substance abuse treatment

Treating Substance Abuse

Substance abuse treatment centers are where people go to transition from a repetitive self-defeating lifestyle brought about by the emotional, spiritual and physical bondage to drugs or alcohol, to a self-fulfilling recovering lifestyle brought about by the emotional, spiritual and physical enrichment that emerges from a sound and serene recovery lifestyle.

Entering Treatment

At the beginning of recovery you may not be sure just what it is you want or expect. You may know only that you can’t stand it anymore the way it has been. You may have been so far down that that you had reached the point where all you knew was that you didn’t want to die. You may think that what you want is what almost every chemically dependent person seems to want at first—to be able to use drink or drugs “like normal people,” that is, with all the “fun” but without the horrible consequences they have had for you.

You may believe that once you’ve become abstinence for any length of time at all, you’ll be “cured”; that just stopping will make it possible to stop forever, without any trouble. Or perhaps you’ve quit already—and fallen off the wagon, unable to sustain the discipline, not getting the support it takes to stay clean and sober. Maybe you think sober is for other people. Maybe you never understood what recovery would mean in the first place. Going it alone and going cold turkey doesn’t work for most people, but how could you know if you’ve placed yourself in virtual solitary confinement with your addiction?

Addiction treatment is the best way to understand why you abused substances in the first place, and then continue treatment with therapy to work on those reasons.

That’s where Royal Life Centers comes in. We will guide you through recovery from start to finish, starting with abstinence and ending with true recovery—a new life that will be really worth living.

Real recovery is not merely abstinence. This concept is difficult for many people, especially those in the early stages of treatment, really to understand. After all, drinking and drug taking were the focal point of their lives before treatment, so it’s only natural that they might think of not drinking, not using drugs, and not lighting up a joint as the definition of recovery. But not using drugs is just abstinence, and although it’s crucial part of recovery it’s not enough. We like to tell our patients that: Abstinence is “I can’t,” but recovery is “I can.” You can live without drugs or drinking, you can lead a life filled with personal growth, freedom, and surprisingly powerful pleasures.

The truth is, abstinence, giving up alcohol or drugs entirely, is not recovery, although it’s the absolutely necessary first step.

Abstinence alone should never be the final goal. Treatment will teach you the difference between abstinence and a life that is happy, healthy, full and meaningful in sobriety. A lifetime of recovery tormented by constant urges for a line of powder or a joint or that after-work drink—what the experts call “white-knuckle sobriety”—will almost always fail. It’s like gritting your teeth and just barely hanging on. It’s nothing like as bad as being an alcoholic or drug abuser, but it’s not great.

Real recovery is great.

The Zone

The idea—and it is achievable—is to reach that point of personal development and integration that could be compared to what athletes call “finding the zone” or psychophysicists call “losing all sense of time-space geometry,” or for most others when one’s thoughts are so focused that they pass their very own home after a hard day’s night.

The zone, black-hole, wormhole, eye-of-the tiger, rabbit-hole, highly inner disciplined meditation, or being “One” with the Universe is a state in which practicing participants suddenly feel that their performance is inspired and effortless, as if they were not concentrating on their actions at all but the actions perform themselves—and at a higher level than they had ever before achieved.

The zone is that point where one has mastered the skills or techniques (in your case, the techniques of abstinence, of good problem solving) of daily living without drugs—where the techniques have become a part of you; where you have become part of the techniques; not something you do but something you are.

You no longer have to think about staying sober, you just are.

The zone is where something indefinable within yourself takes over the conscious efforts, bringing mastery with it.

The Transformation

Substance abuse treatment will teach you the difference between abstinence—just quitting—and recovery, and why recovery make so much real sense.

This is very close to the way our recovering alcoholic or drug-abusing patients describe their feelings. The truth is, they actually tell us they are “grateful” for having had their illness, because without it, they don’t believe they ever would have achieved the personal transformation they have undergone.