Managing Substance Abuse in the Long Term

Learn more about available ways to help you in managing substance abuse in the long term: how coping mechanisms and healing programs work

Managing substance abuse in the long term involves two main strategies. These are, broadly speaking, the coping method and the deep healing method. The coping method falls more under the ideas of long term management of drug abuse. This involves helping people understand their present trigger, and helping them to cope with the experience of those triggers by developing strategies for dealing with their effects or strategies to avoid them completely. This may be the most effective way that someone with a drug addiction is able to execute managing substance abuse.

It may be very effective in keeping the person sober through vigilance, hard work, persistence and determination. Often this requires the building of an aware support system involving family and friends because the job is so hard that it requires a lot of help. The other management of drug abuse strategy, involves not only drug addiction treatment methods but deeper resolutions.

Deep healing and depth psychology approaches, in general, are less concerned with triggers and the immediate development of coping strategies and more concerned with why the tendency to abuse drugs in a destructive way arose in the first place.

The idea is that, with enough emotionally salient insight, someone can understand in such a deep level what happened to them that lead to the development of an addiction that they are able to heal those traumas and emotional pains and slowly resolve them. The effect of this is that there is no longer a need to abuse drugs.

Therapeutically, this achievement is intended to produce deep healing that makes constant vigilance, hard work, persistence and determination unnecessary to maintain a sober and healthy state of mind.

Think about it. If you are not a drug addict, and are not managing substance abuse, how hard do you have to try to stay sober? Most people without drug problems just stay sober because it seems like the best thing to do. They just do it. They don’t even think about it, and it requires no extra hard work because they are concerned with other things in life.

The ultimate goal of drug addiction treatment methods that involve depth psychology, is for a former addict to approach managing substance abuse in the same way a person who never developed one might. It just happens, and other concerns naturally take the place of drugs. The deep psychological factors that lead to their addiction have been discovered, accepted, worked through and healed so the need to address them with drugs is no longer present.

There is a big difference, psychologically and experientially, between the person who is managing substance abuse through hard work, and the person who is managing substance abuse and preventing substance abuse in a similar way that most people do.

They do it without thinking too much about it. It has become an automatic way that the person helps themselves like eating well, exercising and taking care of their important relationships. An additional rationale is, that someone who is managing substance abuse in the deep psychology sense of the phrase has extra energy because it is not being bound up in an active and effortful management of drug abuse.

This extra energy tends to go towards the development of positive and healthy activities that naturally protect against destructive drug abuse.

When considering drug addiction treatment methods it is important to know what kind of approach you feel you would be most suited for. Some people are not interested in delving deep into their dark side to find out how they really got here. Some people are not satisfied unless they reach that level of understanding.

But, it is important to recognize that at the end of the day one approach is not superior to another only more suited to this or that kind of person.

If you or a loved one needs help with abuse and/or treatment, please call the WhiteSands Treatment at (877) 855-3470. Our addiction specialists can assess your recovery needs and help you get the addiction treatment that provides the best chance for your long-term recovery.