The idea of home tends to elicit sentiments of nostalgia, warmth, security, and comfort. Most often home is thought of as a storage bank for memories, a foundation for one’s upbringing, the place that one can always return to and know that they belong. “Home” is idealized, sensationalized, and unfortunately centralized to just one place. Home is where you make it to be. Sometimes, like in the event of choosing to attend a treatment program for drug and alcohol addiction, home needs to be made somewhere other than ‘home’.
Home is full of familiarity. When drug and alcohol addiction are part of what makes home “home”, that familiarity can prove to be fatal. Drug and alcohol addiction are living diseases which alter the normal wiring of the brain. Triggers, cravings, obsessing, and impulsive decision making with a lack of regard for negative consequence are all parts of addiction. Attempting to work through addiction at home can make overcoming these components more challenging. The nature of addiction in the brain means that something as simple as going to the post office, the alley behind which is where you used to purchase drugs, might lead to a reaction causing severe cravings. Should mailing a package at the local post office have to include a sudden overwhelming compulsion to abuse drugs? It shouldn’t, but for someone in the early stages of recovery from drug addiction, such a scenario is not uncommon. Unfortunately, neither is relapse. Relapse is not a required part of recovery which is why relapse prevention is critical. One of the most suggested ways to prevent relapse in the first year of recovery is to stay away from familiar environments. Familiar friends, familiar dealers, familiar bars, familiar toxic relationships, familiar memories good and bad, as well as familiar cravings all come with staying in a familiar habitat.
Seeking treatment out of state can create a new sense of home while restoring a bond to the old sense of home. Many men who are seeking recovery don’t know what “home” means anymore. Home doesn’t have to include the pain and suffering of addiction any longer. Going out of state for treatment is the very first moment of finding freedom from addiction.
At Tree House Recovery, we’re helping men find freedom from addiction. Our treatment programs create sustainable change for sustainable recovery by helping men find their strength in body, mind, and spirit. For information on our Orange County programs, call us today: (855) 202-2138
