Personal Empowerment At Womens Drug Rehab

When you first come to alcohol rehab, you might have some sense of defeat.  You’ve been trying to hold yourself together for so long and you just couldn’t do it anymore.  You’ve given up and succumbed to alcohol treatment.  But what if you thought about this as an opportunity for personal empowerment?  By giving up, you can get your personal power back.

How Does Alcohol Rehab Help You Give Up One Thing To Get Another

Yes, this sounds like a paradox, a riddle.  You give up to get something – how does that work?  Well, what you’re giving up is the illusion that you were ever in control.  That’s the real riddle – we all think we are in control of our lives, but we’re not.  Addiction does an extra push to make you think you need no one else’s help *because* you are in control.  Once you give that up, you can actually do better at managing your life in a healthy way.

Notice that I said “managing” not “controlling”.  Accepting that there will always be some uncertainty and lack of control is the key to having the greatest personal empowerment.  When you have an all or nothing type of outlook, you tend to want to hold all the cards No one needs to tell you what to do.  When that doesn’t happen like you expect, you end up feeling out of control.  You can become depressed, start feeling anxious, start feeling angry, wanting more alcohol or drugs, start acting impulsively to distract yourself from your emotions, etc.

So when you are addicted, you are likely to need to feel either all in control or your become upset by not having it.  But when you accept the uncertainty, some lack of control is not a surprise.  You can realize that it’s out of your control, then focus what *is* within your control to help you deal with it.  Instead of being totally knocked down by your lack of control, you can pick yourself up and take some action.  That’s being adaptable and that’s being personally empowered.

Black And White Thinking Causes Problems With Feeling In Control

At alcohol rehab, the counselors help women to break down some of their all-or-nothing thinking.  A woman in alcohol rehab may not even realize at first that’s what she’s doing.  This can be a surprise and sometimes confusing.  Once she realizes and accepts that, she can work at adding some flexible thinking skills.  This can help her switch from having a “victim of fate and bad luck” mentality to “director of my own future” mentality.

Personal empowerment does not mean that you are finally able to be in total control.  That isn’t realistic for any human being.  Someone can have the best diet, exercise properly, and know all they can about cancer prevention and still develop cancer.  It just simply isn’t all in our hands.  But the way we cope with challenges is entirely in our hands.  Becoming personally empowered is one of the many long term benefits of a stay at alcohol rehab for women.