Imagine for a minute that you have been living in the cycle of drug addiction for months, maybe years. Every day, your entire focus is on finding money to buy drugs, using the drugs to get that high you can’t live without, and then crashing when the high is over. If your addiction is bad enough, you just bounce from one drug-using session to another until you pass out from exhaustion. One day, you get sick and tired of being sick and tired. You are out of money. You are out of drugs. You are beaten down by living the life of an addict. The next thing that comes to your mind should be, “where can I go for help?” That’s the next thing that should come to your mind.
However, you might get the temptation to think that hey, I can just quit “cold turkey.” What is quitting cold turkey? Quitting cold turkey refers to the act of quitting some kind of addictive behavior suddenly and without the help of others. Yes, that might seem like a good idea. You can just stop using and all of your problems will just go away. Soon, your appetite for drugs will go away, your bank account balance will grow, and all of the problems that occurred because of your addictive behavior will just go away.
There are a few problems with this grand plan if that is what you have in mind for yourself. Do you want to see the list of problems associated with going cold turkey on drug addiction? Here it is:
- Doing so seldom results in success (less than 5% success rate)
- Not being accountable to someone else makes it easy to abort a cold turkey attempt
- Face the possibility of some really significant and dangerous withdrawal symptoms without available help
- Fails to address the root causes of the addiction
After looking at this partial list, you might want to reconsider. If you are truly committed to the thought of beating your addiction, you should be willing to do so the right way. What is the right way? That would be taking yourself to a quality addiction treatment center like ours.
The Addiction Treatment Process
Getting treatment from a licensed rehab facility is not the perfect solution. However, first-time success rates of up to 60% are significantly higher than less than 5%. That alone should tell you this is the right way to go after your addiction. To further motivate you to head in this direction, we’ll tell you a little about the treatment process you would likely encounter in rehab. After going through an intake interview, there is a high likelihood you would need to go through a detox program. If your addiction involves drugs like alcohol, heroin, prescription painkillers, to fentanyl, you would certainly want to go through a medically monitored detox program.
Why? The withdrawal symptoms you would likely encounter after a period of abstinence can be very dangerous. We are talking about withdrawal symptoms like:
- Breathing, blood pressure, and heart rate problems
- Hallucinations and nightmares
- Convulsions and body tremors
- Nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and stomach cramps
- Depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideology
Good detox programs keep clients like you safe while they go through withdrawal. After detox, it’s time to get to work. Therapy is the process by which you would get the chance to learn the truth about your addiction. Why is that important? How can you solve a problem if you don’t know anything about which you are trying to solve? You can’t. You need therapy to get the right answers so you can develop the right solutions. For you, the right solutions might be nothing more than you developing better coping skills. With solid coping and life skills in your defense arsenal, you will have a very good chance of avoiding relapses and staying firmly on the road to recovery. We don’t recommend quitting cold turkey. Truthfully, it’s just too much risk for something with such a high failure rate.
We stand by what we have to offer you. If you want to do the work and beat your addiction, you should pick up the phone and call one of our staff members at 833-497-3812. We’ll be glad to tell you about the facility and our treatment options. This one phone call could be all it takes to save you a life of misery.