How To Rid Yourself Of Drug Addiction: Part TWO:

NOT VIA  ANY FORM OF TREATMENT,

 BUT VIA THE TRAINING ROUTE.

To recover oneself to the lasting non-criminal natural state of relaxed abstinence into which 99% of addicts are born, there are three factors to be handled:

FIRST, one must gain full practical KNOWLEDGE of “how” to achieve abstinence.

SECOND, one must again take full RESPONSIBILITY for your body, your thinking, your life and the application of that knowledge, and,

THIRD, you will thus regain CONTROL of yourself, your body, your environment and the people in it.

But you may ask: why “training instead of “treatment”, and why must YOU be responsible rather than Dad, Mum, the doctor, a policeman or someone else ?

Well, this is because, whether we like it or not, life is unavoidably a do-it-for-yourself activity.  You can't live my life for me or anyone else, and neither I nor anybody else can live your life for you !  Please think about that for a moment.

As soon as you think in terms of “treatment”, you are usually thinking about someone else doing something FOR YOU or worse still TO YOU, and that means having a nursing, police or family adviser or “minder” for the rest of your life, which in fact is, in some ways, what got you into drug trouble in the first place.

As a result, the first bit of “knowledge” one needs is a clear understanding of how and why all addicts really do start to use drugs of one sort or another.

If you have a friend on drugs, and think back very carefully, you will recall that just prior to him (or her) starting, (s)he had a personal situation which (s)he was increasingly thinking was a problem for which a solution was needed, and when another friend, relative, colleague or professional suggested or advised that a certain substance would likely be the best thing to take to solve that problem, because drugs in the form of medicines have been agreed upon for generations as “problem solvers”, it was not hard for that problem beset friend to become convinced.

He / She thus became the victim, not only of the addiction creating nature of the drug, but also a victim of the sympathetic, misleading, sometimes well meant, erroneous beliefs of friends, or the bullshit sales talk of some professional adviser or pusher.

So there you are.  Isn't that great.  Addicts are off the hook.  They were a victim of false and misleading advice and of the addictive effects of the drug itself.

Absolutely true. BUT EQUALLY, when you look closer, it was the addict him or her self who made the decision, OR it was the addict themself who agreed to the doctor's advice.

HAD TO BE !

Because, whether we like it or not, we are all living our own lives. No one else is doing it, and no one else can.

Fortunately, this state of affairs gives us the clue to the quickest and most certain way out of addiction.   It tells us that, as we got ourselves into addiction, WE ARE THE ONES WHO CAN BEST GET OURSELVES OUT !

And when over the years you interview or help large numbers of addicts of all types, (as S.A.F.E. and our colleagues have) you find that 70 to 75% not only want to get off their addiction, but that they have been trying (sometimes daily) to quit from a time some three days, three weeks or three months after the date they started. More precisely, from the moment they fully realised and painfully understood just exactly what the drug was doing to them, and that they were trapped.

So we know, from 50 years of experience, that their problem is not willingness to quit – it is lack of knowledge as to HOW to quit.  Which of course is NOT a matter of “treatment” but a question of TRAINING.

SO EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO DO, YOU FIRST NEED TO LEARN, AND THEN YOU SIMPLY NEED TO APPLY IT TO YOURSELF.

This means starting by taking responsibility for the success of the drug-free withdrawal procedure which was described in our earlier post on: “How To Rid Yourself Of Addiction: Part ONE”.

Obviously I can't possibly give you the whole training course here on this blog.  But I can give you a general idea of the programme a recovering addict goes through in the 12 to 14 weeks at the residential addiction recovery training centre we work with in East Sussex.

But now we are getting into our next post, which is: “How To Rid Yourself Of Addiction: Part THREE”.

So, if you're still interested - see you there.

S.A.F.E. is a Not-For-Profit Community Support Group Formed in 1975.

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