Finding the Right Help for Women Suffering from Addiction
Drug and alcohol addictions exert much damage on the body’s chemical processes as well as on a person’s psychological well-being. From a physiological standpoint, men and women’s bodies respond differently to any one drug’s effects. The same is true when it comes to the psychological effects of drugs.
Oftentimes, women seeking help for addiction do so in response to societal pressures and everyday obligations. Addiction help for women attempts to use these motivating factors throughout the treatment process.
As women tend to take a more emotional view within their day-to-day lives, the types of supportive therapies used in drug treatment can go a long way towards providing the type of help for women most needed.
In today’s modern-age, women take on a variety of roles within the lives of the people around them. As such, addiction help for women should take a multi-pronged treatment approach that provides the range of services women most need to rebuild their lives in recovery.
Issues Surrounding Addiction Help for Women
Multi-pronged, collaborative treatment programs help women overcome addiction.
Compared to men, society and the family place more pressure on women to get treatment once addiction starts affecting their lives. According to Westminster College, these pressures account for why women tend to seek treatment sooner than men once addiction becomes an issue. In general, drugs tend to “invade” women’s bodies more aggressively than men in terms of the damaging effects drugs have on the body. This physiological difference also influences why women tend to seek treatment sooner rather than later.
Programs offering addiction help for women understand how women’s roles in everyday life influence their desire to get well. Once in treatment, many women face challenges involving unemployment, childcare as well as underlying emotional issues that fuel addiction’s drug-seeking behaviors.
Treatment programs with experience in offering help for women are able to support the fundamental motivations that prompt a woman to get addiction help.
Supportive Therapies
As males are more statistically likely to become addicted to drugs or alcohol, males tend to outnumber females in drug treatment programs. As a result, traditional drug treatment approaches work from a more male-centered perspective. In doing so, these programs fail to provide the type of addiction help for women that’s needed.
According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, women battling addictions gain more benefit from supportive therapies as opposed to the more confrontational-type approaches used in traditional drug treatment programs. Likewise, programs offering help for women will place more emphasis on supportive or nurturing approaches when conducting psychotherapy and group counseling sessions.
Collaborative Treatment Approach
Addiction programs that use collaborative, supportive treatment approaches can best provide help for women in the areas that most hamper their recovery path. Collaborative treatment approaches provide help in a wide range of areas while at the same time addressing substance abuse issues.
Collaborative treatment approaches meet a woman’s primary needs by providing assistance with housing, employment, transportation and childcare. In turn, drug treatment supports work towards building on a woman’s strengths and motivations to maintain abstinence based on a goal-oriented plan. In effect, these types of treatment programs use a “woman-based” approach to drug treatment.
