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One on One Counseling, better known as individual psychotherapy, is an essential part of drug rehabilitation. It starts while the client is still inpatient and continues on as an essential part of aftercare. A patient may or may not see the same counselor the saw while an inpatient.  Regardless, one of a counselor’s jobs is to unify and integrate all the information and education a patient learned while staying in inpatient care, and helping the patient make use of it. Individual sessions tend to be 50 minutes long, once a week.

 

Individual psychotherapy seeks to explore how the client’s thoughts and emotions work together to either relieve or aggravate the stresses in life. A counselor is looking for those situations and feelings that combine to produce a relapse trigger and work with the client to find better ways of coping than abusing substances.

 

A relapse trigger is a particular co-occurrence of events and emotions that prompt a person to abuse substances. Once a person is in recovery, returning to drug abuse is a called a relapse. Relapse prevention is a big part of one on one counseling. The counselor seeks to find the client’s areas of improvement when it comes to stress management and behavior control. Many people with addiction problems tend toward impatience and the desire for a quick fix. They also demonstrate areas of high impulsivity.

 

Learning to regulate one’s emotions and behaviors is a goal of therapy. There are many techniques to accomplish this; some are in the Cognitive Behavioral or Rational-Emotive Behavior modes, where a client, with a counselor’s assistance, examines events in terms of how each step in each event tended to escalate toward a negative outcome, which based upon a feeling, translated to abusing substances.

Once relapse triggers are identified and skills are developed by the client to defuse them, a great deal of relapse management is then underway. One on one therapy is also extremely helpful for learning better coping and stress management skills, which can help the client in the work and home environment.

One on one therapy is an absolute essential for staying in recovery. Having the full attention of an addiction specialist throughout recovery is invaluable and can help shore up and reinforce recovery for life.

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