Drug and alcohol addiction treatment works on a number of positive fronts: aside from directly addressing the effects of substance abuse, it allows for co-occurring disorders – dual diagnosis – to be treated alongside the addiction, allowing for a more well-rounded recovery. Addiction treatment provides to the addict seeking recovery the opportunity for honest self-appraisal, for judgment-free inventory to be taken so that the patient can both become aware of his flaws and, perhaps more importantly, accept them. Treatment is a means through which an individual can rehab his issues with substance abuse, his issues with his family, his issues with the world, and above all, his issues with himself.
All that being said, addiction treatment affords yet another positive change: a change of scenery.
Who You Are and What Your World Is
There’s an old Spanish saying that says, “Dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres,” which literally translated means, “Tell me with whom you walk, and I will tell you who you are.” It is a way for often overbearing and overprotective parents to impress upon their children that they are not islands unto themselves, that they are the world around them. It is a simple yet effective way to deliver a profound message, one that will initially fall on confused ears; it is a seed that will sprout with the passage of time and the accumulation of experience.
Those overbearing parents, those parents to us all, they – through their years, their missteps, their broken hearts, and the weight of generations past resting upon their shoulders – carried with them an understanding that we exist symbiotically with the world: we give to it, we take from it, it gives to us, and it takes from us.
Addiction Treatment as a New Beginning
The wisdom of our parents – the virtue of their advice – may be a little too simplistic. After all, foxes flourish in the desert, ivy grows along cold and inanimate walls, and children can push themselves farther than the limitations of their parents’ support. But the notion of one’s environment – the people in one’s life, the scenery engulfing one’s view – as a precursor to one’s future actions is a powerful one, and it is of the utmost importance in treating drug and alcohol addiction.
Addiction treatment can prove to be that fresh start – that new beginning – allowing for positive thinking, for positive choices, for positive influences. Whether through support groups or a drug and alcohol treatment center, one can find a new path upon which to tread, a path providing encouragement through meaningful relationships, love, peace, serenity, and freedom from the dark corners of substance abuse and addiction.
The all-important change in scenery that drug and alcohol addiction treatment affords allows for an addict to see that a world exists beyond the baser realities of addiction, a world that makes life worth living, a world free from judgment and regret.
Ernest Hemingway – in one of his more influential works, For Whom the Bell Tolls – once wrote, “The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.” Mr. Hemingway wrote of the promise of the world, of the promise of life, of the promise of truth. Addiction treatment makes clear the promise that for so long substance abuse clouded, and in the battle for sobriety, sometimes a change of scenery can go a long way.