Beat Drug/Alcohol Addiction On Your Own?

I know I need to get sober, but I can do it myself. I don't need to go to treatment. I already know what they're going to tell me. I can do it on my own. Have you heard this before? Have you thought this before? Maybe you've even said this before. This is actually a really common thought, and there's a lot of validity there. There's a lot of reasons why a person would not want to go into a traditional addiction treatment recovery program for any kind of addiction, drugs, alcohol or otherwise. There's a lot of reasons why someone doesn't want to do that. They're expensive. For example, a lot of them require you to be away from work, school, family, home for long periods of time. Right? You lose your autonomy when you're in these programs. You kind of have to do what they say to do when they say to do it. A lot of people don't like that. They don't want to give up their own autonomy and independence. Right. A lot of people don't want to go because they don't want to talk in groups or they don't want to tell their personal business to strangers. These are actually fairly legitimate reasons why someone might be reluctant to go into a treatment program. What are some other ones you guys can think of? Those are just the ones that come to my head sort of first to the top of my head. What are some other reasons why a person may be reluctant to go on to treatment? Maybe they've been 10 times before, right. And they already know what's going to be said or done. It is very common for people to want to do recovery, do the sobriety thing on their own. And it's not a terrible bad thing when someone says this. A lot of times when we hear someone say this, we kind of roll our eyes to ourselves. If we're the family member of the counselor and we think, okay, here we go again, they just don't even mean it. They're just. This is just their way of, like, not dealing with this thing. This is their way of not taking responsibility or not taking action. But it doesn't necessarily have to be that way. Can someone be addiction on their own? Can you overcome an addiction by yourself? Of course you can. Of course you can. It's the same as if you asked me, can I build a house myself? Yes, you can. Can I build muscle without having to go to the gym? Yes. Yes, you can. Now, here's the differentiator. Here's what you got to ask yourself. If this is what you're Wanting to do you want to do it yourself. Are you saying, I want to do it myself? Because. And in your mind you're thinking, okay, I'm just going to make the decision that I'm done with this and I'm not going to fall into these bad patterns anymore. And then it's over and I'm fixed and I got this. If that's what you're thinking by do it yourself, then I'm going to say, probably not. That's probably not going to work. You can definitely do recovery by yourself. But just like if you were taking on any other kind of big, huge task like a remodeling project or something like that, there's some tools and pieces that you're going to need along the way. Now, those tools and pieces don't necessarily have to come from some kind of big fancy pants treatment program, right? You can get these tools and resources in all kinds of ways. So, yes, you can DIY your own recovery program. But what I want you to know about that is it's going to take some work. In fact, if you want to do it yourself, it's probably going to be much harder to do it that way than to go into a treatment program. So if you're thinking, I want to do it myself because it's going to be easier, there's some flaws in that thinking. When you go away to treatment, they pretty much do it to you, do it for you. They hand it to you on a silver platter. You can't really get access to the stuff, so you kind of just show up and they sort of start pouring recovery over the top of your head. And a lot of different ways. If you want to do it yourself, I'm all about it. Do it yourself. However, just like if you were going to do a. Some remodeling of your house on your own, just like if you were gonna try to build muscle mass without going to a gym, you're gonna have to do the hard work. Doing it by yourself doesn't mean not doing the hard work, right? It would be. It would be ridiculous to think I'm gonna remodel my bathroom, as in me, Amber. I mean, if you're like a construction person, maybe you could do that, right? But I'm certainly not. It would be really ridiculous for me to think I'm gonna remodel my bathroom, but I'm just gonna figure it out on my own. I'm not gonna call a friend, I'm not gonna watch a YouTube video, I'm not going to read A book. I'm just going to figure it out, and I'll. And I just. I don't mean I can do this. I can tell you right now, that'd be a big, ginormous, giant, giant, giant disaster. Right. And it works the same way for the whole recovery concepts. If. If you're wanting to do this without going to treatment or without going back to treatment, you can do that. I talked to a young man just this past week who had had a relapse, and his parents were upset with him, and they wanted him to go back to an inpatient treatment center. And he'd been three or four times in the past, and he was like, I know. Like, I gotta get this under control, and I want to. And actually, I'm doing better already, but I don't want to go back to treatment. I've already been a bunch of times. I already know what they're gonna say. And then I start asking the shame man, like, well, okay, you did really good for a long time. What were you doing when things were going good? And I had him explain to me what he did that made recovery successful and work for him. Right. The truth of it is, if you've been 10 times to