Chaz Bono is well-known in both the mainstream media and GLBTQ circles as Sonny and Cher’s transgendered child. Much has been splashed across tabloids about Chaz’s transition and Cher’s reaction, and now, Chaz is speaking up through a documentary designed to dispel myths and help those who may be considering a transition of their own.

The documentary is called Becoming Chaz, and Chaz premiered the film at Sundance this year. The movie chronicles not only Chaz’s transition from female to male but discusses his recovery from drug addiction.

Drug addiction is not uncommon among transgendered individuals, both female-to-male and male-to-female. Especially among transgendered youth, the fears of how their families, kids at school and others in their community will react to the transition can drive many to seek escape in drugs and alcohol.

When Chaz discussed his documentary and plans for a sequel, he said: “I wanted to do this because I wanted to help people. And I knew that…I could put a face on this issue that people just don’t understand because it’s a hard one to understand. I wanted to be able to change people’s hearts and minds on this.”

Gender Identification, Transition and Drug Addiction

Feeling as if you are living your life in the wrong body and unable to reconcile what you see in the mirror with how you identify yourself is almost inexplicable to anyone who doesn’t experience it. Trying to help friends and family understand what is happening leads to feelings of isolation, confusion, guilt, depression and fear – all of which can ultimately lead to drug abuse and addiction for teens and adults, no matter what the cause.

Fighting Drug Addiction in the Transgender Community

Just like any other situation that leads to drug addiction, early identification is key. Discerning the difference between recreational abuse and an addiction that requires drug and alcohol addiction treatment can be difficult when it’s your life or the life of someone you are close to, but it’s essential to getting the necessary help. Enrolling in treatment sooner rather than later can have a big impact on the outcome of that treatment. The earlier you get the help you need, the more effective the treatment and the longer most will be able to sustain abstinence in recovery. 

Find Help for Drug Addiction

If you or someone you love is living with drug and/ or alcohol addiction, help is only a phone call away. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you come back from addiction and create a life for yourself in recovery.

Women need the friendship of other women to sustain them through the bad times and help them celebrate the good times. Friendships are said to increase longevity, happiness, and quality of life – and isn’t recovery devoted to all those things? But what do you do when your girl friends do nothing but cause you pain and drama? How do you find positive friendships in recovery that will support you as work toward a balanced life without drugs and alcohol?

The Problem with Girl Friends in Recovery

If you haven’t been there, you know someone who has: girls who are “frenemies,” always talking about each other behind each other’s backs until something gets back to someone else and suddenly the fur is flying. Women who are in recovery have the same problem: sleeping with each other’s partners, back stabbing each other at work, or just plain being mean out of feelings of insecurity or jealousy. Just because you meet someone in recovery who purports to have the same goals of finding a healthy balance in their lives without drugs and alcohol, it doesn’t mean that they are going to be a good friend for the long haul.

Other issues arise with women who you befriended before or during your addiction. If your friend is still using, it can be a problem for you, even if she just drinks recreationally. You are trying to build a new life that doesn’t include going out to bars and clubs, and if your friend is still spending her time this way, it can mean problems for your friendship with her.

The Benefit of Girl Friends in Recovery

Sometimes, though, you have girl friends who have known you your entire life. They loved you before you developed an addiction, they hung out with you during your addiction – they may even have been at your intervention. And now that you’re out of alcohol and drug rehab, they are still there to support you. There’s nothing like it.

Then there are the women that you meet during drug and alcohol addiction treatment. These women have been through what you’re going through, and they want to give support as much as they need you as a positive influence in their lives. Some of the women you meet in drug rehab will provide friendships that will last you the rest of your life.

Seeking Out Positive Friendships in Recovery

If you don’t have friends that you wish to keep up with from before your time in addiction treatment or if the women you met during drug rehab have all relapsed, then you can seek out positive friendships in recovery. Group therapy, support groups and 12-step meetings are all great places to meet likeminded women who will support your sobriety, but you can also meet new people in the community as well: at church, taking classes at the community college, at work. Take a moment to make a friendly comment to your neighbor or co-worker. Sometimes all it takes is a few words to start a friendship that lasts a lifetime.

Yes, this is a true story about desperation and drug addiction. Yes, this is one more crazy story for this guy and his pal to share at their future NA meetings. It seems that, in the never ending quest to get more drugs – or more money to pay for more drugs – a pair of guys in Netanya decided that it would be a good idea to steal adult diapers designed for the elderly and sell them. Both were arrested recently and one of the suspects put the cherry on top of the story when he admitted that the person they were stealing the adult diapers from was… Grandma.

What You Will Do to Support Your Drug Addiction

Not one person who has lived through drug addiction comes out of the experience without a tale or two of seriously bad choices made in the name of getting money or getting drugs. Drug addiction takes everything from you, including your common sense, and while it may be funny to read about addicts hocking adult diapers for drugs, it’s also crushingly sad. The desperate acts and terrible judgment that characterize drug addiction can lead to irreversible consequences. Though, in this case, the grandmother will not likely become another victim of diaper theft, she certainly will have to struggle with watching her grandson go to jail. Other addicts have done far worse for far less – all in the name of supporting their drug addiction.

What You Will Do to Support Your Drug Addiction Recovery

To support drug addiction, addicts will hurt those who care about them most, destroy their family’s finances, steal from people alive and dead, lie, abandon their children, sleep with people for money, and come back around to do it again if given the opportunity. Serious, drastic, desperate, with a “by any means necessary” approach – that same fire should apply when you begin to build yourself back up during recovery. Though there may be guilt from the actions you chose before you went into drug rehab, it’s essential that you learn how to let that guilt go and funnel that energy instead into creating a new and positive life for yourself that pursues recovery as vehemently as you once pursued drugs.

