Crystal methamphetamine is one of the most difficult drugs to fight with drug rehab treatment. The psychological withdrawal symptoms are too easily forgotten a few months after drug addiction treatment and when the urge to get high crops up again, many believe they can use “just once” without fully falling back into addiction. Unfortunately, it seldom works out that way and most who relapse end up living with crystal meth addiction within a relatively short time.

So how do you make crystal meth addiction treatment last after you return home? How can you help yourself to remain clean and sober when the “itch” to relapse hits a few months after your drug rehab graduation?

Surviving After Crystal Meth Rehab: Don’t Follow Your Emotions

The first few weeks and months after crystal meth rehab, many women feel really good. The future looks bright and they are hopeful about rekindling positive relationships in their lives. The feeling of happiness is enough to sustain them and they may or may not have anything more than this and the recent memories of methamphetamine rehab to sustain them from day to day.

Soon, however, feelings change, as feelings are wont to do. A stumbling block will arise, someone will say something inconsiderate, something you were counting on won’t quite pan out the way you had hoped and feelings turn bleak, angry or sad.

Reminding yourself that feelings are by nature a changing force and nothing to base your continued health and recovery on is essential. Reminding yourself to base your decisions on practical matters and goals and making the next right choice you can to get yourself closer to those goals is the only way to move forward.

Surviving After Crystal Meth Rehab: Building a Support System

For many, support in recovery after drug addiction treatment starts with a 12 Step program. Here you will find recovering addicts with months and years of experience in living without drugs and alcohol. You’ll find other newcomers in their first few days without their drug of choice. You will find mentors ready and willing to provide you with one on one guidance and support as you navigate your way through the pitfalls of early recovery. Many find everything they need in the meetings, the sponsorship and the literature that accompanies a 12 step program.

Others may add to this by incorporating strong friendships and family relationships. Though it is not advocated that you embark on a new romance right after rehab-many even suggest that you don’t focus on an old romance unless that person has always been clean and sober while you were using-relationships with young children, support parents or siblings, and extended family can help keep you grounded when the going gets rough. New friendships will certainly form as you continue to attend meetings, find a new job, take classes, get involved in new hobbies and little by little you’ll build a world for yourself that doesn’t include drug use.

If you’d like to get started building a life for yourself that doesn’t include crystal meth addiction, contact The Orchid today for more information about our crystal meth rehab program for women.

Willingness, honesty and open mindedness are the considered the essential tools necessary to succeed in any recovery program by most in the 12 step community. For women entering heroin addiction treatment, this holds true. But what exactly do these three things mean and what does it look like in action when a heroin addict takes those first strong steps into a new life without heroin addiction?

Heroin Rehab and Women: Willingness

Obviously, if you are over the age of 18, no one can drag you kicking and screaming into a heroin rehab program. You have to agree. You have to be willing to walk through the doors, sign the papers, and prepare for a new way of doing things. It may sound simplistic but that is exactly what heroin addiction treatment is made of: a series of simple steps in the right direction. These simple steps and decisions never stop and the first one is the willingness to conceive that there is hope for you outside of heroin.

Heroin Rehab and Women: Honesty

Honesty is an interesting characteristic of successful heroin addiction treatment for women. Most people define honesty as the simple act of not lying, but honesty in recovery means also being honest with yourself. There are lies that everyone tells themselves to help them make dealing with certain things easier. Most heroin addicts, for example, may downplay the level of their heroin addiction for years in order to make it easier for them to continue living the way they do. Even with the willingness to enter heroin rehab, they may not fully be honest with themselves about the extent of their heroin addiction. For a real shot at success in heroin rehab, it’s very important that women are not only honest with their therapists, their counselors and their doctors but with themselves and each other as well.

Heroin Rehab and Women: Open Mindedness

This is arguably one of the most difficult of the three characteristics of a successfully heroin rehab stay. Willingness will get you through the door and you have to make the decision to be honest every time you open your mouth but open mindedness, that is what happens inside your head where no one else is there to hold you accountable. Are you open to hearing what your counselors have to share? Are you open to trying out the new coping skills in your everyday interactions and thought processes? Are you open to putting in the work it will take to learn how to live a life without heroin addiction? Are you open to the possibilities that will come your way as come across new ideas, new people, new opportunities?

No matter how wonderful the idea or opportunity or person that crosses your path, if you don’t have an open mind, it won’t benefit you in the slightest.

If you think you have the willingness, honesty and open mindedness necessary to succeed in heroin rehab, contact The Orchid for more information today.

In some states, if you were a heroin addict who held up a grocery store with a toy gun like Marisol Rodriguez-Ritter of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, you might end up getting sent to drug rehab by the judge. Not so for Rodriguez-Ritter: she was sentenced to 33 to 83 months in prison.

Rodriguez-Ritter claims that she went to the criminal extremes she did because of a heroin addiction. She lost her child due to her addiction and was trying to pay the child support payments by robbing the grocery store. She tried to define herself as a victim of heroin addiction in need of help, but the DA wasn’t buying it.

Robert Eyer was the assistant district attorney assigned to Rodriguez-Ritter’s case. He says: “I’m not going to suggest that she does not have a drug addiction. But I’m going to suggest this is way more than a drug problem.”

He may be right: after obtaining a warrant, police searched the home where Rodriguez-Ritter lived with her boyfriend and found 140 bags of heroin. Hardly the stash of someone who is solely a heroin addict. More likely, Rodriguez-Ritter and/ or her boyfriend are heroin dealers and the courts don’t look too kindly upon that.

Drug Rehab or Prison?

