Interventions and Drug Treatment
It's important to note too that interventions can be important psychological catalysts for successful drug treatment, especially insofar as they help to show addicts the truth about their drug problems. The drug rehab patient who gets sober is more often than not the drug rehab patient who is motivated, and who understands what's at stake in a drug rehab center. With that in mind, it's fair to say that only those rehab patients who've been made to see themselves as they really are in the course of an alcohol or drug abuse intervention can expect to achieve any kind of lasting drug recovery. In the fight against drug dependency, there's no more compelling motivator that thorough and loving honesty.
Drug treatment isn't a passive activity: It isn't enough for an addict to check into rehab and wait to get healed. On the contrary, only those addicts who play active roles in their own healing can expect to achieve any kind of meaningful sobriety…and only those addicts who've been made to see the truth as it actually is can be expected to find the courage and resolve necessary for such engagement. The addict who gets healed, in other words, is the addict who's been through an honest and supportive intervention.
And so there's no mistake: Drug treatment, like interventions themselves, is a difficult thing. Even the most loving and compassionate intervention in the world can't save an addict from the trials of addiction treatment…but interventions done right, like an alcoholic intervention , really can help rehab patients see those trials through to their conclusion. In the fight against drug abuse, an addict needs all the allies he can get. There's nothing like an intervention to show you who your real friends are.
Meaningful Substance Abuse Recovery
One final point of emphasis, in closing: An intervention only matters if it effects meaningful and long-term substance abuse recovery. Again, the purpose of an intervention is not and cannot be to shame an addict, or take him to task for his drug abuse problem; an intervention succeeds only when it leads a drug addict to seek drug treatment, and only when that drug treatment is a conduit to lasting and substantive sobriety. With so much to lose, nothing less could ever possibly cut it.
It's hard to focus on the future when someone you care about is mired in the depths of drug abuse. Indeed, the challenge for anyone conducting an intervention concerns itself mostly with hope: You've got to keep your focus trained on the prospect of a brighter tomorrow, even as today seems so impossibly broken. A successful intervention, in the end, is one that's built on faith, and on optimism. If the addict you care about is going to get better, he's got to be able to see the daylight through the gloom.
But enough about that, for now. You know what's at stake here, and you know what you need to do: You know that a family intervention is an important first step in the fight against drug addiction, and that the addict you care about can't get better without your help. Now, for your own sake and the sake of the people you love, you've got to find the strength to act. And please, don't wait. There's no time like the present to start making the future a little bit brighter.
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