If you are considering stopping alcohol or drugs and you’re ready to get sober, you should strongly consider several things to help you. If you hit rock bottom or not, alcohol abuse and drug addiction often need professional help or an ethical treatment program.
We help people with addictions and substance use disorders recover. Get mindfulness training and learn the 12 Steps for deeper healing.
Here Are 6 Tips to Help You Get Sober
1. Detox
If you are saturated with alcohol, benzos, or heroin, you should detox. With alcohol, if you do not detox properly, you can die or have seizures. Medical withdrawal is critical and should be left to professionals. Learn more about alcohol withdrawal here. It’s better to be in a safe space while you detox.
2. Find Residential Treatment
If you know enough about addiction and alcoholism, then you will know that by simply detoxing you will not automatically be better. A common misunderstanding is that if you just avoid drinking you can stay stopped. The problem for alcoholics and addicts is bigger than just not drinking.
Residential treatment — which is treatment where you stay at a facility for 30 to 90 days — will get you help from professionals. If a 30-day treatment doesn’t work for you, or you’re a chronic relapser, you might need a long-term program.
3. Treat Underlying Mental Health Issues
Often mental health issues and substance abuse are so intertwined, it takes professionals to unravel both. If you have a dual diagnosis problem, then it is critical to treat mental health. Untreated mental health issues often can lead to relapse. Also, some behavior can look like depression or high anxiety, but in reality, it is just a bad case of alcoholism. It takes professionals who know about both to treat both.
4. Continue Treating Yourself
Whether you go to Burning Tree Ranch for 10 months or you go to a 30-day program, you need to continue treating your addiction. Alcoholism and addiction are not “cured,” but they can be continuously treated.
Be sure that once you finish your treatment that you have a discharge plan that continues to treat your addiction and any underlying mental health condition identified in your treatment.
5. Do the 12 Steps
The 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous has successfully treated millions of alcoholics since the book was published in 1939. The first 164 pages have been unchanged, even though the rest of the book has been updated.
The Big Book has instructions on how to have a psychic change, which allows you to change how you respond to life.
6. Find a Sponsor
Finding a sponsor is critical if you want to learn the steps. But you cannot just pick any sponsor. Some sponsors believe just going to a meeting will help you, but that should not be all of your program of recovery.
There is a lot more in the book, and actually, meetings are never mentioned. To find a sponsor, check out our tips here.
