Communication Issues and Addiction
Mental health is the foundation for all life skills, including communication with others. For people with dual diagnoses, these skills may be underdeveloped at best, frozen at the developmental stage when their mental illness or addiction began. Mental illness and addiction makes a person focus primarily on themselves, which makes good communication difficult. In dual diagnosis drug rehab, people learn how to reach out to others again and build useful communication habits.
A person with good mental health has the basis for good communication. People use all their senses to communicate back and forth with others. To be effective, the message sender and the message receiver need to aware, responsive, and adaptive. There are many things that can change a person’s message from the time it forms in their brain to the time it gets out so another person can see or hear it. Also, there are many things that can interfere with a message being interpreting in the way the sender intended. Even on a good day, clear communication can be tricky!
So now throw in some depression and methamphetamine, or maybe bipolar and alcohol. The whole proposition gets even stickier. Now, you have a person, or persons, who have serious distortions with both message delivery and message reception. The mind of someone affected by mental illness and addiction is scrambled, desperately confused and warped. The drugs distort sensations and a person’s state of mind. The mental illness creates a “fun house mirror” effect with a person’s thoughts and feelings - everything is out of proportion, and often extreme in nature.
Basic skills and abilities come together to make communication possible. Unfortunately, these skills are sabotaged when drugs and mental illness run amok. These skills include basic listening and short term memory, empathy, patience, being able to use words clearly, staying emotionally calm. For most people with dual diagnosis, communication problems hinder their ability to form and keep good relationships, it keeps them from getting the mental illness and drug treatment they need.
At the Canyon, dual diagnosis drug rehab uses drug detox and alcohol detox, counseling, traditional addiction 12-step methods, and ancient therapies. The holistic drug treatment approach attends to the whole person, allowing healing to occur in many ways. When a person regains balance in their life, they have the opportunity to re-tune their communication skills. Individual and group counseling are safe environments for practicing these skills and making good habits.
After completing drug rehab, a person needs to stay aware of their new habits and their old unhealthy habits. Addiction and mental illness are multi-faceted problems. It can take a person many months or even years to establish a healthy lifestyle. Drug rehab isn’t a miracle cure, but it is a place to start a new direction in life.
Tags: Communication Issues and Addiction, drug-rehab, Dual Diagnosis
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