I’m studying addiction psychology and I’m curious what treatments you all have personally found to be most effective (eg types of therapies, 12 step programs, rehabs, detoxes, spiritual practices etc)

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What I have learned though 15 years of use, abuse and relapses. It doesn’t matter what method you take unless you want to change. The illness is in the mind, usually with people that are too smart or don’t fit like the asking a fish to climb a tree test. Family support saved my life. The glorification of nihilism by today’s youth doesn’t help.

I think it’s a chemical addiction. Study dopamine, serotonin, GABA. Look at what social media is doing because of the dopamine hit it gives people. The glorification of drugs and alcohol by media/music also doesn’t help. The other thing to keep in mind is drug abuse has been around since the beginning of man, it’s just easier to OD now with fake pills etc. In summary a support system is the most important thing. Would be happy to talk about my personal experience privately if it would help.

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There is so much wisdom is this answer…I hope you consider it carefully. I came to understand that addicts are only successful in recovery when they have truly internalized the need (as in most important thing in their life) to get better. Data backs it up as wel. Just look at the success rate of people who enter an outpatient program by choice versus those who are somehow compelled by a court, job or significant other.

The dopamine point is true as well, though rarely talked about. Most recovering alcoholics enter a phase early in their recovery often referred to as the honeymoon phase. Once they are past the physical withdrawal, they are overcome by happiness or energy. I went around hugging random people in a grocery store. The reason is that drinking was a chemical stimulant that resulted in a release of dopamine (or in some cases replaced it). When you stop after having been a drinker for a long time, your brain doesn’t know how to regulate dopamine so it often just turns it on…all the time. That reinforced to me the chemical nature of the addiction in addition to the mental addiction.

I also agree with the proposed treatment here. Support. It was explained to me like this. You are building a table of support…you want a sturdy table with many legs. Family can be a leg. Exercise. AA. Therapy. Diet. That way, if one or two legs fails, the table doesn’t fall over. In my opinion it can never be just one thing…addiction is complicated, routed in a persons past and full of a range of emotions.

I’m also willing to chat privately.

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AA for me is what finally worked. 37 years … 38 years next month!

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Dm me if you need. I hit rock bottom, and found rockier bottoms 10 times. I get it.

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I work in outpatient substance treatment. I person does need to be at the right place to listen and move forward. AA/NA has been helpful for many, however our facility sees it as one tool in a big toolbox. We have a holistic approach that centers on addiction as a disease model. It's not a defect of character. We encourage clients to really reach deeply to determine what happened to them to push them into substance use as a coping mechanism.

I once saw a quote (forget by who) that I'm paraphrasing - "Thank God you found alcohol/drugs/gambling/food/whatever addiction .... It helped you cope and kept you alive until this point, now you have a chance to heal and learn healthier coping skills." Instead of seeing it as a cross to bear, it was a crutch to lean on when you couldn't cope emotionally. Like when a person breaks a leg and goes through physical therapy, emotional therapy can help provide life-long skills to heal so that crutch is no longer needed. One of the most important skills is to recognize what happened to make you feel the crutch was needed in the first place. Discovering triggers and using healthy mitigation strategies on a routine basis creates new neurological pathways. The more these new skills are used the neurological pathways become stronger and increase likelihood of continued use of healthy skills. That's not to say that relapse doesn't/can't happen, but the approach of learning from the relapse without shame is important to the long journey if sobriety.

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So much of thisssss

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Yeah I guess I second the ‘you have to want to get help’ idea. Also I’ve only tried AA, but I just definitely need to discuss my life with other alcoholics when I’m having a hard time. I don’t think any program would work for me if it was lead by non alcoholics. I just couldn’t get past the idea that they don’t get it.

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AA - greatest spiritual movement of the 20th/21st century

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I totally agree with the original responder. It took me a long time to realize that I did have a problem and that I did need help but most of all that I WANTED to be helped. I entered an outpatient program voluntarily and I was just really into it so it worked. There i did group therapy with other addicts as well as individual counseling so i went 3 times a week. I also had a family that was extremely supportive that stopped having alcohol at family gatherings and that literally let my family live with them while I was in recovery. I also caution people against trying to do too much. I knew that I had to change many things about my life to make me be a healthy person. But I started with my brain. I knew I needed to quit smoking I knew I needed to get in shape and i knew i needed to lose weight. But the first most important thing was for me to get my brain right and allow it to work the way it supposed to. To allow my depression and anxiety medication‘s to work the way they’re supposed to. It’s been four years and I still haven’t quit smoking and I still haven’t lost weight but I am still sober.

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Actually, I just realized it will be five years next month! Yay!

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AA, HA, NA any of the A’s. 7 years sober from alcohol and opioid addiction, they truly saved my life.

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Dopey Podcast

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Lots of people who have had success with AA here but it never did a thing for me. I did an inpatient rehab at a place called Schick Shadel in Seattle, and haven’t had a drop to drink in the 7+ years since. Their method is rough but incredibly effective. Five times during your ten-day stay, they give you ipecac to induce nausea, then have you down a bunch of your drink(s) of choice and violently throw them back up. Then you lie in bed and feel borderline vomitous for another 2-3 hours.

I don’t remember many of the scientific terms they used to explain the reason it works, but it boils down to this: your frontal lobe is in charge of decision, judgment, and self-control. This is the most recently evolved part of our brains. The pleasure and reward center of your brain is more primitive and is traditionally responsible for motivating us through the release of pleasurable chemicals to perform basic functions like eating, sleeping, and having sex. In an addict’s brain, two things happen: first, this area learns to release those pleasure chemicals in response to the addictive substance or behavior, often eventually to the exclusion of other necessary behaviors. If you’ve gotten to the stage of drinking where you rarely eat, can’t sleep unless you’re dead drunk, and have no interest in sex because you’re always drinking, this might start to sound familiar. And second, it short-circuits your frontal lobe. The more primitive part of the brain basically overrides the more modern part and our sense of judgment and rationality simply doesn’t engage when we’re feeling the pull of addiction.

The part of the brain responsible for nausea is even more primitive. Nausea is one of the oldest evolved functions of anything with a brain, located all the way down in the brain stem, which also controls things like heart, lung, and central nervous system function. Using nausea to combat addiction is sort of like turning addiction’s own technique against itself: just as the somewhat primitive pleasure center overrides the more recently evolved frontal lobe in addicts, the even more primitive brain stem can override the urges caused by this rewired pleasure center.

It doesn’t undo the changes addiction makes to your brain, but (at least for some people, like me) it makes the addictive substance completely unappealing.

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Very interesting too. Never considered this route

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I'm an AA guy - worked for me

Thank you so much everyone for sharing

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