Drug and alcohol addiction treatment from a psychotherapeutic perspective

You can recover from drug addiction with the help of psychotherapy. Clinical psychology as a scientific method offers drug addiction treatment. However, psychotherapy is a little different in approach.

Both analytic and dynamic psychotherapy models can offer you treatment in a social context instead of a hardcore scientific context, pretty much as in Christian drug treatment.

The reason behind this is that psychotherapy - at least some schools of psychotherapy - in fact deals with abstract notions. In my previous post about religious approaches to addiction treatment, I stated that many contemporary drug rehab centers are based on the assumption that if the addicts social and psychological factors change, the addictive behavior will change accordingly. So, psychotherapy also stays in that perspective although it is different than a religious approach.

Every process of psychological counseling is not the same but I can still provide examples to explain what I mean.

Well, here is this addicted person that seeks addiction help. There are reasons that the person is addicted. One possible reason for that may be that the person doesn't feel that he or she is an adult person but still have feelings of childhood. The person feels as a child but her body is an adult. Suppose that this person has nobody around her to give her the care as if she is a child. Now, this person should find her way into something that will feed her childish, infantile feelings and starts dealing with addictive substances.

I know that the example is not really comprehensive enough but I just tried to show how a psychotherapist would establish his assessment for addiction treatment. It is an abstract establishment. It is a different framework to understand her tendency to addictive substances. It is about reasons and bringing the reasons to one's consciousness so that he or she can deal better with them.

One drawback of such a psychotherapeutic process is that it takes time. It usually takes years to recover. Moreover, a talk therapy usually consists of weekly counseling, one hour per week. This may not be enough for an agitated person. If the status of addiction is very high then hospitalization or a drug rehabilitation center would help more.