Women Facing Alcohol Rehab
You have considered yourself a strong woman for a long time. You’ve toughed it out through some bad family times, a difficult marriage, and plenty of money problems. You started drinking in the evening
just to take the edge off the stress, and now look at you. Your parents won’t let you come over. Your friends don’t know what what to say to you anymore. Your husband is handing you a brochure for alcohol rehab. You just want to sink into a hole and never come out. How could things have gone so wrong?
Alcoholism Is Different For Women
Alcoholism isnt’ quite the same for men and women. Many of the physical responses to alcohol are similar and recognizable. And the symptoms all add up to alcoholism regardless of gender. But it’s the way alcoholism develops, the path it takes to get to a woman’s soul – that’s where things differ.
Men tend to be more stoic about their emotions. Yes, they are likely to show excitement or anger more easily, but just about anything else they tend to keep for themselves. It’s not that they don’t feel emotions or don’t like sharing them with someone they trust. They just don’t live with their emotions the same way women often do.
Women Sense world Through Their Emotions
Women sense their world through an emotional filter. Whether they are more practical or more sensitive, they are all still women. And women are simply different from men. Period. Women connect to create supportive social networks for support. They verbalize and explore their feelings with ease.
And they can bring softness and nurturing to many situations. Unfortunately, a woman’s greater connection with feelings can make it easier to fall under the trap of an addiction. When feelings easily rise to the surface or overwhelm a woman, sometimes talking and crying about it just isn’t enough to help.
Alcohol Is Temporary Solution to Emotional Problems
Sometimes, a moment of desperation makes a woman reach for an artificial and temporary solution – alcohol. Yes, drinking once in a while to relax is usually harmless. But if a woman begins reaching for their drink as a daily ritual, things can easily get out of hand.
What she thought was a fix can become the problem. Alcohol can blur painful emotions for a while, but intoxication also makes emotions go to greater extremes. After some time being frequently drunk, she forgets how to manage her emotions any other way besides drinking. She drinks to be just OK, not only to hide anymore. The pain lingers, grows, and becomes the foundation for a destructive addiction.
Alcohol Rehab For Women Helps Women Get Sober
Alcohol rehab can sound like the last place a woman would want to go. That would be so frightening, so unnerving to have the safety blanket of alcohol taken away from her. Also, it’s true admission that she has lost control and really really screwed things up. She may as well have a big “L” for loser (or “W” for worthless) stamped on her forehead.
But if an woman can just get started in alcohol rehab, she might find that it isn’t quite so bad after all. It may be tough at first, but she might start to find herself again in her new sobriety. Just a little small piece of her that dares to come out into the light.
Baby steps are fine in alcohol rehab – nothing that serious gets changed overnight. Any woman facing alcohol rehab needs to know that it’s OK to start here, it’s OK to say you have lost control. Alcohol rehab can help you get control back into your life – one day at a time.