Doctorweblog. About Health & Medicine

If you are one of the unwilling ones, concentrate on getting to meetings, getting involved and getting a sponsor to help you through the daily difficulties. If God and the Twelve Steps make you worried, you can shelve them for the first few weeks.
Regular attendance at meetings and keeping clear of drugs are the essentials. Practise doing the little things that people suggest, because many of the small practical suggestions of how to stay away from drugs, how to deal with drinking situations, what to do about old using and abusing friends, and so forth are easy to accept.
You will notice that recovering addicts often do not give advice directly. Instead they talk about what they did, and what parts of the programme worked for them. It’s impossible to take offence at this. After all, they are only reporting the facts.
The facts of their experience can help you, if you let them. Of course everybody is different, and what works for one individual may not work for another if circumstances are very different. For instance, the experience of a single person may not be able to help others with their marriage problems.
But when people have the same kind of trouble, then usually the experience of a longstanding member will have something that you can learn from it. A married member will be able to tell you about the strain on his marriage during the first few weeks of recovery. If you are undergoing the same strain, you will probably be able to learn something from his experience.
The other mental trick that sometimes helps unwilling people do what is suggested is to use the 24-hour plan. Just for one day you might be willing to do something which otherwise you would reject. Looked at in this way, you do not need quite as much willingness.
Trust in NA and AA-Getting clean and sober is rather like a leap in the dark. You are bound to be dismayed and frightened about the future. You are at the beginning of a big change in life. And in the first few weeks you may well have fears and doubts about it.
Trust in NA and AA. Of course, the future seems scary at the moment, but when so many addicts have stayed clean thanks to doing what the programme suggests, it is overwhelmingly likely that it will work for you too. Remind yourself of all the happy recovering addicts who used to feel like you do but who are now making it. All you have to do is give it a try today.
Unwillingness can and does change to willingness, just as long as newcomers are in close contact with NA or AA. As long as you stay away from drugs or drink and keep going to the meetings, you will recover.

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If you want to stay clean, you will eventually find that you have to change the way you
live – because the way a drug-using addict lives is not a good way for a recovering addict to live. In exactly the same way, a drinker’s lifestyle is no good for a recovering alcoholic.
One of the secrets of staying stopped is to alter your attitudes about things. Indeed, AA members say that the initials of their fellowship stand not just for Alcoholics Anonymous but for      Altered Attitudes. In the same way, NA could stand for New Attitudes. If you think about it, you will see it makes sense. In fact, if you are successfully staying off drugs and drink you are probably already practising this in small ways.
For example, you are probably already changing the way you think about drugs and drink.   Instead of thinking about the pleasures of drug-taking or drinking, you are thinking about the bad times. You have altered your attitude towards drugs or drink and that new attitude is helping you stay away from them.
But this is just the beginning. There are many other attitudes which in the long run are going to need changing. Using drugs has affected your life and the way you think and feel in all kinds of ways. You may not yet know the full extent of what your addiction has done to you.

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For people living in close contact with a drug user or drinker, these signs are helpful. But many professional workers are not in such close contact. They may see the addict or the alcoholic only in the office, rather than in home surroundings. Addicts and alcoholics are past masters at putting on a good front when dealing with authority or people outside the home.
The best way to find out if they have a drug or drink problem is to ask a family
member – parents, partners, or sisters and brothers. These usually know enough about the relative’s way of life to realise what is going on, though they may be slow to use the word ‘alcoholic’ or ‘addict’ because they tend to look only at the meths drinker as alcoholic or the Piccadilly ‘fixer’ as an addict.
If you are asking a family member, make sure it is someone stable. Addicts and alcoholics sometimes marry or live with people with the same problem. Sometimes a family feels
stigmatised by the illness of one of the members and therefore denies the problem.
In addition to asking the family, you may be able to get an idea of the problem from various records. In the later stages of chemical dependence, the addict or alcoholic often becomes ill, has difficulties at work, or difficulties with the law.

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Chemical dependence is a progressive illness, which over the years robs sufferers of their health, their happiness and often their lives. The longer it goes on, the more difficult it is for the sufferer, whether a drug addict or an alcoholic, to recover. In the early stages of chemical dependence, just as in any other illness, recovery is much easier than in the later stages when the addiction has taken such a firm grip.
Yet many professional workers either fail to recognise the illness in its early stages, or for reasons of social embarrassment, wishful thinking, loyalty, or misplaced kindness, do not confront or let the problems confront the addict or the alcoholic. In this way, they rob a sick person of their chance of an early recovery.
Failing to treat the illness in its early stages is not a kindness to the addict or the alcoholic. As we have said, it is like letting a woman with a small cancer lump in her breast go away untreated, leaving it to become a near terminal condition.
The result is that the addicts and alcoholics get more and more damaged and sick. Society is giving them permission to continue on the downward path. They become more and more ill, and more and more desperately unhappy.

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