Going to a rehab facility in South Africa is all very well and good but how do you get to that point? And once you have been at a rehab centre, when do you leave and how do you maintain your healing once you are back amongst the people you know?
Aftercare services include a number of supports that extend beyond the anonymous group meetings. These services are especially important in the early stages following addiction treatment but should not be discounted as structures to handle ongoing relapse prevention.
Many rehab centres dealing with drug addiction have a programme that they work through with individuals to help them from the time they know they have an addiction until they leave and beyond.
Not every recovery treatment works unfortunately, as there is a great deal of commitment that needs to come from the addict.
Early recovery especially is stressful and difficult and the person will find it hard to overcome the patterns of addiction they have become so used to. They need to find new ways in which to cope with the problems in their lives, rather than going back to taking drugs.
Taking responsibility for an addiction is probably the hardest part of the process and can be a very difficult thing for a person to accept. This is why one of the most important goals of a treatment centre is giving these people the power to say no, a power they have not had before and think they cannot possibly have again. It helps them gain back the will power they need to overcome their addiction.
A good rehab programme will attend to the two aspects of addiction, the physical need for drugs and the psychological dependency on them. For an addict, flushing drugs out of their system is difficult, but possibly the easier part of the process and once this is done, they can enter into the second more difficult phase. In this, they will need to work hard to understand their addiction and to overcome it, something that is possible with treatment.