Fear of Soberiety

Posted April 17, 2008

Close your eyes. Now imagine you have had a really bad day. Not just a bad day at work but I mean like you caught your spouse cheating on you, or a death of someone really close to you. You need someone too talk to, someone that you have known for along time and you can really confide in. You call your best friends and they don’t answer. You slowly make your way to their house and the car is in the driveway but no one answers the door. You walk away thinking my life is falling apart and I do not even have a friend to talk to or just sit with for a while. You go home and sit in your house alone, beaten, with no one to talk to just you and the four walls closing in around you.

When an addict goes into treatment they will make up every excuse you can imagine in order to leave or even get kicked out- one of the main reasons for this is fear. Fear that their best friend (drugs and Alcohol) will not be there to support them when they complete the program. Fear of burying themselves they are thinking I will never go back to my life, I am burying the old me. They will even go though a grieving process of mourning the lose of their old life. They are sad and scared and angry they need to self medicate to make them selfs feel better. They cannot see they need to learn a different way to cope with life, the life they have been living is the only life they know.

This may seem strange to people that have never walked in an addicts shoes, but when I finally recieved the help I needed to end a 15 year Drug and Alcohol Addiction I went through this process. At first I was scared but I was in the right Addiction-Treatment Center and over the next 3 months they help me understand why I was scared and how to live a better life then the one I left behind. I realized that I had not lost my best friend, I had lost the dead weight off my back and I could finally start to live a productive and full life.

I have been an Addiction-Treatment counselor for five years now and have seen this over and over. If you have a loved one that is in treatment and they are telling you all the reasons they need to come home you need to be strong. If tough love got them there, then you you to continue on with it. Be firm with them and do not let them manipulate their way back into your life with out the treatment they need.

Link to us!