Pain Motivates Desire for Recovery

The following article was written by Addiction Recovery expert Bill Urell.

Pain As A Motivator For Addiction Recovery

The true motivator for virtually every alcoholic and drug addict that I know [has] entered recovery has been pain.

The question that I unfailingly ask every patient I work with is what got you into treatment? Why now? Why not a year ago, why not a year from now?
The answer is, while they vary somewhat in content all have a common theme in as the pain of using drugs and alcohol became too great. The irony is a lot of people use drugs and alcohol to alleviate pain, be it emotional or physical. For many, it gets to the point where this stuff just doesn’t work anymore. And then we’re left with a situation where continued drug and alcohol use is necessary to achieve just marginal functionality, just to get out of bed. Never mind getting high.

The ‘nowness’ of entering treatment is often a crisis that happens, upfront and personal. A narrow escape from a car accident, a significant other walking out, jail time, a hospital visit, a role the types of crisis that can motivate one to seek treatment. I have never yet met an addict or alcoholic said they entered treatment because they read an article and just learned that it was bad for them.

While in upfront and personal crisis can be a motivator for a large portion people who seek treatment is not so for everyone. The other side of the coin is a number of people just get “sick and tired of being sick and tired”. They get to a point of mental, moral, and emotional exhaustion and there comes a point where they just feel they cannot go on something has to change. Arriving at this point is not easy because a typical alcoholic or addict will try to change everything in their lives around them for changing the use of the substance. So arriving at this type of motivation as a desperate last gasp for life. Many people at this point have said I wanted to kill myself but I couldn’t go through with it. The misery at that point can be motivating.

One thing I firmly believe in is that it really does take very strong motivations to begin the road to long-term addiction recovery.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 18th, 2010 at 2:03 am and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.