Is There a Difference Between Therapy and Counseling?
When overcoming an addiction, you may discuss your challenges with a licensed mental health professional during counseling or therapy sessions. These mental health treatments can help you understand yourself, build your resilience, and relieve mental and emotional distress. Both counselors and therapists use clinical techniques that can help you recover, but their credentials and approaches may differ. Therapists treat mental health conditions, while substance abuse counselors treat addictive behavior. Substance abuse counseling tends to be programmatic, practical, and results-oriented, while therapy is a more exploratory, long-term treatment that addresses underlying mental health issues.
Counseling for Addiction
Counseling for addiction can provide you with focused guidance that helps you actively and directly face immediate challenges to your sobriety. Counselors will try to help you mitigate or avoid legal, financial, and medical difficulties and toxic situations threatening your quality of life.
Therapy for Addiction
Therapy for addiction focuses on helping you understand the feelings and circumstances that contribute to your addiction. A therapist will help you explore your past and identify and change negative thought patterns. The practice should help you build the resilience to avoid self-destructive behavior and work toward setting and reaching your goals.
Therapists and counselors who work with substance abuse patients often have overlapping training and skill sets. Some mental health professionals become cross-licensed so they can provide their patients with comprehensive, personalized treatment.
Why Is It Important to Get Therapy or Counseling for Addiction?
The importance of counseling and therapy is reflected in the increased success addicts experience in maintaining long-term sobriety. Recovering substance abusers are much more likely to deal with their addictions successfully if they have access to the right tools and support system as challenges arise.
Identify Circumstances That Can Contribute to Substance Abuse
Difficult moments can create unpleasant emotions that contribute to ongoing substance use. Suppose you can recognize how your relationships and life experiences affect your substance use. In that case, you can address feelings of disconnection, anxiety, and unhappiness that can make you vulnerable to relapse.
Get the Tools You Need to Stay Sober
People often develop substance use disorders when they are coping with stress. Unfortunately, self-medicating with substances is usually harmful in the long run. When substances become a habitual escape, tools like exercise, meditation, and journaling can help you re-engage with life and achieve positive outcomes.
Gain Accountability
Being accountable to the people helping you recover can help you normalize a lifestyle of sobriety. Committing to change involves taking on the responsibility to do right by yourself and your community.
Receive Personalized Support
Counselors and therapists can help you work through addiction and mental distress by providing strategies to maintain resilience as you face addiction-related challenges.
Receive Peer Support
Group meetings with peers can help you feel less alone during recovery. Talking with people with similar experiences can help you build healthy relationships.
Gain Strategies That Help You Maintain Long-Term Sobriety
Changing how you respond to people and situations that threaten your sobriety or avoiding them altogether while engaging in healthy activity can help you succeed in recovery.
Reduce the Risk of Relapse
Recovery counseling and therapy can help you develop sustainable support systems that can help you avoid a relapse. When you know you have people to rely on in challenging times, it will be easier to heal and uphold your commitment to sobriety.
Increase Your Self-Awareness
Honest introspection in a safe environment can help you explore your feelings and needs. When you set goals for how you want your life to be, you will be more motivated to make the necessary changes to improve it.
What Are the Benefits of Therapy and Counseling?
Therapy and counseling can provide you with several benefits, including:
- better interpersonal and communication skills
- improved self-esteem
- reduced incidence of self-destructive behavior
- improved ability to manage anger and stress
- improved conflict resolution skills
- reduced anxiety
- better decision-making and problem-solving skills
- increased confidence
What Are the Different Types of Therapy and Counseling?
Many modalities of counseling and therapy can be used to treat addiction. Family, personal, group, and aftercare counseling can be used individually or together to promote healing.
Treatments pursued during therapy and counseling sessions may include:
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
If you have negative thinking patterns, you may feel powerless, anxious, and depressed. Cognitive behavioral therapy can help you practice healthier ways of thinking to help you deal with triggers, cravings, and stress as you maintain sobriety and achieve your goals.
12-Step Therapy
12-Step therapy treats addiction as a physical and spiritual disease. As you recover, you will give and receive peer support in a community of individuals who share a similar goal of sobriety. 12-step therapy helps you develop healthy relationships and learn to trust and speak freely in a safe space. It promotes introspection and helps clients develop the resilience they need to thrive.
Other Therapeutic Modalities
When dealing with your addiction, finding a therapeutic modality that works for you is imperative. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), and person-centered therapy are just a few of the treatment options that can help you on the road to recovery.
Cypress Lake Recovery Provides Addiction Counseling and Therapy in Woodville, TX
The importance of counseling and therapy cannot be understated when it comes to staying sober. Cypress Lake Recovery offers holistic, personalized addiction and mental health treatment in an inclusive, therapeutic environment. Our Woodville, TX, counseling and recovery center is in a beautiful natural sanctuary promoting wellness and healing. When you’re ready to make a change, contact our team and get started on the path to a better life.
