People who suffer from substance use disorders (SUDs) are highly unlikely to openly discuss it with anyone. This holds the same even for therapists and support groups, which are normally attributed to people who are struggling with addiction and mental illness.
This is where individual therapy works best as it offers an intimate and safe environment to express themselves, giving the patient the privacy they need.
Individual therapy, however, goes far beyond just giving someone in recovery the benefit of privacy. This form of therapy could give specific benefits for those deemed to respond to it better than to other forms of care.
At Legends Recovery in Green Springs and Cleveland, Ohio, our facilities provide various treatments including individual therapy to help people from all walks of life manage their conditions successfully.
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Therapists will typically suggest a treatment form for a particular patient based on what could prove to be the most effective type of treatment based on an initial evaluation. One of the benefits of psychotherapy is that the patient will also be a contributor in determining what’s best for their needs.
These factors are important to consider because not only will an ineffective treatment form be an utter waste of time, but it could also leave the patient in a state where they have less faith in the efficacy of such treatments.
People think that talk therapy is just all about talking. The truth of it is that talk therapy requires a good deal of courage. Most people who need therapy don’t want to talk about it, mostly because it holds up a mirror to their own perceived defects and imperfections.
During individual therapy, however, there is the benefit of a one-on-one setting where exposure to others is kept to a minimum. This kind of setting lessens the need to muster up the kind of courage required to sit and talk with a group of people and discuss the potentially uncomfortable details of addiction.
Contrary to most depictions in popular media where the therapist tends to ramble on about details that have viewers wondering “what does that have to do with the problem?” therapists who facilitate individual therapy prefer to delve into deep and meaningful conversations that would lead the discussion to the heart of the problem.
From there, the therapist works with the patient to foster a better understanding of the problem, how evasion of the problem would only aggravate it, and how a conscious effort to solve the problem is the only lasting solution to it. Time wasted on unproductive and unguided discussions will only serve to make the therapy longer, and decrease the chances of success with the treatment.
People in the grip of a substance abuse disorder tend to veer away from the truth. Whether it be to hide their condition from others or because they could not admit it to themselves, people suffering from an addiction will exercise a good amount of dishonesty with anything relevant to their condition.
This tendency for dishonesty will only aggravate the person’s condition, not because of reasons tied in with morality, but because it drives them further away from any realization of just how serious their situation is. The further they go from the realization that they need to open up for treatment, the less their chances of responding better to any kind of treatment given to them.
One of the major difficulties of people who suffer from a substance abuse disorder is the inability to effectively communicate what they are going through. This difficulty in communication could be due to many things, not the least of which is the period where they kept to themselves and avoided seeing or talking to others.
Not being able to talk to others will not just diminish their speech capabilities, but it would also greatly affect their socialization skills as well. Individual therapy gives the person the chance to communicate with someone again and is the perfect jump-off point to learn how to socialize with others once more. Communicating and socializing with others also require a certain amount of knowledge of borders and limitations. People who live in isolation tend to forget this fact.
People close to someone with a substance abuse disorder will notice several unpleasant changes in the person suffering from the addiction. The changes could include a desire to be left alone, a tendency to be irritable, a flair for sudden outbursts, and other behavioral patterns that cause people to stay away from them.
People suffering from a substance abuse disorder exhibit these traits as a form of defense mechanism, even if they do not need to be defensive about anything. These mechanisms are identified, discussed, and addressed in individual therapy so that the people who care for the person with addiction are not pushed further away by their aberrant behavior.
People who suffer from addiction tend to develop a severe mistrust of others. This could be due to fear of being judged harshly, being persecuted for some perceived wrong they did while doing substances, or simply because of the skewed thinking brought about by their use of whatever substance they are hooked on.
The environment provided in individual therapy is one of privacy and security so that patients undergoing this type of therapy are better able to feel safe enough to open up about what they are going through. Encouraging a person with trust issues to invest trust while undergoing treatment will be immensely difficult because of how they feel while deprived of their substances, which is why patients first need to be made to feel safe and secure while in therapy.
Many people who go through addiction admit to “not knowing who they are anymore” at some point during their substance abuse disorder. This is not a mere exaggeration of how they feel or a false perception of what they were going through. Everyone who suffered from one form of addiction or another will come to a point where the only thing they know is that they need to get another dose or hit from the substance that they are addicted to.
This removes any other thought they might have about anything else, including their sense of self. To make matter worse, people going through addiction will go through severe behavioral changes, further creating a sense of alienation from who they were before the addiction. Individual therapy slowly guides the person back to identifying who they are and what they are all about. For many, it even becomes a period of discovery, as they learn more things about themselves they did not know before the treatment.
Apart from being an important component of addiction rehabilitation, individual therapy has also been used in the treatment of other conditions that have to do with a person’s way of thinking and behavior.
This includes:
The caring and secure environment fostered in individual therapy are essential because people who require this kind of treatment are often in an extremely vulnerable state for one reason or another. In many instances, the person suffering from the condition might not be completely aware that they have the condition.
The main driving component of any kind of therapy used to treat addiction is that it is effective in helping the patient to stay away from using substances again once they complete their rehabilitation.
This could only be done through a focused approach during therapy where no effort is wasted on strategies and methods that will yield mediocre results at best. Individual therapy capitalizes on the fact that the therapist alone has the attention of the patient and there are no other distracting elements during therapy.
This is how the therapist is better able to win the patient’s trust and get them to open up to further discussions about their condition. Therapy also necessarily requires the complete engagement and commitment of both therapist and patient in the effort. As distractions during individual therapy are kept to a minimum, chances of keeping the patient engaged and committed to the treatment are increased exponentially, as compared to other forms of therapy.
Treatment is a crucial part of recovery. In many cases, ineffective treatment will not only prolong the path to recovery, it might even make the patient fall by the wayside. This why we here at Legends Recovery make a point to ensure that the people we help receive the treatment that is best suited to their needs.
We don’t suggest any kind of treatment or therapy without first making sure that it addresses all the needs and concerns relevant to the condition the patient might have.
We do this because we know that one chance is all the patient might have, which is why we do no less than our best to get it right the first time around. Contact our admissions team today to get started!
