Addicts expect a lot of themselves. Society doesn’t talk about that a lot. There is this perception that addicts are chronic lazy bums and that they are not putting any effort into anything. But that is untrue. For an addict, almost every day is a fight, and almost every day they lose.
The fight is the tension between knowing that their addiction is destroying them and the loss is submitting to that addiction anyways. But let us take a moment to appreciate the “almost” in that sentence. Because even if an addict loses that fight every day in a row for years, all they have to do is win just once in order to be on a path to never being defeated again.
But you can’t get there if you think of yourself as lazy. In fact, you can’t get there if you think of yourself in any simple, one-word term of dismissal. Every addict is a person, and people are complicated. And that means they oftentimes need a treatment plan customized to their needs.
Let’s talk about some of the reasons why a customized treatment plan is necessary.
Table of Contents
The best place to start is as broad as possible in order to get the obvious stuff out of the way first. To begin with, your schedule is unique. Your ability to transport yourself, your location relative to a treatment center, your work hours, and how hard your job is, are unique.
If someone came to you with a plan for conquering addiction and it did not respect those things, then it would not be a plan at all. No one can be expected to uproot their entire life to get clean. Doing so would create more stress than it would dispel.
On a slightly less obvious level, your addiction is unique too. To some people, this is obvious, but most people with addictions go around thinking that they experience the same addiction everyone else does. This is simply not possible. Some people get addicted faster than others, while other people feel cravings more intensely.
Worst of all, there is no governing reason as to why this happens. That means it is hard to predict. The only way to treat it is to respond to your addiction uniquely.
This is another one that everyone knows, but they act like it isn’t true. The world is so large that it has made the idea of the “average person” far too common. The result is the expectation that if, for instance, you are tired when tiredness isn’t prescribed, then you are in the wrong.
One of the most common components of a treatment plan is exercise. But what kind of exercise you do and how much you do will be catered to your unique level of physical fitness.
When imagining their treatment plan, many addicts will completely forget about the mental and emotional burden of fighting addiction. Well, it’s not exactly that they will forget about it—rather, they will take it for granted. But everyone dealing with addiction needs therapy to help them.
But there is no one-size-fits-all therapy. Make sure your therapy is in a format and a style you are comfortable with.
Just like how addiction affects different bodies in different ways, everyone gets stressed out by different things. And that means that everyone has to watch out for different stress triggers that cause them to have cravings. Your treatment should focus on recognizing those triggers.
If you have only been dealing with addiction for a few months, then your withdrawal and medical treatment during recovery will be far easier to manage compared to someone who has been dealing with it for years. And if you have been dealing with it for years, then you know to expect the worst. A treatment plan should be flexible to account for both possibilities.
This is critical, as a treatment plan that does not offer the medical care you need can be deadly.
Whether it is the state of your room or the area you live in, your addiction will have a huge impact on what your environment looks like. It could affect all of those things or just one of them. A good treatment plan considers how your environment encourages your addiction. Sometimes that means a plan will require you to change one or all of those.
Not everyone wants to admit it, but most addicts have a friend that helped them get addicted. The word “helped” is used for lack of a better way of describing it because sometimes that “help” means someone who encourages the addict to be social, while other times it is someone that stresses the addict out. In both cases, that person lends pressure on the addict’s addiction.
A treatment plan should have a response for this. Whether it means learning how to say no, learning how to stand up for oneself, or just learning to walk away.
If every request you made to your doctor had to be in writing, would you be able to handle your treatment plan? What if you had to speak every request? What if it was in front of a group? In-person? Over the phone? There are lots of different ways of communicating, and not all of them are the best for everyone. A good plan considers how the addict can best communicate.
So much of addiction recovery is focused outward that it can be easy to forget that the journey starts inwards. A customized treatment plan is ideal for a lot of reasons, but this is perhaps the best: Some people are ready to dive into the deep end of recovery. Others are not.
And biting off more than you can chew is one of the fastest ways to relapse.
The world tries to standardize everything to make the development of products as easy as possible. But no one lives life in what is “average,” nor does anyone conquer addiction in an “average” way. So, come visit us if you want an idea of what a custom treatment plan looks like for you: https://newwatersrecovery.com/
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