treatment, you probably don't need to go back. You need to do what you already know you need to do. So when someone says, like, I already know all that stuff, it's probably true. If someone says, I went to treatment, didn't work for me, my guess is you went to treatment and you didn't do what they told you to do. 99% of the time, that's the case. It's not that treatment doesn't work. It's that people want to kind of mess with their treatment program. They want to pick and choose the parts they think they want to do. Right. And they want to ignore some parts that they just don't want to necessarily deal with. And because of that, they don't do what they learned to do in the treatment program. So there's just a couple pieces. Just do it on your own. If you've already been to treatment, you probably do know exactly what you need to do. Right? Do it right. You know, if you've had recovery time in the past, you know what works. Of course you do. You know you better than anyone. Right. And you know what you need to be doing. So just put those things in place. If you're the family member and you're hearing someone say that, I know it's frustrating. And you're probably like, amber, you're not helping my case here because I keep trying to get them go to treatment. And I hear you. I understand that family members almost always want someone to go away to treatment because the addiction has caused so much chaos and it's been going on so long and it feels like, okay, like, this is the best medicine, this is the best plan. Like, let's just do that, right? Because nothing else seems to be working. And I get where you're coming from, but like I said, there are a lot of reasons why people may not want to go or maybe even can't go. Maybe they can't afford it, maybe they can't take the time off work or they'll lose their job, maybe they can't go or they'll lose custody of parental rights, other kids. There may be some reasons, right? I'm not saying you for anyone. I'm not trying to help someone make excuses, right? Because I'm not excusing away doing the work. In fact, if you want to do it yourself, you're going to work harder. Okay? So just like anything else, if I want to fix my car myself, I'm gonna have to work harder than I would if I took it to the mechanic, right? So I'm not letting you off the hook by saying these things. I'm just validating that there are reasons why someone might not want to go. That. Right. And there are ways to do it, but you're going to have to either put in place the things that you already know work for you because you've done it before in the past. Like if you built a bathroom before in the past, you don't have to remember what you did and do it again, right? If you're trying to do it again, that. That's just common sense, right? If you haven't done it in the past or if you haven't done it successfully in the past, then just like if you're gonna DIY anything else, you probably need to figure out how to do that right now. You don't have to go away to 30, 60, or 90 days to figure out how to do it, right? There are a lot of ways to figure out how to do it. If you're watching this video, if you're watching my videos, then I'm telling you how to do it. You can literally learn every single thing they will teach you at any treatment center on this YouTube channel for free. Promise. You know how I know? Because I've worked in treatment centers, I've created treatment programs and sets of outpatient programs, inpatient programs wrote Them I've created the content and everything that I ever taught anybody in an inpatient setting or an intensive outpatient setting, I have taught on this YouTube channel probably multiple times in multiple ways in 10 different videos, right? So you could find what you need right here on YouTube now. So there's pieces of it, there's the information on how to do it, right? But you can find, right. You can read books, you can listen to podcasts, you can watch videos, there's ways to find that. And another piece to it is how are you going to stay motivated to do it? Because there's going to be hard days. If you think of it like you're going to remodel the house because it's very similar. You're just remodeling your life, right? Which is big job. You're going to have to know how to do it. You're going to have to have the willingness to do the hard work and you're gonna have to figure out how to stay motivated, right? Because there's going to be some days in that process where you just want to give up, where you try to do something and it backfired on you and it was a mess and it's harder than you thought, you know. And so, you know, you need to figure out how to put these things in place, right? The motivation, the willingness, the accountability, the education that you need, these are the tools that you need in order to make recovery work. Now there are a few situations where people really do have to go away, like to big daddy treatment in order to get better. I'm tell you what they are. If the, if the person, if you are using so bad and your body is dependent on it, and you've been using a lot very regularly, then you may have to go to some kind of detox program just to sort of physically come off of a substance. And if you have to do that, okay, but that you can get that done in five, seven days max, right? So that's not that big a deal. And then you can sort of still, you've got to put your recovery program together. If sometimes people need to go to like the big treatment, like 30, 60, 90 days or longer. And I think the times where I would say, yes, someone has to do that, here are some circumstances where I would say, yeah, probably they're going to need to do that to be successful. A lot