Does drug rehab work?

Don't you just love loaded questions? Depending on who you ask, you'll get radically different answers about the success rates of rehabilitation. Even about particular rehab programs, you will get huge swings of opinion. Take twelve step programs for instance. My sister-in-law believes they don't work. The funny part is that as long as she believes that, it's true for her.

I've read through the entire workbook for a twelve step program produced by my church. They worked with Alcoholics Anonymous to develop an adapted faith-based program. I was impressed with the program. It's designed for addicts of all sorts. Emotional addicts, chemical dependency, and a whole raft of other problems can all be addressed through the program with minor adjustments. I decided that reading it wasn't enough for me to really understand it, so I've actually gone through the first third (so far) of the material meeting all the requirements and answering all the questions on my own as a self-help guide.

So far, I don't see what there is to the program that wouldn't work. The twelve steps are represented by honesty, hope, trust in God, truth, confession, change of heart, humility, seeking forgiveness, restitution and reconciliation, daily accountability, personal revelation, and service. There's nothing shocking or contrary to be found in the whole list.

I can see how several of those steps can be terrifying to someone into a problem way over their head. It can be intimidating for me, when my goal with the personal review of the program is to change some fairly minor aspects of my life.

I can also see that such a program, when applied properly, can transform a person. It can help them to purge the part of their life that is destroying them, and replace it with peace, joy and success. Successful rehabilitation programs can give back things that seem impossible to achieve when viewed from the depths of addiction.

The answer is "YES," these programs can work. They do work, but not for everyone, and not with great predictability. No program will succeed if the addict is unwilling to change absolutely everything that needs to change. No fair holding onto that one questionable friendship. Keeping a stash hidden away for emergencies is admitting defeat. Thinking you know better than the ones running the program is a major sign of pending failure. Deciding you can skip a step because it sounds too hard or pointless will likely doom the effort.

The net result is that success requires several things, many of which are really hard to give. These things include submission, humility, and a desire to do whatever it is required to succeed. Success is also a bit different than some might expect. It may not mean getting back to the way things were. For some, that restoration is just impossible. Everyone else's lives keep moving forward, and if an addict checks out for a few years, the world just isn't the same when they come back. The children we care for have grown over the past two and a half years. Their parents just can't get that time back. But the parents can change, move forward, and be a part of the lives of their children in the future with planning and hard work.

Sorry for not having an easy solution that will work for everyone in minimum time, but that's the way things work. Free will plays a huge part, and if will is opposed to recovery, then recovery fails. If free will is applied entirely to recovering no matter what is required, then success is simply waiting in the wings for the work to be done.

If you are the one wanting to recover, make the sacrifice to start now with your entire heart. If you're concerned about a loved one, support the good decisions they make, and let them know that you approve of their good efforts. It could be all that's needed to nudge them from failure to success.