Getting the Addiction Treatment Help You Need to Fight Drug Addiction

Choosing a drug and alcohol treatment program that can provide you with the psychological care you need to work through the issues that come up for you during drug addiction recovery due to your addiction as well as the traumas and co-occurring disorders that may have spurred the addiction in the first place is essential. With your therapeutic team, in personal therapy and in group sessions, you can talk about what you’ve been through and come up with a way to make amends if possible and develop a plan for avoiding those choices in the future by preventing relapse.

If you would like to begin treatment at a drug and alcohol rehab facility dedicated to helping women heal from addiction, contact us today.

Studies have shown that those in critical condition who have loved ones praying for them tend to heal more quickly and more completely. Prayer is powerful. It can be a healing force in the person praying and in those who are the subject of those prayers. But can prayer fight drug addiction? Can the healing powers of prayer be applied to drug addiction? Will cocaine release its hold on its victim? Will alcoholism evaporate in the face of prayer?

Personal Prayer and the Struggle for Balance

Many who family members of addicts and women in recovery find that prayer offers a balance to their lives. Taking a moment to pray before going to bed can help them unwind and sleep better. Praying before starting the day has the same benefit of quieting mind offered by meditation. Pulling back from stressful or angering situations to breathe a prayer and give the issue to God has helped thousands avoid relapse. And there are a number of mothers, wives, and sisters of addicts and alcoholics who feel quite sure that their dedicated prayer helped their loved one to find a drug rehab, complete the program successfully and remain clean and sober.

Prayer as a Battle Tactic in the War on Drug Addiction

In some communities, church members and pastors are fighting back against the drug addiction that they see hurting not only the addicts but the family members of those addicts. To them, having faith in God means that asking God for assistance with the problem is a natural next step. Rather than praying alone, some community members are banding together to pray en force.

In Lancaster in Fairfield County, Pastor Tom Alexander of Fairfield Christian Church did just that: he and other local religious leaders joined together with church members and other community groups like Prevention Works for a Drug Free Fairfield County to pray against the rising issues of heroin addiction and prescription drug addiction in their town.

Says Pastor Alexander: “A lot of the pastors in the area have noticed how the community has done a great job of working together with the (Fairfield County) Opiate Task Force and other groups and it just occurred to us that we ought to get together and pray.”

Backing up Prayer with Action: Choosing Drug Addiction Treatment

Prayer is thought, and though thought is powerful, it is not enough on its own to heal a chronic disorder like addiction. Medical detox, ongoing medical care and follow-up, addiction counseling, personal therapy, the support of other addicts, group counseling, sober living – these things add up to a successful battle against the disease. Prayer may help your loved one to choose drug addiction treatment but an intervention can go a long way, too. Prayer may sustain you during drug rehab and recovery. But action on the part of the addict and dedication to the ongoing progress of their growth in recovery is the best way for an addict or alcoholic to get – and stay – clean and sober.

Call us today if you would like to take action and enroll in our drug and alcohol addiction treatment program for women here at The Orchid.

Drug addiction recovery is going to bring with it a lot of incredible new opportunities and changes – but it’s also going to bring disappointments and setbacks that you will be painfully sober for. Both good times and bad times are to be expected. No matter how cheerful or positive you are, no one has a perfect day every day. The important thing is to give yourself permission to have bad days and to have a plan for how to deal with upsets so that you don’t relapse – and if you do relapse, to keep it as short and insignificant as possible.

Drug Addiction Recovery: Celebrate the Little Things

The little victories in recovery can be simple things like just barely catching the bus, coming into a movie just after the previews but before the first scene, an unexpected phone call from an old friend or a word of encouragement from someone you respect or admire. They can also be huge – every day you don’t drink or get loaded, especially the days when you’re stressed out, depressed, or angry. Avoiding relapse when you want to get high is something worth celebrating. There’s something to be said for celebrating sober “birthdays” and giving yourself something you’ve been wanting: a nice dinner out, a massage, a day off from work, a morning to sleep-in. Treating yourself will give you a little boost that will keep you going until the next time you could use a little celebration of you.

Drug Addiction Recovery: What to Do With the Other Stuff

Celebrating the good stuff, that’s easy. But what do you do with those less than stellar days when you feel like getting loaded – or worse, actually do slip? You get through them. Just like the “pink cloud” days when you feel like nothing will ever knock you off your happy pedestal pass, so too will the ones that you feel will never end. It’s an important concept: “this, too, shall pass.” And it’s a good one to remember when you’re at the bottom of a bad day and considering relapse.

Drug Addiction Recovery: Have a Plan

While the power of positive thinking is a great place to start, the best way to handle the rough spots in treatment is to have a plan. Because bad days will happen, knowing in advance how you will handle it will let you avoid that lost and angry feeling that precedes drug relapse. First, have phone numbers for three people you can call. If you’re feeling stressed out and on the verge of a slip, calling someone who is willing to talk you through it is your best option. If you can meet them, even better. Getting a cup of coffee or meeting at your favorite restaurant or park will give you something to do as you wait until the negative feelings pass.

Your Drug Addiction Recovery

If you have not yet enrolled in drug addiction treatment, contact us at the Orchid Recovery Center today. We help women create a new life in recovery. Call now.