What Is Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, And How Can It Help People Recover From Drug Or Alcohol Addiction?
Drug or alcohol addiction can damage your relationship with friends and family, and it can also have serious financial and legal consequences. Quitting drugs and alcohol and avoiding relapse can help you repair the relationships in your life and get it back on track.
One method that can help is rational emotive behavior therapy, which helps you deal with cravings as a result of a stressful event occurring in your life. REBT is very useful for people who are having difficulty avoiding relapse, and it's also suitable for people who are trying to quit drugs and alcohol for the first time. To learn more about REBT and how it can help people recover from drug or alcohol addiction, read on.
What Is Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy?
REBT is a form of psychotherapy that teaches you how to recognize the difference between rational beliefs and irrational beliefs. It's based on the idea that a person's reaction to a stressful event is based on what they believe about it rather than the event itself.
Irrational beliefs typically involve assuming the worst possible outcome of a negative event that happened in your life. If a presentation at work goes poorly, for example, an irrational belief about the event would be assuming that it would lead to you getting fired and being unable to pay your bills.
The purpose of REBT is to teach you how to identify irrational beliefs and replace them with rational ones. Your therapist will teach you strategies that you can use to identify irrational beliefs as soon as they come into your head. You'll be able to slow down and think through an event and its possible outcomes logically, allowing you to form a rational belief about the event and avoid reacting poorly to it.
How Can Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy Help Someone Recover From Addiction?
When it comes to treating addiction, the main benefit of REBT is that it can help you deal with triggers that make you feel the need to drink alcohol or use drugs. When a stressful event occurs, your immediate reaction may be a craving for drugs or alcohol. REBT teaches you how to identify the way that you react to stressful events by changing your beliefs about them, which helps you break the cycle that makes it difficult to become sober and stay clean.
Overall, REBT helps you slow down your initial reaction to stressful events in your life that trigger cravings for drugs and alcohol. By learning to spot irrational beliefs and replace them with more helpful rational beliefs, stressful events will feel less catastrophic, and this helps you avoid drinking alcohol or using drugs as a coping mechanism for them.
If you're having difficulty becoming sober or staying that way, find an addiction recovery program near you that offers REBT sessions for addiction treatment. You'll work with a therapist to learn how you can avoid the link between stress and feeling the urge to drink or use drugs. Reach out to addiction recovery programs near you to learn more.
Share