How do you deal with a loved one addicted to heroin or Oxycontin?
Answer:
Get professional help immediately! Opiates kill thousands of addicts every day and destroy the lives of countless families. Opiate addicts must have a highly-structured regiment of group, and often individual therapy, in order to achieve any success in sobriety. In many cases, medical or psychiatric care is also necessary.
It is critical to talk about his addiction. Keep the disease front and center at all times. To deny it, is to allow it to grow. It is highly recommended that you both join a support group and devise a plan for recovery and stick to it. Make it clear to the addict that you will help him if he helps himself. However, you must draw the line. If he refuses to help himself there is nothing you can do.
Do not be an enabler. Let the addict solve his own problems. Allow him the dignity to make his own mistakes. It is important that the addict experience consequences of the problems he created. If you solve the addict’s problem, you deny him dignity and reinforce his feelings of low self worth. To baby them is to bury them.
Stay positive at all times. Motivate the user to keep getting help. Do not criticize failures. Convince the user to think more positively about himself, and convince him that he can succeed. Talk about the differences in him as a user and in sobriety. Teach the addict to think through his powerful urges to the point where he hits bottom, before he acts.
Will an addict stay addicted for the rest of their lives? Are there really any successful addiction recovery solutions?Answer:
Once a person becomes an addict he or she can never return to occasional or recreational use of the drug. In almost every case, the addict must abstain from all drug and alcohol use in order to stay in recovery.
There are various stages of addiction. Normally, you don’t become physically addicted in a day, although the mental obsession can be triggered after one use. For most, addiction is a process that can take months or years. Sometimes people take steps at a time; they decrease or discontinue. Others will go on until the end. In the case of less severe forms of addiction, the addiction is a temporary disorder and treatment can help a lot. In the case of more severe addictions, the disorder has a more lasting character. In all cases, the goal of treatment is to discontinue use. More severe addictions often mean that there is a long history of use and many physical and social problems. Addiction to heroin often shows that the brain is damaged in such a way that the addict can no longer resist the impulse to use. “Addicted once, addicted forever” never means that an addiction can’t be treated or overcome. The problem is that addicts often draw that wrongful conclusion. They say, “I can’t be helped”, or “I can’t help it”. Also, the family and other people around the addict often draw this conclusion. This usually happens when the addicted person starts to use, drink or gamble again and again. This creates the feeling of dejection, which has a negative effect. It can be the reason to keep on using and not seek help.
It is very important to see how the addict and the people around him react to the relapse. Instead of being dejected, it is better to find out what you can learn from a relapse. You can determine under what circumstances the relapse happened and how you can react better to alcohol or drugs next time when you are in the same circumstances. In other words, you can get stronger from a relapse. An addict must realize that getting addicted is a process, as well as getting off of it. Breaking the habit means that there is also the possibility of a remission.