Individual Therapy: A Path to Self-Discovery

Addiction to drugs and alcohol does more than wipe out your physical health. It takes a toll on your mind, instilling behaviors in you that you would never have dreamt of incorporating into your life when you were sober. While a medical detox can free you of the chemical addiction your body experiences when you’re abusing drugs and alcohol, it does nothing to fix the mental health issues you’re dealing with from months or years of addiction.

Carrara Counseling Services offers individual addiction counseling to help you clear the cobwebs in your mind and see your situation clearly for the first time. Almost every addict we’ve ever treated arrives at our facility with a co-occurring mental health disorder brought about by their addiction to substances or alcohol. Your treatment at our Hollywood Hills, LA, or Malibu facilities starts with a complete assessment of your physical and mental health by qualified medical and therapy teams.

When we have your diagnosis, it’s time to move on to the next phase of your therapy – individual and group counseling sessions. These sessions have different purposes in your treatment, and both are indispensable strategies to your recovery and eventual assimilation back into society.

Let’s look at what you can expect from your individual therapy sessions at Carrara and what they’re all about.

Understanding the Power of One-on-One Therapy in Addiction Treatment

Addiction is a personal affliction and runs deep into your physiology and psychology, where it disrupts your thought patterns and behavior, drastically altering your life course. As most addicts who’ve tried to get clean understand, getting over the physical withdrawal from drugs or alcohol is hard enough, and many don’t make it through a self-detox.

But even if you do manage to get clean by yourself, what are you going to do when the psychological symptoms of your addiction rear their ugly head and start to ruin your sobriety? Personalized addiction therapy programs offered at Carrara tackle the issue of psychological dependence, helping you break free from the mental chains that addiction wraps around your psyche.

Individual therapy sessions involve you sitting down with your therapist in your private room at our facility. You’ll relax on the luxurious couches in your room or sit in bed and speak with your therapist as they walk you through the session and give you a chance to unpack your trauma. It’s a deeply intimate setting where you can feel vulnerable without being afraid of people judging you or taking advantage of you.

When you have this level of personal attention from a licensed, experienced therapist, you’re more likely to make rapid progress with freeing your mind from the clutches of addiction. You get one-on-one time with someone who’s qualified to help you unpack your mind to get to the root cause of what’s driving your addiction and why you can’t seem to stop your compulsive behavior to use. It’s an incredibly powerful tool and the crux of your treatment program here at Carrara.

What Psychotherapy Techniques are Used in Clinical Addiction Therapy Programs at Carrara?

The Carrara addiction counseling program is a tried and tested solution to helping you recover from addiction. Your individual therapy sessions play the lead role in forming the foundations of your recovery, giving you the tools you need to navigate your new life choice of staying sober. Individual therapy for drug addiction involves the use of three different therapy models in your treatment program, with each one designed to tackle the problem from a different angle.

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

You might not realize it, but your actions and behavior are the reason why you’re in this mess in the first place. Your therapist uses CBT to unpack your mind and identify the thoughts and behaviors that perpetuate your addiction. By examining your negative thinking patterns, you find where you need to change.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)

We all have conflict raging in our minds, but for the addict, the feelings of stress and negative emotions experienced every moment of every day become too much to bear. You want to brush them aside, but they dominate your thinking and your experience. DBT teaches you mindfulness strategies to handle stressful moments and it teaches you pragmatic strategies for overcoming these moments of weakness.

Somatic Trauma Therapy (STT)

Many of the addicts we speak to have a traumatic event governing their addiction cycle. They might have experienced something in their childhood or as an adult that changed the way they think about risk-taking behavior, leading them to try alcohol or drugs for the first time. Your therapist works with you to uncover these deep-seated traumas and eliminate their influence on your thinking and behavior.

From Self-Doubt to Self-Discovery: Transformational Benefits of Therapy

The transformational benefits of individual therapy for addiction are dumbfounding. At Carrara, we’ve seen people turn their lives around and make a lasting recovery from addiction with the power of personalized psychotherapy. They enter our facility and their mind is a mess, and by the time they leave, they have a new lease on life and the skills they need to stay sober for life.

