Is Addiction, Medicating & Numbing Holding You Back From Being Your Best Self? Is Codependency and caretaking keeping you for speaking your truth?
Does your life seem consumed by consequences from drinking, over eating, using porn, or even perfectionism? Have you had a DUI, or had to lie to a loved one about where you’ve been or what you’re doing. Are you sick and tired of feeling sick and tired? Maybe everything seems fine on the outside, but on the inside, you’re struggling with low self-esteem and deprecating self-talk. Perhaps you’re dealing with unexpressed feelings of sadness, resentment, grief or loss. Covering or masking feelings with substances and behaviors only works temporarily. The difficult feelings return, along with the cravings. Despite promising yourself in the morning that you won’t drink that drink, eat that junk food, or zone out with hours of screen time, you may find yourself doing the same thing over again. Perhaps you’re withdrawing from others and retreating into medicating and numbing, sliding deeper and deeper into loneliness and isolation.
When treating codependency, you can be overly reliant on managing your partner or managing your expectations. This can also show up as perfectionism, medicating with work or exercise, or being overly involved in your children’s lives. When treating addiction and medicating, you can be overly reliant on alcohol, food, “healthy living,” chaos, money, busyness or religion. This can also show up as abusing medication, nicotine, sex and pornography, and of course any other drug. While these can affect you physically in different ways, the outcome is the same-a lack of true connection and intimacy with self and others.
If you are frustrated, lonely or tired and questioning how you got here, you are in the right place. Our therapists at Relationship Enrichment Center in Matthews, NC help people define and create their recovery. Recovery is living a full, connected, and joyful life without using medicators to numb out. Recovery is possible when there is balance in the physical, mental, emotional, financial, relational, and spiritual. Moving forward, we will mostly use the term “medicators” rather than addiction.
One of the most helpful quotes regarding codependency, medicating and addiction is “the absence of substances and medicating behaviors is not the same thing as recovery.” Meaning, it takes a lot more to treat the problem than just helping someone to stop their behavior.
Our Therapeutic Approach
From a relational perspective, medicating wreaks havoc on relationships. Medicating impacts the lives of loved ones and the relationship with yourself. When loved ones have better support for themselves, it increases the likelihood they will be more supportive, in more conducive and healthier ways, to the person using. We help to heal strained relationships by teaching new ways to relate with and communicate to loved ones while also taking better care of yourself. We provide couple and family therapy (provide link) as well as group therapy (provide link.) Group therapy is a proven way to safely work on relationship skills that translate to healthier relationships outside the therapy office.
From an attachment perspective, one way of defining addiction is “developing an unhealthy attachment to something that alleviates emotional and physical pain.” When we heal your attachment wounds (a term we use to describe anyone who experienced less than nurturing relationships, especially in childhood), there is a greater likelihood of remission. We help you heal these unhealthy attachments to numbing and medicating behaviors, while helping you repair old relationships and create new ones. This is done through individual therapy, intensives, workshops, group therapy, and help with finding support groups in the community.
From a trauma perspective, anyone with an attachment wound would fall under the category of having trauma. However, there are many types of trauma: childhood, religious, betrayal, divorce, narcissistic abuse, medical, just to name a few. Trauma keeps the body in a state of hypoarousal (not feeling) or hyperarousal (feeling way too much.) In order to cope with this, many people turn to medicators to feel relief. Everyone’s story and body is different and therefore, one type of therapy isn’t a fix all for everyone. We offer many types of trauma therapy including Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, IFS, Transforming Touch, and Psychodrama and Experiential therapy. All of these modalities work best when the medicating is arrested.
From a medical perspective, stress, loneliness, and using substances wreaks havoc on the body. We educate on how the body is affected by high stress or use of substances and how it will feel during and after detox. It can be maddening to still feel unwell even months after one stops using substances. We teach new ways of managing stress by teaching about connection. Most people who have been medicating in codependency or substances have practically earned a PhD in isolation. What we teach at Relationship Enrichment Center is how to do life in connection, rather than doing it alone.
From a spiritual perspective, one definition of spirituality is being connected to a greater whole that is around us. By the time people reach adulthood, they are often burdened with unhelpful beliefs about themselves and others, and have lost touch with things that make them feel alive. Reconnecting to nature, hobbies, their bodies, fun, pleasure, joy, laughter, and peace is essential for living a full life. Spirituality is not the same thing as religion, and we often help those that have experienced religious trauma and banished all spiritual connection from their lives.
Together you can do what you cannot do alone.
If you are ready to see, feel, and experience what it’s like to live your life with a stronger connection to yourself and others, start the online intake process or call our intake coordinator at 704-804-0810.
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