Whole Health Recovery from Addiction

If you have received a dual diagnosis for both a substance use disorder as well as a co-occurring medical or mental health disorder - or even a behavioral health disorder or an intellectual or developmental disability - you might want to consider the option of whole health recovery.

Also known as integrated treatment or dual diagnosis treatment, this type of recovery program is designed to help you manage your mental health disorder as well as ensure that you are able to overcome your substance abuse and addiction problems.

The important thing to keep in mind is that untreated and unmanaged addiction and psychiatric disorders will leave room for connections with your spiritual values. For instance, if you have been struggling with both alcohol dependence and addiction as well as major depression, you may experience feelings of worthlessness, helplessness, and a general lack of joy in your life.

The spiritual emptiness that arises in the process could also increase your chances of harming yourself or even committing suicide. Additionally, you may suffer from worsening mental health and emotional symptoms. Over time, this could contribute to higher rates of drug abuse and alcohol consumption as you attempt to fill the void that has been created.

To this end, the goal of whole health recovery is to ensure that you are able to attain the highest levels of success in your addiction treatment while also taking care to overcome all the mental health and other co-occurring disorders that you have also been diagnosed with.

About Whole Health Recovery

While seeking help for a substance use disorder from a center that uses the whole health recovery approach to treatment, you can expect to focus on the health and wellness of various aspects of your life - including your physical, psychological, and overall health. In particular, your physical wellness and health will include:

• Achieving fitness
• Avoiding the abuse of various intoxicating substances
• Carrying out certain tasks on a daily basis
• Developing relaxing skills
• Ensuring you have proper body fat
• Getting sleep and rest
• Maintaining nutrition
• Practicing positive lifestyle habits

On the other hand, emotional and mental health and psychological wellness will include:

• Accepting your personal limitations
• Learning as well as using information effectively and correctly for personal, professional, family, and career development
• Learning to deal with all new challenges that you encounter in more effective ways
• Managing stress
• Recognizing, accepting, and eventually expressing your thoughts, feelings, and emotions appropriately
• Striving for balance in play, rest, and work
• Striving for continued development and growth
• Structuring your time

In the areas of the environment, culture, and your social life, wellness will encompass the following factors:

• Developing as well as maintaining intimacy with your significant others
• Developing tolerance and respect for those who have different beliefs and opinions
• Successfully interacting with people as well as with the environment around you

On the other hand, your spiritual health will be interwoven with your emotional, mental, and physical wellness. As such, you can expect it to encompass:

• Believing in a higher power, religion, science, nature, or some other force that serves as the uniting factor for all humanity while also providing purpose and meaning to life
• Living and defining your personal ethics, values, and morals

Introducing Holistic Treatment

The concept of whole health recovery has led to the creation of holistic addiction treatment programs. Today, there has been an increase in the number of recovery facilities that adopt various holistic concepts in the treatment of substance abuse and addiction and other co-occurring mental health disorders.

The goal of these treatment programs is to provide services that are designed to address the spirit, body, and mind of the individual struggling with addiction. In such a program, your addictive symptoms will not disappear overnight. Instead, you will be required to work on improving various areas of your personal self as well as your life.

To this end, a holistic addiction treatment program will teach you that it is never enough to just quit drugs or alcohol. You also need to heal while also taking care of yourself at every phase in your life.

Most of these programs will also fuse traditional therapy and counseling concepts along with many other recovery options. These include but are not limited to music therapy, animal therapy, art therapy, exercise programs, nutritional therapy, acupuncture, and meditation - among many others.

Some of the most common forms of alternative therapies - as holistic addiction treatment is also known - include but are not limited to:

• Adventure Therapy (AT)
• Art Therapy
• Biofeedback
• Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT)
• Equine Therapy
• Mindfulness-Based Therapies
• Neurofeedback
• Psychodrama
• Yoga

Benefits of Holistic Treatment

There are several benefits that you stand to gain by choosing holistic addiction treatment. For starters, the alternative recovery methods have been proved to be effective at promoting overall mental health and wellness. It can also improve the factors that will most likely lead to higher success in terms of relapse prevention and treatment programs.

Additionally, this type of treatment can ensure that you have a more comprehensive and all-encompassing approach to long term recovery. This is in the sense that it will address your whole person - on the spiritual, physical, emotional, and mental levels.

When you ensure that none of these areas are ignored, you might be able to increase your overall chances of attaining success in the long term as well as reducing your risk of ultimate relapse.

You might also find that traditional treatment methods are intimidating. To this end, combining them with holistic addiction treatment could ensure that your recovery approach feels much more accessible than it initially was. Additionally, the experiential approaches used could uncover other issues underlying your addiction and mental illness - which might not have been revealed through talk therapy.

Getting Help

The important thing to keep in mind is that whole health recovery as supported by holistic addiction treatment could prove to be intrinsically useful to your long term sobriety while ensuring that you manage any other physical, psychological, or social disorders that you have also been struggling with alongside your substance abuse.