Alcohol and drug addiction are, unfortunately, among the primary issues, most people are grappling with worldwide. Luckily, considerable research resources have gone into understanding what causes the addiction and the strategies that will effectively treat them. Mental health issues have been shown to not only contribute to drug and alcohol addiction but also be aggravated by the same. To this end, several mental health therapies have found their way to addiction treatment.
Dialectal Behaviour Therapy (DBT) is one of the leading alternatives in drug and alcohol treatment centres. It is aimed at helping patients overcome negative and substance-abusing behaviours as well as damaging emotions that contribute to dependency. DBT encourages a balance between acceptance and change so that the patient is sufficiently empowered to live an addiction-free life. The following are the primary skills that therapists will centre on in DBT to generate a mind-body balance and nourish sobriety.
Mindfulness
This focuses on being fully aware of the here and now. Most people battling substance addiction will centre on their past mistakes and their failed attempts at getting out of their issue. Mindfulness enables patients to have a clear and balanced mind when starting their therapy. This minimizes the stress most people battling addiction experience. In so doing, it reduces the odds of relapse since stress is among its chief causes.
Emotion Regulation
Dysfunctional and negative emotions are common triggers of substance use disorders. If you cannot learn how to handle the negative emotions you feel, you often will self-medicate with drugs or alcohol. DBT for addiction treatment will thus focus on how to control your feelings and healthily regulate them. Emotion regulation also picks the negative sentiments you are managing through substance abuse. This guarantees a long-lasting solution to these emotions.
Distress Tolerance
Most people will have an immediate urge to reduce distress immediately they experience it. This, for most means reaching for the substance they associate with a relaxing feeling. Unfortunately, distress is a large part of your daily life. The urge to take the relaxing substance in higher and higher doses and more frequently increases over time. In DBT, distress tolerance teaches a patient how he/she should accept and thrive in distressing situations rather than running away from them.
Interpersonal Effectiveness
When you do not have effective conflict resolution and communication skills, you will often learn to keep in most of your emotions and have minimal interpersonal interactions. The isolation and turmoil this causes often leads most people to different types of substance abuse. In DBT, a therapist will teach you how to start and maintain healthy and fulfilling interpersonal relationships. With these relationships, you get a channel for venting your frustrations.
The treatment of substance abuse disorders involves more than detoxification. As such, the many options online on detoxification solutions for addiction treatments will not guarantee as effective a treatment as you get in accredited treatment centres. The above skills in DBT are sure to deliver the highest benefits in addiction treatment and minimize your chances of relapse after treatment.
