Today, we’re glad to be able to avail from so many different means of treating our problems or mental illnesses. There are all sorts of different therapies ,and depending on your personal choice, or your capabilities at the moment, you can choose between the different ways of helping yourself.
There are individual therapies, in which you and the therapist are the only people participating. There are a lot of different types of group therapy as well, for particular problems which require particular solutions.
A very peculiar type of therapy are twelve-step programs. Such programs are based upon 12 different goals that a patient must accomplish in order to have taken all the necessary measures to treating his or her condition. First introduced in 1939 by the AA, twelve-step programs have undergone a lot of changes and development, and now there are many similar programs to help people with addictions or compulsions. Compulsive behavior can be shortly explained as a person doing something not because they want to do it in a certain way, but because the feel that it should be done, and that is strongly related to the behavior of most addicts.
Most twelve-step programs consist of the same basic principles. The first principle in every twelve-step therapy is admitting that what you are doing is wrong, and you are no longer capable of managing your own life without help. This first step is crucial , because it allows you to remind yourself that something needs to be done to treat your issues.
The rest of the steps are focused around making amends for your mistakes, or seeking an apology from the people you’ve harmed because of your problems. For example , alcoholics and narcotic users often ask for an apology from the people they’ve harmed in the times they were under the influence of those substances.
Some of the steps in twelve step programs are concerned with admitting that there’s a higher power and the patient should ask for advice and help from that higher power. Using this spiritual aspect of the program, people with religious background often see a way of healing faster, and that is what makes the program so efficient in most cases.
Learning how to accept a new code of behavior is also crucial to the use of twelve-step programs. Most of them employ the idea that the patient or the person treated should accept a new code of life that will guide him in the future, and that this code is an absolute – it cannot be mended or broken in any way. This helps most of the patients prevent relapse to the substances they used to be addicted to, since they see their new way of life as something they’ve built with hard work, and also as something that shouldn’t be removed or broken so easily.
Twelve-step programs are something very useful in the treatment of addictions , and it is the best option for interventions or support groups. If you’re a psychotherapist (or as the Danes say - godt psykoterapeut københavn), it might be a good idea for you to learn more and organize a support group in your town or area.
Hello, my name is Sawas Dee, and I live in Denmark. I want to interest you in my articles about psychology