It’s challenging to treat and overcome substance or alcohol abuse disorder. When you or your loved one become an alcoholic, drug and alcohol counseling must be sought. A skilled addiction counselor can root out the life stressors, deep-seated emotional traumas, adverse social factors, and other causal events. He works to guide the patient towards decision-making skills and create awareness to help him overcome addiction.
Addiction counseling comes in many different forms and a counselor may combine different therapies depending on the level of addiction of the patient. Some popular therapies for counseling addicts include cognitive behavioral therapy, motivational interviewing, and dialectical behavioral therapy, but a customized counseling treatment based on the individual psychological needs of the patient proves to be most effective for treating addiction. Some reasons why you should get addiction counseling are elaborated below.
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1. Helps Overcome Self Defeating Behaviors
Addiction can make you lose control over your behaviors. Your uncontrollable need for alcohol or substance could have made you do a lot of self-destructive things that have affected your health, your relationships, and your health. In a counseling session with your therapist, he’ll teach you how to identify your thoughts, behaviors, and habits surrounding your addiction.
With the help of cognitive-behavioral therapy, you’ll learn how to overcome and change these repetitive thoughts and compulsive behaviors and help you replace them with more constructive and healthier thoughts.
2. Helps Heal Attachment Disorders
If one hasn’t formed the basis of security and lifelong trust in the early years of his or her childhood due to attachment deficits, such as neglect, absent parents, unstable living environments, and abuse, he/she may adopt a coping mechanism to gain a sense of security.
As an adult, substance or alcohol abuse may deliver you a sense of attachment that you crave. Addiction counselors at the substance abuse treatment centers can help understand those childhood insecurities that may be driving your attachment to alcohol or drugs.
3. Provides Safe Setting For Sharing
When you sit down with an addiction counselor, you can share your fears, experiences, and frustrations in a safe and controlled and setting. Your counselor is supposed to keep your case confidential so you won’t have to be afraid of being judged.
Your counselor will not share anything with your friends, family, or employers. So, feel free to express what is troubling you. Since your relationship with your addiction counselor is professional, it will not affect your daily life. Depending on your case, your counselor may opt for group counseling, where patients can share common experiences. The counselor will facilitate the discussion and help each patient gain a deeper understanding of their addiction-related issues.
4.Helps Prevent A Relapse
Relapse is likely to occur during your recovery. Emotional stress, stress factors, social cues, and personal hardships can drive you back to the addiction. Your addiction counselor will encourage you to work towards recovery. He will also educate you on the process of recovery and offers assistance on the challenges you are facing.
He will help you understand anger, acceptance, denial, and feelings of hurt. Therefore, addiction counseling can prevent relapse by helping you learn the warning signs of a relapse, develop coping strategies to deal with stress, build a social support network, and much more.
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