourse is to hang on and "white knuckle" these situations in your life.  Make drug rehab more than take away or counting negatives. Make drug rehab a chance to learn and relearn all the things you feel you need to become the best you can be.  When you leave drug rehab, you want to have a new bag full of better ideas and methods to cope in your life.  It is not about stopping drugs.  It is about starting life.

I was talking to an individual a few days ago.  They had a few concerns that had grown and were now ruining their life.  Ultimately they decided to get help.  Once they had made the decision they come to realize something which was giving them great comfort in this time of turmoil.  They were going to give their family the best Christmas present in years.  It is peace of mind.  By entering a drug rehab center before the holidays, their family could relax.  There would be no stressed out hovering, wondering if another holiday would be ruined by being intoxicated.  No door slamming and leaving in the middle of the night.  No apologies and promises of change in the morning.  It takes courage to leave at a time when everyone is getting together and celebrating family.  It takes self sacrifice to be willing to miss out on some todays to you can have a bunch of great tomorrows.  I would like to take this moment to thank all of those individuals across this country who took the better path this year.  They took action to make this Christmas a good one for their families and entered a drug rehab center before the holidays.  Merry Christmas and best wishes in the New Year!

You cannot help change "addicts".  You cannot change "junkies".   You cannot change "boozers".  All of these are labels.  A label is a tag or name we give to a set of things that look like something.  Labels are about sterotypes and assumptions.  You can however change people.  To do this however you actually have to get to know them and all of their unique abilities.  In other words you have to see them as people with a lot of value and some behaviors they want to change.  If you just see a junkie, they will feel confined by YOUR definitions.  I do not care how good your intentions are. 

Drug rehab is about first finding the real person again and then about assisting them to change.  How can you see the real person if the first thing everyone says is "Hi, I'm a alcoholic."?  Labels prevent people from seeing people.  Labels give the false impression that everything about addiction is the same and if you just do steps one through twelve, everything will be fine.  People are not labels , and every solution is not a cookbook.

I choose the word client in describing people who deal with us for a very clear reason.  It does not label them.  A client is simply someone receiving a service.  "Patients" and "Addicts" can come with some negative connotations.  In drug rehab centers we help people.  We help people find what they want and stop imposing our definitions on them. 

Some clients are really quite easy and simple about drug rehab.  They phone, they tell you about their problem, and inquire about cost of rehab.  They phone back a day or two later and tell you they are coming in.  This is a small percentage of the clients we see though.  In most cases it is a third party arranging the drug rehab.  It is a parent, brother, sister, spouse, or even a boss.  Sometimes it is even all of tose at once.  Throw in the odd lawyer and parole officer and you have a lot of concerned and stressed people trying to coordinate an event.

When you are getting a loved one in drug rehab you are not really in the best frame of mind.  You are tired and stressed.  You are worried for their health and safety.  You are trying to arrange finances. Putting it mildly your plate is full.  Add in talking to several drug rehab centers, andtrying to figure out which program will be the best choice for the money you have available.  This is a recipe for miscomunication if there ever was one.  Add into this an addicted person, consuming drugs and alcohol, probably at a higher rate than normal, because they know they are going to quit soon.  The last binge before the diet type of thing.

This recipe of stress and tension will lead to a few mistakes.  So if you are a client in a drug rehab center, and everything is not "exactly" as it was descibed to you, you may want to stop and think a bit before you accuse someone of misleading you.  Those around you in your life and the people at the rehab center are all doing the very best they can to get a safe place for you to change. They did it under tense moments.  Nobody got up one morning and said, "I'm going to trick so and so into a rehab that is not what they expected."  Everyone was trying to help, through phone calls, e-mails, faxes flights and all the other myriad of things that had to be done before you got there.  Cut poeple some slack.  They are the same people who have cut you a lot of slack in your behavior over the past few years.

There is not a single day that goes by that we don't get asked the question, "Do you know of a good drug rehab center by ________?"  You can fill in their home town.  People would like to very close to their family and friends for support. I always try to point out this may not be the best possible choice.  If it were just up to support of family and friends most people would have changed already and would not need to go to drug rehab.

Being very close to home makes it really easy to quit.  If all you have to do is jump in a cab and get a ride home from the drug rehab center, the temptation is very large to quit. I don't care how motivated you are, and how wonderful the staff is, there will be moments of doubt.  There will be also moments of euphoria where you are convinced you know it all, and are ready to leave early.  If you are at least an airplane ride away from home, you will have time to resist that temptation.  You usually cannot get a plane ride out that same day with spending a LOT of money on airfare.  Having to wait an extra day means having the time to remember why you came to drug rehab.  It gives time to reconsider you hasty decision.  When it comes to the question of where to go for drug rehab, the answer is simple.  Go at least 500 or more miles away.  Go to the other side of the country.  Leave the country.  Just do not go "down the street".  Put the odds of success on your side.

