How Cocaine Addiction Treatment Helps You Overcome Drug Cravings
Anyone who’s abused cocaine on a continuous basis and tried to cut back has likely experienced how powerful drug cravings can be. Likewise, people who’ve remained abstinent for months or years at a time can still be lured back to the wiles of cocaine addiction through a random craving.
Besides helping you break the body’s physical dependence on the drug, cocaine addiction treatment equips you with the tools needed to overcome the mind’s dependence on cocaine. As drug cravings ultimately become the main obstacle to maintaining abstinence for any length of time, most of the cocaine addiction treatment process entails helping people overcome drug cravings.
What Drives Cocaine Cravings?
For most people, cocaine addiction starts out as a casual indulgence or experimentation with the drug. At this early stage, it’s the physical effects of the drug that pull a person in as cocaine interferes with the brain’s natural chemical makeup. According to Macalester College, once drug use progresses to a daily habit, the mind starts to develop a psychological dependence on the drug.
In essence, this psychological dependence lies at the heart of addiction as a person’s thinking and emotions become enmeshed in the addiction cycle. Ultimately, it’s the mind’s psychological dependence on the drug that drives cocaine cravings.
Cocaine Addiction Treatment Objectives
Drug Education
The first step in the cocaine addiction treatment process works to help addicts understand how cocaine’s effects in the brain perpetuate continued drug use. Understanding the workings of addiction better equips a person to take control of his or her ability to choose when the urge to use cocaine arises, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. As ongoing abstinence entails a day-to-day effort, addicts can make daily life choices from an informed perspective when they know how the drug works.
Talk Therapy
Talk therapy helps recovering addicts change their drug-using thought patterns.
Helping a person identify and work through addiction-based thinking and behaviors makes up the bulk of the cocaine addiction treatment process. Talk therapy plays an integral role in helping recovering addicts dismantle the faulty belief systems and thinking patterns that feed drug cravings. Replacing this addiction mindset with healthy ways of viewing self and others goes a long way towards breaking the mind’s dependence on cocaine’s effects.
Behavioral-Based Treatment
Someone who’s struggled with addiction for months or years at a time has likely fallen into a lifestyle that supports continued drug use. An addiction lifestyle develops out of the destructive thinking and resulting emotional patterns that cocaine abuse breeds.
Cocaine addiction treatment programs use behavioral-based treatments as a means for helping addicts replace addiction-based behaviors with healthy ways of coping with daily life stressors. Behavioral treatment also entails taking a proactive approach to overcoming drug cravings by helping you develop relapse prevention strategies.
Considerations
Cocaine exists as one of the most aggressive, addictive drugs on the market. This means cocaine addictions tend to develop quickly, trapping a person inside the effects of the drugs via the declining state of the brain’s chemical system. Cocaine addiction treatment specializes in equipping people to overcome lingering drug cravings on a day-to-day basis.
If you or someone you know struggles with cocaine addiction cravings, please feel free to call Cocaine.org’s toll-free helpline at 800-934-3781(Who Answers?) to speak with one of our addictions specialists.