Short Answers, Paragraph or 2 each question:

Why do chemically dependent people have difficulty with their feelings?

1. Why are relationship skills so important in the process of early recovery?
2. How do individual assignments help a client work through the recovery process?

Chapter 8

Recovery skills

 

Contracts are patients homework

• The Contract Group meets daily
• Helps patients identify a problem, understand the problem and learn new skills to overcome the problem
• They are the tools of recover that are individualized for each patient

 

Chemical Use History

• Designed to give patients and their counselors a detailed account of the patient's use of drugs and alcohol
• Breaking through a patient's denial

 

Honesty

• An exercise that helps patients to see how they have been distorting reality
• It is an eye-opening experience for patients to realize how much they have been lying to themselves and others

 

Love, Trust and Commitment

• An exercise that helps build self-esteem
• Patients build appositive relationship with themselves and others
• Patients learn how to be loving to themselves and others

 

Feelings

• An exercise designed to help patients identify their feelings and use the appropriately to solve problems
• Chemically dependent people treat their feeling with drugs and alcohol
• Each feeling needs to be carefully processed
• Patients in treatment need a lot of practice identifying their feelings

 

Relationship Skills

• Chemically dependent people have poor relationship skills
• This exercise teaches patients how to practice healthy interpersonal relationship skills
• Nothing solidifies learning better than watching the consequence of old behavior compared to the new behavior

 

Addictive Relationships

• They can be as destructive as alcohol or drugs
• This exercise teaches the patient the difference between healthy and addictive relationships

 

Communication Skills

• An exercise for those who have a difficult time in delaying gratification and accepting responsibility for their own actions
• Poor self-discipline leads to failure
• Patients with self-discipline problems have poor problem-solving skills

 

Impulse Control

• Acting too quickly on their feelings

 

Relapse Prevention

• One of the most important aspects of chemical dependency treatment
• Patients must be willing to prevent relapse
• An exercise used to develop a relapse prevention plan
• Patients develop skills necessary to deal with high-risk situations

 

Stress Management

• Helps patients cope with stress
• The inability to handle stress effectively fuels chemical dependency
• Stress is the physiological response to the organism to a stressor
• Patients must learn to do 3 things:
• Relax twice a day
• Maintain regular exercise
• Learn coping skills to handle stress

 

In learning new coping skills, patients need to learn assertiveness skills, social skills and to increase t heir involvement in pleasurable activities

 

 

Chapter 9

The Steps

• Treatment programs differ as to which steps they address
• The more steps a patient completes, they better off they are in recovery and the further along they are in the program
• Rare is the program with more than 5 steps
• As you go through the steps, make sure patients are internalizing the material

 

The Committee

• Patients are constantly torn between the side that wants to use drugs and alcohol and the side that wants to stay clean
• Do not move onto the next step until you know the patient has understood the first

 

Step One

 

All patients work on solid Step One in treatment

It is the most important step

Without it, recovery is impossible

Step One necessitates total surrender

Step One is mainly group work

Patients must admit that they are not in control, are powerless and that their lives are unmanageable

Step Two

 

Essential to step two is willingness

Without willingness to seek a great power, patients will fail

The word sanity in AA means soundness of mind

Here is where patients look at their insane behavior

They must conclude that they cannot hold onto their old ways of thinking

Patients must be encouraged to be honest, open-minded and willing

Once patients trust the group, it can be transferred to the AA/NA group

Step Three

Most patients will have difficulty with Step 3

Here is where they can begin to feel relief emotionally

There is great hope at Step 3

Willingness is the key to Step 3

Step Four

Patients make a thorough housecleaning

They rid themselves of the guilt of the past and look forward to a new future

Patients will share Step 4 with someone of their choice in Step 5

Patients need to concentrate on the exact nature of their wrongs rather than accuse r blame other people

Step Five

Match up with someone to share Step Four inventory

This step attacks the core of the chemical disease

Make things right with yourself, others and God

Patients must come to realize they are good people

After Step 5, most patients experience