New Year, Same You?
At the beginning of each new year, many of us resolve to live healthier. We pledge to ourselves to adopt a healthy behavior or to stop doing something we know is unhealthy. However, we know from experience that New Year’s resolutions are much easier to make than to fulfill. The reason for this is pretty simple. Unhealthy behaviors may be unhealthy, but we indulge them because of the short term rewards they provide. Binge-watching my favorite Netflix show while snacking certainly feels great, but it is not one of my behaviors that is likely to help me achieve my goal of getting more exercise.
Now, I am also a recovering alcoholic-addict and have been clean and sober for a little over three years. If I had treated my alcoholism and drug addiction with the same nonchalance that I approached my need for more exercise, I would most certainly not still be clean and sober. I made resolutions galore over the several decades I was in active addiction and not one of them became a commitment I could keep for longer than a few days or weeks at most.
Instead, I learned that I would have to make some serious changes in my life—monumental changes in how I approached everything. These alterations were not going to happen quickly or magically, and I was going to need lots of help making them.
Hired Power Can Help
Most people in active addiction are in a place similar to the one I was in before I began my recovery journey, and like me, they need help to get started on their recovery journey. For someone in active addiction, getting to a detox center or into a treatment program by one’s self is unlikely to happen. The reason for this is that an actively addicted person often sees the prospect of treatment as incredibly threatening and scary. It is much easier and more comfortable to stay in active addiction.
Connecting the actively addicted person to a Hired Power Personal Recovery Assistant, or PRA, can greatly help the person transition into recovery. The PRA can provide what Hired Power calls “Safe Passage,” which is just what it sounds like: Safe and effective help getting the client to and from treatment.
Once a client completes treatment, the PRA provides invaluable assistance by helping the client maintain a strong recovery program. Once away from the structure of a treatment facility, a recovering person can find establishing and maintaining healthy routines quite challenging. These routines include regularly attending recovery meetings; getting to and from doctor and/or therapy appointments; eating healthily and regularly; staying physically active; and sleeping regularly.
Hired Power helps the client with these daily activities by providing an invaluable “Monitoring” service. The Monitoring service is a multi-pronged approach to helping a recovering person establish and maintain a treatment plan, one in which the client becomes and stays accountable to his or her recovery. This is achieved through a “support and report” approach, in which the client’s social support network (family members, doctors, lawyers, clinicians) is provided with regular reports on the status of the client’s recovery. This service includes regular breathalyzer and/or urine drug testing as one of many crucial ways to help the client stay recovery-accountable.
For the client’s loved ones, this support and report approach often has the welcomed consequence of relieving the loved ones of the burden of being the behavior police. The parents or spouse of an actively addicted person frequently find themselves in the uncomfortable and unwelcomed role of managing and monitoring behavior. Hired Power relieves loved ones from this burden by taking on the policing role and holding the client accountable for his or her decisions. In this way, loved ones can now provide the recovering person emotional support that is free from the feeling of always having to be the “bad guy.”
Long-term recovery is possible for every actively addicted person, but it is tremendously difficult to achieve without support. Recovering people—particularly those in early recovery—are vulnerable people, chiefly because they are still very sick. Detoxifying from the substance of addiction (alcohol, drugs, destructive behaviors) is but a first step on the path to long term recovery. The psychological, physical, and spiritual consequences of active addiction are varied and profound, and they are not healed overnight.
Instead, recovery is a process that is a connected series of small and large successes and failures. Each of these is a learning experience, and collectively these experiences help to form and shape a life in recovery. Hired Power has helped thousands of clients by providing them with invaluable support and guidance as they navigate this new path and start to live a life that is marked by healthy choices and a strong sense of personal accountability.
If you and your family are in need of guidance and support, call Hired Power today. We are here to stand by you. Call: 1-800-910-9299.