In a drug and alcohol rehab program there can be literally hundreds of things to do and change.  Many are important and a few are even more important.  What is the MOST important activity to success in a drug rehab program?  Let me explain a little bit more.  Weight loss is ceratainly talked and read about a lot.  There must be several million diets out there.  There has to be more abdominal exercisers on T.V. than just about everything else. 

Do you know what the critical activity is for weight loss?  What is the one thing that if you do has the GREATEST correlation with success?  Working out?  Cutting out fat?  No on both accounts. The single activity that apparently has the greatest relationship with long term weight loss is DAILY weigh-ins and journeling that number.

Do we even know what the critical activity for drug and alcohol rehab is?  It may be something as simple as the equivalent of the "weigh in".  What if we had daily urine testing, with documentation.  Not for the whole world to see, but you and your counselor.  Not weekly, or at random, but DAILY.  If would be much harder for a single use or lapse to turn into a binge or full blown relapse.  Daily testing could also be used at the beginning to see if drugs that stay in the system for longer periods are actually decreasing in concentration.  Like watching you weight go down so to speak. 

I am not saying this is the critical activity.  I am suggesting we still do not know what the critical activity is yet.  Drug rehab is still a best not the most precise science.  This may be a step towards derceasing that.

Addiction is a condition where one person gets it and yet everyone comes down with it.  Drug rehab is a place where the "cure" will either work for everybody, or it won't work for EVERYBODY.  I was chatting on the phone with a mom recently.  She was checking out her options.  Her grown child was in need of another stay in drug rehab.  A thirty day stay earlier this year hadn't worked as they relapsed less than a week after finishing.

I spent some time and explained 30 day programs are just not enough for a lot of people to have the time, to learn all they need to in order to make the change.  I know she was listening.  I know she cares deeply.  Still I could feel a level of anger within her.  She was angry that the previous drug rehab hadn't worked.  She could not find the faith at the moment to spend the money to try again.  I think there are moments when anger will come out from family members.  They have gone to great lengths living with the effects of addiction.  They have spent time and money trying to help someone else deal with their addiction.  It is ok to be angry once in a while.  It is ok to be angry about the bad behavior.  It is ok to be angry about the lies and deception.

Just do not let this anger stop you from acting.  Do not let this anger stop you from remembering what your ultimate goal is.  Getting angry is human, staying angry is not.  Remember to focus on the things you can control.  Remember to take care of your health.  Remember if drug addiction were truly easy to leave behind, you family member would have changed already.  Drug rehabs exist because change in this area is not easy.  It is not a sure thing.  It is also far better than doing nothing.

To have a different path in your life after you attend a drug rehab you have to change.  To change you have to take a chance.  We all get locked in to a rut sometimes.  Yet we all have the talent to do better.  You have to take a chance.  You have to be willing to do things outside of your comfort zone.  Drug rehab is a safe place to try things you would not try at home in your regular enviroment.

When you take a chance, it may not work.  However, if you do not take a chance, it will never work. Your dreams will never come true, stress will build up and you will end up self medicating yourself like the rest of the world. It is not the pain of failure that pushes over the edge, it is the pain of it being the same without the hope of change.

He's a link to a fellow who took a chance.  He risked it not working out.  A saleman with a dream to be something different.  We all have talent.  We just need more faith to se haow far it will take us.  Click here for a look at another person's dream, and what they did about it.

So many events in life are definately not fair.  They are not just, or even handed.  Addiction does not treat all people equally.  Drug rehab treatment and events are not equal either.  Some clients recover more quickly than others.  Some clients seem to put in more effort and yet have less results than other clients in drug rehab. 

You can only control what you can control.  Your effort is one.  Your beliefs are another.  Your goals and dreams are the third.  If you are true to the first two, the third will take shape in some form or another, but it may not be on your desired time schedule.  Efforts and beliefs feed on eachother.  However something wonderful happens when you combine the first two.  On some level the third, maning the outcome purely become the result.  The joy, happiness and fulfilment are found in the pursuit of a worthwhile goal.  Many times the achieving the actual goal is almost an anti-climax.

If your particular journey through addiction and rehab is riddled with hardship and seemingly unfair results, you are not alone.  Everyone pursuing worthwhile goals has detours and "relapses".  Nothing great is accomplished in a straight line.  Stop judging if something is fair or not.  Stop being purely results orientated.  Start looking at progress, growth and skill development.  Keeping working on your effort, and your belief in the value of your goal.  If the first time you went to drug rehab didn't work, go again.  Look for another opportunity to grow.  If you develop the skills of a sober person and focus on them, eventually you will be one.