of young people need to do that. Like if you are, you know, if you're dealing with a teenager or a 20 something year old and they've been using since they were 14 years old, they're more likely to need to go away because they don't even have regular adulting skills because they've been using so long. They don't have coping skills, they don't have, you know, adulting skills, they don't have being responsible skills. They don't have solving problem skills a lot of times. And so not only does a person have to get clean and sober, a young person, but they have to, like, gain all of those skills at the same time. And trying to do that while still going to school or, you know, raising a family or something, that. That can be very difficult. So that's a circumstance where sometimes people really do need to go away and be in a bigger, more structured kind of treatment program. Gonna need more hand holding. If you. If the environment that you live in, you know, is just totally not conducive to recovery, like everyone in your family or your house is using drugs, you might need to go because you might just need to physically get out of that environment, right? If there's so much chaos or drama in your life and stress that it's just constant on you, then you may need to go away somewhere in order to get better. Because you. You literally need to get away from the drama and the chaos and the stress so that you can conserve your willpower enough to get sober and get your recovery going. You can get your. Your footing under you is what I call it. Those are some reasons why I think those are some circumstances where I say if that's the case, you probably do really do need to. To go away to do that, like to get big treatment, to be in a treatment program. The minimal amount of treatment program I would suggest for someone to get to get sober in a situation like that would be an intensive outpatient. But usually in those cases, those ones I just identified, I would say you're looking at some kind of inpatient or residential treatment program. But the thing of it is, is in the end, you got a diy, your recovery anyways. You can go there and you can get yourself started, right? But you still got to figure it out. It's like you may have to go to college to learn how to be an engineer or a doctor or something like that. But in the end, you got to get out there in the real world and put those things into practice. And it's the same with, with recovery. In the end, you do have to do it yourself. In the end, you do have to figure out how to make it work for you. Sometimes you need that stabilizing force in the beginning to help you get off to a good start, to sort of set the stage to make. To make it where you're setting yourself up for success. That's why you might need to do that first. But ultimately you got to do it on your own anyways, right? So can you do it on your own? Yes. You can't really do recovery for someone else. You can, you can help give people some of the tools, right? You can teach them tools. You can give them the tools, but. But they ultimately have to decide how to use them. So if you're trying to decide if you or your loved one, could you. Could you possibly be a do it yourself recovery person? Ask yourself this. Are you a do it yourself person in general? Right. Like, I could tell you right now, like, there's some things I like to figure out do myself. Like I had to go on Pinterest and then convince myself I can do some kind of crafty project. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Here's what I know I won't do on my own. I don't think I can go on YouTube and figure out how to fix my car because I have zero skills in that department. Right. I don't think I could remodel my bathroom because I have zero skills. And I don't even want to do it myself. Right? So think to yourself. Do you have the willingness to put in the hard work to do it yourself? Do you have the willing, the discipline to do the things that you need to do? And do you have the resources, the knowledge, the information, the support, the accountability, the motivation? Do you have those things? Or can you put those things in place to ensure that you are successful? If you're on this sort of do it yourself plan or, or you've been to treatment and now you're. You're putting it in place yourself. And you would like a resource. One free resource you can get is our 30 day jumpstart program. If you haven't had that, you might like it. And I have put the link in the description of this video for you to get access to that. And what that is is it's like 30 days of little messages that come to your inbox that are there to help, designed to give you recovery skills, help keep you motivated, help overcome roadblocks. And it comes to you every single day in a very sort of routine kind of way to keep you focused on track. And that's something that you can access for free. That's a great tool to put in your. In Your do it Yourself recovery toolbox. We also have. We also just released our new Recovery to Go program, which is specifically designed. It is the do it Yourself program of recovery. It is literally designed to help give a resource to people who don't want to go to treatment. They either don't want to go at all or they don't want to go back. Right? It gives you the step by step, like, here's how to do it. Like, if you're going to build a house, it would say, do pour the foundation, do this, do this, do this. It kind of gives you that plan. But you do have to log in there, right? Like, it's not going to do itself. Like, you still have to do it. You have to put the things in place. You have to log in, you have to consume the information. You have to do the