Addiction can destroy lives and divide families. It’s a disease that affects the brain – one that makes you chase after the next fix or next bottle, regardless of your obligations to work or school, your loved ones, or the risk to your safety and health. Your compulsion compels you to do whatever you can, as long as you can, to satisfy your need for drugs or drink. Eventually, it compromises even your will. Long-term drug abuse, especially, changes the way your brain works.
How Addictions are Born
Consider how muscle memory works. You do something often enough, you train your muscles to move in that way. That’s how athletes go beyond the norm, perform above the average, and achieve seemingly impossible feats of daring. That’s similar to how addiction works. When you take in drugs or alcohol often enough, you’re training your body to get used to both. You won’t even notice it a few times. But gradually, you’ll start wanting these more often. You won’t be able to help yourself. That’s because your body has already learned to defy and depend on the drug.
Fighting Back
The best way to fight back is to accept it. Recognize the signs that you’re falling into a drug or alcohol addiction that you’ll need to change. When you do, you can take it one day at a time. No need to rush. There are plenty of recovery centers in Malibu that you can choose from. Make sure to check the following:
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Program accreditation and licensing, says HelpGuide. States often have different laws regarding what treatments are permissible and not so find out if your state has a special condition or term that affects treatments available to you. This is also the best time for you to ask about the facility’s staff and their qualifications.
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Success rate of treatment program. Past success can be an indication of how well a facility is run and how spot-on their treatment programs are. That’s all good news. But keep in mind that treatments depend a lot on personal factors so what might work very exceptionally well for someone else might just have a marginal effect on you.
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Aftercare services. This helps keep a relapse from happening. Relapses can undermine years of work in a single sip or alcohol or hit of a drug. With support from family and friends, as well as aftercare services, you can stop relapse from destroying all your hard-won progress.
Knowing these can help you decide which recovery center to pick. Choose wisely!
Serenity Malibu offers addiction treatment services. Let us help you with your recovery. Get in touch with us today.
