Alcoholism can make you feel powerless
It feels as if you don’t even have control of your life. Instead, your disease, alcoholism, is making your decisions for you. Because an addiction to alcohol changes the structure of the brain, that feeling is truer than you might realize. The Ridge is committed to helping you get into recovery, and take your life back from your addiction.
Every day, a recovering addict has to recommit to resisting temptation and staying sober. Especially when it’s so easy to buy a drink, this constant vigilance can seem difficult, even overwhelming. The Ridge knows this feeling, and we sympathize. That’s why we highly recommend that our patients stay involved with aftercare even after they’ve been sober for a long time. Aftercare is a great way to share your struggles and learn that you have support from people just like you. Knowing that you aren’t alone, and that successful long-term sobriety is possible, are priceless assets for recovery.
Alcoholism doesn’t only harm the body, it does serious damage to emotional connections and relationships, as well. An addiction like alcoholism makes a person do things they never would have sober. They’ll lie to loved ones, use them, steal from them, or worse. The disease essentially requires the addicted person to get more alcohol, and they’ll do whatever it takes to achieve that goal. Not to mention that drunkenness impairs judgment, making it more likely for an alcoholic to behave in hurtful, inappropriate ways. Alcoholics are often ashamed of what their addiction made them do, and feel that even after they begin recovery, the relationships they strained or broke while drinking are irreparable.
The Ridge knows how important a healthy support system of friends and family is for recovery, so making amends for past bad behavior is a major part of our treatment philosophy. Our family education sessions will make sure your family knows that alcoholism alters behavior, and that the hurtful things an alcoholic didn’t aren’t a reflection of their feelings towards others, but a result of alcohol addiction’s effect on the brain. Still, relationships take time and work to mend. A few words of apology won’t fix a relationship right away. At The Ridge, we’ve had experience helping recovering alcoholics rebuild trust with their families, friends, and loved ones, and can help you make your reconciliation process as effective as possible.