Getting yourself or a loved one to be willing to accept help, make an active change, and enter treatment takes immense effort and persistence. One may think that after treatment is completed, the addiction should be resolved, poof! This thought is immensely incorrect. Addiction is a disease that does not go away with any duration of sobriety. Sobriety must be maintained every moment of every day.
Regardless of efforts and intention to maintain sobriety, if the mind and body are not fully unearthed of co-occurring disorders or conditions, relapse can be inevitable. For many individuals suffering from addiction, relapse is a meaningful step in their journey to lifelong sobriety. Rather than low integrity, selfishness, lack of self-control, or other things that those observing a relapse may identify as a cause, a relapse can be a symptom of a problem that was left unaddressed in addiction treatment. Relapse can signify that your work excavating the cause of your addictive tendencies is incomplete.
Why Do I Keep Relapsing?
A cut to the skin naturally heals fairly quickly. However, if the cut contains a shard of broken glass, it may halt the healing process or even make it impossible and lead to infection. In this metaphor, the cut can represent addiction, and the shard of broken glass can represent a mental health condition, such as post-traumatic stress disorder. With PTSD, dysfunctionally stored memories can act as shards of broken glass in a wound, disabling individuals from attaining long-term healing.
To prevent infection with a cut to the skin, the cut must be fully cleansed of all contaminants. Even if the skin heals, the wound will persist if there is still a shard of glass under the healed skin. This is the same for addiction and mental health treatment. One may detox from a substance, gain coping and relapse prevention tools, and immerse oneself in a sober community. However, if they still suffer from an unaddressed co-occurring disorder, such as PTSD, there may still be a contaminant in their newly healed wound, and relapse may be festering under the surface.
How To Prevent Relapse
Most inpatient rehabilitation stays range from 30 to 90 days in treatment. Although many modalities of treatment are important steps in the healing process, it is vital that a fast-acting treatment be utilized due to the short time allocated to address a lifetime of trauma and causes for addictions.
Classic forms of exposure therapies involve patients recalling memories in a safe space repeatedly to diminish trauma and avoidance of the memory, along with situations that may trigger it. While highly effective, the talk therapy route can take years and years to resolve trauma and gain a new perspective.
Classic exposure therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy are excellent treatment modalities. These modalities of therapy are evidence based and proven effective. In addition, with such short stays in treatment and long lifetimes of trauma to be addressed, modalities such as CBT and exposure therapy make excellent courses of treatment for the long-term prevention of relapse after addiction treatment.
To maximize the productivity of the brief stay in treatment, EMDR therapy is used as a fast-acting treatment for a wide range of mental health conditions, including depression, panic, phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and dissociative disorders, eating disorders, some personality disorders, and PTSD. Many studies have proven that EMDR therapy allows people the benefits of psychotherapy that once took years to make an impact.
How Does Midas House Rehab Prevent Relapse
Occasionally referred to as an “emotional surgery,” EMDR is a rapid and long-lasting treatment. Like any physical surgery, preparations must be made to ensure treatment success. To achieve readiness for the “emotional surgery” of EMDR, clinicians utilize visualizations and imagery to help develop enlightened qualities. At Midas House, EMDR is utilized in unison with other evidence-based therapy modalities.
To benefit from EMDR, patients must be able to endure emotional discomfort. Therefore, to prevent clients from shutting down emotionally or becoming too overwhelmed by feelings, other modalities of therapy are utilized in unison.
Midas House empowers clients to gain the emotional and mental strength to call on cognitive and emotional resources to reprocess their memories successfully.
EMDR sheds light on the darkest parts of a client’s past, present, and future. This is hard work that can be triggering at times, but it yields rapid and long-lasting results. The trauma is simply held in mind during the treatment process; full benefits can be yielded without having to discuss past trauma in great detail, like with other modalities of therapy.
At Midas House, relapse is prevented by maximizing the progress that can be made in the 30, 60, or 90-day inpatient treatment duration. Clients are provided with ample preparation to ensure they can endure the growing pains necessary for them to make a breakthrough. In addition, progress is maximized by preparing clients to be as receptive as possible during the hard work they need to do to benefit from EMDR treatment as well as other modalities of therapy.
Other modalities of treatment, such as cognitive behavioral therapy and exposure therapy, are utilized as well as tools such as visualization to support clients in executing the hard work they must do in order to achieve lifelong sobriety and reduce the chances of relapse. Treatment at Midas House is comprehensive. Not only are the surface wounds created by addiction addressed, but also co-occurring mental health disorders.