work. But it is the do it Yourself recovery program. I did put the link to that in the description for you as well. Let's see who is joining us live. Let's see what you guys have to say about it. What are the reasons you either don't want to go to treatment or you've heard your loved one say, does it work for you? Has it not worked for you? If it did work for you, what was your secret ingredient? So tell us so other people can figure that out. And if you're joining us on the replay, we are glad you're here, too. We definitely want you to join the conversation. I go back and read every single comment that gets posted and I respond to most of them. All right, let's see who's here. Looks like we got quite a few people here with us. All right, we have Margaret says she finally got here for a live show. Hey, we're glad you're here, Margaret. Debbie says she has been wanting to know the answer to this question for a lot of years. I hope that I was able to answer that for you. Sarah sue says, because he's not that bad. My guess is what Sarah sue is saying there is. You're saying that your person doesn't want to go to treatment because they're not that bad. That's a good one. I should have put that in the list. That should have went at the top of the list. Glad you said that. Seriously, I don't need to go to treatment because I'm not that bad. There might be some truth in that. Right. But you still got to do the hard work one way or the other. Debbie says, I don't want to do it because I don't want to lose all my friends. That's a really good. Let's stop and talk about that for a second. Debbie. My guess is, is not they don't want to go to treatment because they'll lose their friends if they go to treatment. I guess is they don't want to go to treatment because they know they're going to be told in treatment that they need to stay away from these friends. Right. So even if you want to do it yourself, if that's part of the tools or things that has to happen, that's going to have to happen whether you go to treatment or not. Like, part of what's going to have to happen is you're going to have to decide what influences that you need to keep in your life. What influences do you need to bring in more of and what influences do you need to get some distance from? And unfortunately that usually involves sort of making some decisions about friends and family members, people, places and things. So that's probably going to have to be done either which way. Hey, Amy. Hey. Ashley's Practical Magic Soaps. Patty says need some advice. Old alcoholic friend has lost her job and shut herself off from everyone. What to do. She. And then there's the follow up that she is going to die if something is not done. We've been friends for 45 years. Love her so much. That is a difficult situation especially it sounds like your friend is, is really isolating themselves. And what you can do in that situation is just continue to say, hello, I'm here for you. Kind of. You're just really like letting them know that the door is open. Not constantly. You don't want to bombard them because that's just going to irritate them, but you just want to sort of be there and peek in and check in on them every now and then. And it doesn't always have to be about the alcohol. Just say, hey, what's going on? You know, however you used to interact with your friend, try to nurture that relationship and maybe just open the door back up to the relationship before you even try to engage with the alcohol problem. Because if they're shutting everything off, you've got to sort of build that bridge first. Hope that helps a little bit. Debbie says. Can meetings accomplish the same thing as rehab? Yes, most of the time. Yes. And for those of you who don't know, there's all kinds of meetings out there these days. Most people when you hear meetings, think of 12 step, which is you think of that because that's what there's the most of because it's been around the longest. But there is Dharma Recovery, there is smart recovery, there is various churches have their own specific recovery programs. There's all kinds of different recovery pathways meetings, support groups out there. So yes, you can find what you need in those groups. In fact, a lot of treatment, a lot of what goes on in treatment. I know because I've worked in treatment is just literally pound it in your head to go to meetings. Right. It's one of the things that they're telling you to do. So yeah, you can do that. And most of those meetings are free. Most of those meetings don't cost a thing. Right. Sometimes part of people's recovery program will. They'll need some kind of work on something mental health related. But that doesn't necessarily mean they have to go away to big cat daddy treatment. But they may have depression or anxiety or trauma or some other things like that that need to be worked on. And those may be some tools and resources that have to be pulled in as part of the DIY recovery plan. Right. You may have to pull a piece here like a counseling for this meetings for that sponsor, recovery coach, whatever. You may have to sort of pull your pieces in and piecemeal your plan together. But as long as you get the right pieces and the right resources, 30 day jumpstart information in the description link or you can get information about our recovery to go do it yourself program. You guys ask super great questions and I really enjoyed it. I will be back here next Thursday live at 1, just like every Thursday, 1pm Eastern. And if you want to see the bonus video tomorrow about the Johnny Depp Amber Heard case, because you haven't heard enough about it, then join me and we will talk more about this question that Jason just asked.