The reasons for a person’s life to become unmanageable are vast and many. There are many stress factors from childhood, adolescence and adulthood that contribute to an inability to cope with life. These factors include grief, trauma, abuse, relationship breakdown, reduced social skills and mental illness. These all can contribute to a self-medicating cycle called ‘addiction’.
Addiction then leads to further financial stresses, legal stresses, relationship stresses and further mental health problems. Addiction is not only chemical dependency like alcohol addiction and drug addiction; it can also be a behavioural addiction such as gambling, shopping, self-harm, extreme spontaneous behaviour, drama seeking, pornography and many others.
Most addictions are progressive and interchangeable, but it is up to the addict to decide when to seek help. Intervention can come by way of family members or, at worse, homelessness, prison and hospitalisation. Whatever it is that leads an addict to reach out for recovery; we commend them for it.
Many people have pre-existing mental illnesses diagnosed, and un-diagnosed that become self-medicated with an addiction or the addiction causes a mental illness to occur. Whichever comes first is inconsequential. We call these conditions comorbidity or dual diagnosis, where there are two conditions concurrently affecting a person. Transformations believe the treatment has to come from a holistic perspective on an evidence-based best practice model. Holistic treatment is what we provide through our signature residential recovery program.
Common barriers to asking for help
Some of the common barriers that may deter those from seeking help include:
• Feeling like no one would help or understand
• Feeling afraid, embarrassed or anxious to ask for help
• Thinking that the problem will go away by itself
• The belief that “getting help” will be too costly and time-consuming
• Believing that you will be able to cope without help
• Not knowing where to go to get help
How to help your addicted love one?
Consider a Family Intervention
These interventions facilitated by specially trained interventionists that go on a ‘search and rescue’ mission. Interventions are designed to support and empower the family to break through the addicted person’s denial to get them into treatment immediately. It is a caring, loving action that confronts the very addiction itself to rescue the person suffering. Families, friends, and love ones of the addict are trained and equipped to do a once-off meeting with the addicted person facilitated by the interventionist to save the addicts life.
Addiction mostly ends with jail, institutions and death, but it doesn’t need to be that way. We can stop the addict from reaching another potential rock bottom by saving them from themselves. Many interventions have been carried out by our team, all with incredible success. Whether the addict has gone straight into treatment or not, their drug use has never been the same, and at some point, they ultimately reach out for support. Most people respond well to interventions, take the hand reaching out to them, and agree to go into treatment straight away.