Identify and Challenge Your Limiting Beliefs

What do you think is possible for you to achieve with your life? You’ve heard the claim that “we’re our own worst enemy,” and that’s a fact we can’t escape from, especially when it comes to what we think about addiction.

What you believe you will achieve, and that goes for both sides of the scale. If you believe that there’s nothing left for you in life, that you don’t deserve a life of health and wonderment, that’s exactly what you’ll get. All addicts struggle with the constant surge of feelings of worthlessness. Their self-image is terrible, and they perpetuate these feelings until they start causing issues with their mental health.

Individual therapy gives you a chance to share your thoughts and beliefs with your therapist. They’ll help you unwind the chains of negative emotions and limiting self-beliefs you’ve bestowed upon yourself. Your therapist guides you through unpacking these issues you have with yourself, giving you the tools you need to challenge and change your internal belief systems.

A Safe Space for Trauma Release

Trauma is a big deal in addiction behavior, and you probably have trauma lying deep in your subconscious that plays a huge role in your addictive behavior and tendencies. It’s hard to let go of trauma when it’s made such a massive impact on your life. It’s something that you feel you can’t disclose to anyone because you think they probably don’t want to hear about your problems, and they probably don’t care anyway.

Individual therapy for addiction gives you a way to finally let go of that trauma that’s eating your mind alive. Your session is in a private room, giving you a safe space to share what’s on your mind and what’s bothering you.

Your therapist helps you process the trauma, and through this process, it loses its hold on your mind and your thoughts. You’ll feel like the weight of the world is lifted off your shoulders as you finally come to terms with your trauma and its impact on your life and addictive behavior.

Understand Your Strengths and Weaknesses

We all have strengths and weaknesses, and everyone is more flawed than they think when it comes to being the “perfect person” society expects us to be. Do you know where your strengths and weaknesses lie? Addicts get so lost in their addictive behavioral patterns that their sole focus is on how they can get their next hit and how it will make them feel.

Giving into this pattern of self-destructive behavior makes you lose confidence and awareness in yourself. You lose the joy in life, and even your substance of choice stops bringing you joy.

What will you do if you get clean? It’s hard to think about the gaping void it will leave in your life when you no longer use your drug of choice, or you can’t take a drink after a hard day at the office.

Your therapist helps you uncover where you’re weak and where you’re strong and how you can focus on building up your weaknesses to ensure a lasting recovery.

Break Cycles of Negative Thinking and Behavior

The mind truly is the battleground of addiction, and what we think about all the time eventually becomes our reality and the foundation of what we chase in life. That’s great if you’re obsessed with building a business, and that’s all you think about. But if you’re an addict and all you can think about is your substance of choice, it’s going to create drama in your life. When all your thoughts revolve around your addiction, they’ll eventually bring up a constant cycle of negative emotions that you can’t escape from.

Your therapist helps you identify and break those negative thought patterns. They’ll teach you strategies on how to handle those thoughts as they emerge, stripping away the power they have on your thought processes and actions.

Cultivate Emotional Intelligence

The Carrara individual addiction therapy program teaches you how to connect with yourself on a deep level, building your self-awareness. You’ll learn how to get a handle on your emotions, and when you do, you’ll develop a sense of emotional intelligence in your thoughts and actions and how you communicate and see others.

Your therapist teaches you how to step back from your current position in life to see how your addiction hurts the people you love. When you finally understand what your behavior is doing to your loved ones it becomes a powerful motivating force keeping you on the path to maintaining your sobriety.

Develop Coping Mechanisms

One of the biggest advantages of individual therapy in addiction treatment is the coping strategies you learn to deal with the emotional triggers that drive your addiction.

Your therapist works with you to get a complete overview of these triggers. They’ll develop a coping strategy to help you overcome the compulsion to use.

Wrapping Up: Individual Therapy or Group Therapy?

Carrara’s individual therapy for addiction treatment is just one part of a holistic healing program designed to give you a lasting recovery. It’s not better than group therapy; it’s another approach to your treatment and a vital part of developing the skills and mindset you need to stay clean. Group therapy is just as rewarding, but it’s a different approach to the healing process. Both individual and group therapy play an important place in our treatment program.