Healing from Old Addiction

After interviewing several recovering drug and alcohol addicts, I found them to have one thing in common: after choosing to clean out their lives, they had to start over from scratch. This did not mean necessarily that they had to find a new job and new relatives. Rather, it meant that their experience and knowledge of life had to be reformed, rather like they were children or babies inside of an adult’s body. There were of course many memories, but the reasoning part of the brain, the part that especially identifies who is what and what makes an identity whole again was gone.

Many friends and family members of addicts see their loves ones becoming less and less like themselves as they fall into their substance abuse. This is because as the substance abuse grows stronger, their identities are essentially being washed away. While, yes, many addicts retain old characteristics, the fullness of the character and depth of the person in their right mind has been diluted. This dilution continues until the individual is no longer the same person as they were before.

This means that, even after addiction has occurred and been recovered from, the individual will never have the same personality, same characteristic, or the same nature that they had in the past. Even if they come out of their addiction and build a whole new life for themselves, they must still rebuild their own personalities. That is quite difficult enough, to begin with. However, the real point is that they are never the same person as they were before the abuse. They are almost a completely different individual, with the same body, perhaps, but not the same mind.

As you see, drug abuse and alcoholism are dangerous problems to have and to behold. Workplace drug testing and alcohol testing were originated to help companies identify who is falling under this cloud, and who is able to maintain their own lives, addiction free. The end result is that onsite drug screening is needed by businesses all over Australia. 

This article has been taken from http://mediscreen.net.au/articles/?p=2449