When possession of drugs like heroin is a small enough amount to be for personal use only, the courts are more likely to prescribe drug addiction treatment as opposed to a prison stint, especially if there is one or no priors and that is the only charge. Unfortunately, when you add in a violent charge to the mix, few courts will risk putting you back out on the street without at least a short stay in jail and a probation officer to make sure that you’re staying in line.

Jail Plus Drug Rehab

More often than not, in the case of multiple drug possession charges or cases of a drug possession charge coincides with other charges, the judge will order a stay in jail or prison, depending upon the severity of the crime and the priors. But the sentence won’t end there. Rodriguez-Ritter, for example, is required to attend drug rehab while she is in prison and is further tasked with getting her GED. The hope is that while she is inside, Rodriguez-Ritter will be able to clean up her act and get a foundation for a successful recovery when she gets out of prison. Her daughter may be older by then, but if she does well inside, she likely won’t serve the full seven years and she’ll be able to show a family court judge that she is stable and dedicated to giving her daughter the life she deserves.

Drug Rehab Before the Prison Sentence

If you are living with heroin addiction, cocaine addiction, alcohol addiction and other addiction issues that are putting you in a position to commit crimes in order to maintain your habit, the best thing you can do for yourself is get the help you need before you find yourself standing in front of a judge. Women who are ready to turn their life around can find help at The Orchid. Call today for more information.

When you started using drugs, what do you remember about your emotions?  Did you really just wish you could forget about them?  Did they seem exaggerated or fuzzed out?  Chances are, that’s a key reason you started using drugs in the first place.  You didn’t want to be there inside yourself, and drugs offered you an escape.  Now that this has become your life, you know that sobriety is on your horizon.  You have no choice - you may die if you keep going like this.  You’ll need to understand that when you go through recovery, you’ll be expanding your numb feelings to more open feelings.  Are you ready?

Living With Numb Feelings

At first, it may seem like numbing your feelings will bring you relief.  Much needed relief from the reminders of your misery.  Your difficult childhood, your difficulties with relationships, your difficulties with money - whatever your problems are, they have become to much to push out of your mind.  They overwhelm you, they consume you, and they push you to the edge.  Relief?  You’ll take it however you can get it, and drugs have been the answer.

But numbing your painful feelings has a price - you numb your positive ones as well.  You lack the experience of true joy, of anticipation for a happy event, of pride in a challenging accomplishment.  You cancel those out emotions in favor of manufactured highs and lows.

You also miss out on important emotional clues that help you make decisions and judgments.  Little feelings of stress that cause you to rethink a risky choice, a small buzz of anxiety to give you energy when you face a challenge, a hint of guilt when you speak too harshly - these emotions give you valuable information about your actions.  But if you fuzz them out with drugs, you lose the opportunity to learn about yourself.

Opening Your Emotions With Courage

It takes a lot of courage to reverse your course of action once you have lived this way for a while.  You have removed yourself from the responsibility of your feelings and reactions.  But you can learn how to live with your emotions again, with patience and courage.

Courage is simply doing something while having fear about it.  It doesn’t mean waiting to take action only when you have no more fear.  By moving forward and opening up your feelings in drug rehab, you learn how to live with the uncomfortable emotions instead of hiding from them.  You learn to acknowledge them instead of blurring them.  By letting them have some freedom inside you, they actually has less power over your life.  The more you try to erase or forget them, the more destructive they can be.  They’ll pop up somewhere whether you like it or not. Better to know how to cope with them instead of trying to wipe them out.

Drug Addiction Recovery - Living With Emotions

Living with your feelings honestly can be very difficult.  You may not have faced some of these feelings for a very long time.  Ironically, once you face them and keep going forward, you can actually gain more peace in your life.  With the help of drug rehab professionals, you can learn to go from numb feelings to open feelings.

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Your loved one been told to go to drug rehab, even though day think it’s pointless.  In the end, they have been bribed and bargained with just to set foot in the drug rehab center. Will it work? Will they even stay? These are questions that float through your mind all day long. But when it comes right down to it, you need to know where the rubber hits the road. Who is really working harder during their addiction recovery, them or everyone else?

You Do Your Part In Addiction Recovery

You’ve now done an intervention, gone through some counseling, and even gone to a few Al-Anon meetings. You have a better idea of what you can do to help support your loved one through their addiction recovery. But you’ve also been hearing stories about people frustrated with their role.

The support people and family members seem to be doing their part, but the addict it’s going back to their old ways. No matter what the family does, no matter how far they bend backwards to do their part, the addict seems to resist or change their mind. How much more can they put up with?

Rubber Meets The Road In Addiction Recovery

Here is where the rubber meets the road with with addiction recovery - the big question. Who is working harder during an addict recovery? The addict or the people around them? If the answer is not be addict, you can expect relapse to be a real possibility.  While support from others is important, it will not make a person stay sober.

The addict has to make the largest effort because it is an investment in themselves. They are the ones that will be sober or not, no matter who else is around them. No one can force this on an addict. While an addict can be made to go to treatment, it’s like the horse being brought to water. You cannot make them drink, no matter how thirsty they might be.

Is Recovery Hopeless For Reluctant Drug Addicts?

All hope may not be loss, even when an addict doesn’t seem terribly motivated to stay sober at the time. If you and other family members are working harder than the addict, then recognize this reality. Do your part and be there, but stop bending over backwards. The addict may need to fall again to get the perspective they need. They may not yet see how much they need sobriety, and no amount of family activity will make up for their lack of vision.

When people with addiction are truly ready to take in the experience of drug rehab, you can be ready to take a more active role in. They will need your help to get drug rehab started again. Hopefully, it won’t take long for them to be ready to really give up their drug addiction lifestyle.

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