How To Fight Drugs Or Alcohol Addictions When You Have A Child

Addictions can have a devastating impact on your life, especially if you have a child. It's hard enough to manage an addiction without having to manage another person's life. It's important that for you, and your child, that you kick your addiction once and for all.

It's also important that you kick your addiction the right way. If you don't overcome your addiction properly, you risk potentially relapsing and sinking back into addiction.

This article will tell you how you can fight drug or alcohol addictions when you have a child:

Recognizing Your Addiction

The first step to overcoming an addiction is to recognize that one exists. It's easy to rationalize and explain your addiction without ever accepting it for what it really is.

If you don't fully accept that you have an addiction, then you should try keeping track of drug and alcohol use, write a list of the pros and cons of quitting, ask a friend for their opinion on your substance misuse, and most importantly, consider how your substance misuse impacts the person closest to you, your child.

Coming to terms with your addiction can be a very anxious and uncertain time. Once you do come to terms with it, you will have to change a lot of things in your and your child's lives, including:

• The medication and prescription drugs that you take;

• Who you let into you and your child's lives;

• The way that you manage stress;

• What you do in your spare time.

All of these changes will ultimately benefit your recovery and keep you away from drug and alcohol addiction. Recovery doesn't happen overnight. You need to overcome your addiction one day at a time.

Treatment Options Available to You

Once you're ready to change, you can begin exploring your treatment options. Treatment for addictions varies according to the substance.

The most popular form of drug treatment is residential treatment, which involves you living at a hospital or facility, away from the influence of drugs and triggers. Some people stay in residential treatment centers for several months at a time. These centers can also, according to Shoreline Recovery Center, offer you job skills and training courses to help you integrate back into the community. Residential centers are by far the most successful types of rehabilitation centers.

However, because you have a child a live-in rehabilitation center might not be possible. Instead, you might want to try a day treatment center. They are clinics for people who still wish to live at home but want to receive support for their addiction. They can last for up to eight hours a day.

There are also sober living communities, which are similar to residential treatment. You live with other recovering users in a house or hostel. They're a great place to go if you have nowhere permanent in terms of housing. They may be incompatible with children, however.

No Treatment Works for Everybody

When you're entering into some kind of treatment for your addictions, it's important to bear in mind that no treatment works for everybody. Everybody's needs are completely different. What works for one person isn't guaranteed to work for another. Each situation is unique, and thus, must be treated as such.

Addiction Impacts Your Whole Life

Another thing to remember is that addiction impacts your whole life, and so, your treatment should address other areas of your life. Your child's life, for example, will undoubtedly be impacted by your addiction in one way or another. In order to totally recover, you need to address how your addiction has impacted your child.

Commitment

When you are embarking on a path to sobriety, you need to be committed. Addiction treatment is not easy. It is long, arduous, and stressful. Generally, if you have an intense addiction, the treatment will need to match it in intensity. This is something you can only manage through commitment. If you're not committed, you'll just leave.

Mental Health Issues

Drug addiction usually goes hand-in-hand with mental health issues. If you're seeking addiction treatment, you must equally address your mental health issues. The best way to overcome your addiction is to seek treatment for your mental health from the same people you are seeking addiction treatment from.

Talk to Your Family

Your family's there for a reason. When you are seeking treatment for your addiction, try not to go at it alone, especially when you have a child. During the hardest parts of your addiction, you might want to consider taking your child to live with your parents. If you do not have family, then you could potentially ask any close friends.

Breaking Your Network

It's important, once recovered, that you break your social network. As human beings, we tend to surround ourselves with people who enjoy the same things as us. As an addict, there's a strong chance that your friends are all addicts too. It's crucial to your recovery that you break your network and build it again. Any friends who are addicts have to go until they have recovered. They can be very dangerous to have around and can easily lure you back into addiction.

Coping with Stress

If you cannot cope with stress, you're more at risk of relapse. After you have resolved your addiction and you are in recovery, you need to begin learning to cope with stress.

In the past, after a long day, you would unwind with drugs and alcohol. That's impossible now. Instead of numbing your emotions, you need to address them and work through them.

After you have left treatment, the recovery center will assign you a key worker who will keep in touch and help you through the hardest part of your recovery: Going at it alone. You might also want to interact with drug workers and government-funded addiction services.

If you begin to struggle after you are fully recovered, don't hesitate to get in touch with your key worker or with a drug worker.

Dealing with any addiction can be very difficult. If you are trying to kick your addiction and live a drug or alcohol-free life, then this is the article for you. Good luck.