Six Tips to Resilience in Recovery

A problem we see again and again amongst the addicts who seek help from our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program is a lack of resilience. Resilience is a term psychologists use to describe a person’s ability to bounce back from stress. All too often, people slip into addiction because they lack the coping skills that allow them to be psychologically and emotionally resilient, and recover more easily when things get tough.

As you recover from addiction in our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program, you will need to build your coping skills and develop more resilience. You probably learned unhealthy, negative survival skills when you were growing up, like disconnecting from your emotions, dissociating and abusing substances. The good news is that it’s more than possible for you to replace those negative survival skills with positive ones.

The key is to forge connections between yourself and others. You also need to take good care yourself and give yourself the chance to appreciate life – make your happiness a priority. Here are some tips from the team at our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program to help you get started.

Care for Yourself

You won’t be able to accomplish much, in our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program or in life, if you’re not taking care to see that your basic needs get met. Your ability to stay clean and manage stress depends on your commitment to good self-care. Eat right, exercise often, make time for the things and people that make you happy and get plenty of rest each night.

Cultivate Your Support System

Social support is the strong person’s secret weapon. A person who copes well with stress and hard times is a person who has many friends, loved ones and peers to turn to for support. This is why it’s important for you to develop social skills as part of your addiction treatment program. That’s also why 12-Step or other recovery support group meetings are so highly recommended.

Peers in recovery can offer you valuable support and experience as you get back on your feet. They can empathize with your struggle to resist cravings and offer advice about things that have helped them. Friends, family and loved ones can help you learn to enjoy life without substances, and learn respect, trust, empathy and appropriate behavior.

Set Goals for Yourself

Goals give you something to strive for and help you feel more confident when you accomplish them. Staying clean is a goal you’ll share with others in our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program. Taking your recovery one day at a time will help you learn to break larger goals up into manageable chunks.

Find Purpose in Suboxone Treatment Delray Beach

Having a strong sense of purpose will help you stay strong in the face of sense and keep you from taking yourself too seriously. You might find a sense of purpose from working towards your goals, sharing your strengths with others, helping the community, pursuing professional or academic achievement, helping other addicts or building a connection with your higher power.

Build Problem-Solving Skills

As you go through addiction counseling in our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program, you’ll start to develop your problem-solving skills. Problem-solving skills allow you to tackle challenges without taking actions that might make them worse, like using drugs. When you develop your problem-solving skills, you’ll be able to hold yourself accountable and take the steps you need to take to improve your own life. As you learn to anticipate the consequences of your actions, avoid the lure of instant gratification and solve your problems, you’ll become more confident and feel better about the future.

Embrace Disappointment

No matter how hard you try, you can’t escape disappointment. An important part of your addiction treatment will be learning to remember that challenges and setbacks are normal, and that they can be overcome. Instead of exaggerating setbacks and treating each challenge as a life-ruining catastrophe, embrace them as learning experiences. It’s when you find the lessons in adversity and persevere through the tough times that true strength and resilience appear.

Opiate addiction is one the rise, but our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program can help you overcome addiction and return to leading a normal life. Don’t become another statistic.

Call us today at 888-699-5679 and find out how Suboxone maintenance therapy can help you or someone you love.


Suboxone Treatment Delray Beach: Are You Ready to Recover?

If you have been struggling with opiate addiction, the Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program provided at our facility can help you get clean and return to a normal life without suffering through withdrawal symptoms. But using Suboxone for opiate maintenance is about more than avoiding withdrawals. It’s about staying clean over the long term so that you can get the counseling you need to live a drug-free life. So when you enter our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program, you can expect to be taking Suboxone to manage your opiate withdrawal symptoms for at least six months to a year.

Suboxone Is a Long-Term Opiate Maintenance Medication

Research supports the use of Suboxone as a long-term opiate maintenance medication. If you want to use Suboxone to get off of heroin or other opiate drugs, it’s best if you’re in it for the long haul. Studies show that the short-term use of Suboxone for opiate detox does very little to prevent full relapse into opiate addiction. To obtain the maximum benefit from Suboxone therapy, you should plan to remain on this medication for the long term – at least six months, but preferably for a year or even much longer.

Is It Time to For Suboxone Treatment Delray Beach Has to Offer?

The goal of Suboxone treatment for opiate withdrawals is to eventually taper off of Suboxone so that you’re living entirely drug-free. Few recovering opiate addicts will need to remain on Suboxone for the rest of their lives. But recovering from opiate addiction requires time and addiction counseling; just getting clean isn’t enough. You need to deal with the underlying issues behind your addiction, or you will eventually relapse.

We recommend that clients in our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program remain in therapy for at least two years before attempting to completely stop using Suboxone. Remember, there’s no rush; while you’re on Suboxone you’re capable of living a productive life and functioning in society, but when you stop taking Suboxone, you run the risk of relapsing into full-blown opiate addiction. Opiate addiction causes physiological changes in the brain that may be permanent, but with maintenance medications like Suboxone, you can manage the symptoms related to these changes.

Are you ready to taper off of Suboxone? Here are some signs that you may be ready to stop using Suboxone:

  • You have been in our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program from six months to two years.
  • You are at least 30 years old.
  • You have a stable job, and are financially secure.
  • You’re no longer hanging around with your old opiate-using friends.
  • You wouldn’t know where to get illicit opiates if you wanted them.
  • You have done addiction recovery work in inpatient or outpatient rehab, one-on-one counseling, and recovery support groups, and are prepared to continue doing this work.
  • You’re in a stable romantic relationship or you’re comfortable with being single.
  • You are taking your dose of Suboxone each day automatically, without feeling like you “need” it and without having a lot of complicated feelings or thoughts about it.
  • You’re comfortable lowering your daily dose of Suboxone.

Sometimes, when a client in our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program first lowers his or her dose to begin tapering off of the drug, he or she finds that he or she can’t tolerate the lower dose of Suboxone. In other words, the client begins to experience opiate withdrawal symptoms on the lower dose of Suboxone. The point of our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program is not to force a client to endure opiate withdrawal symptoms.

If you find that you experience withdrawal symptoms on a lower dose of Suboxone, or if you have trouble tolerating a lower dose of Suboxone for longer than a couple of days, you may still be able to slowly begin tapering off. We can try cycling your dose, so that you take a lower dose every other day, and your usual dose on the alternate days. Gradually, we can extend your cycle so that you are taking the lower dose two days in a row, then three days in a row, and so on.

Opiate addiction has the potential to kill.  Our  Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program saves lives. We can help you get off the roller coaster of opiate addiction and start feeling normal again as soon as your first day of treatment.

Call us today at 888-699-5679 to learn more.


Suboxone Treatment Delray Beach Programs Report Rise in Cases of Heroin Addiction

Heroin use – and overdose deaths – has been skyrocketing around the country and South Florida is no exception. Our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program has seen an increase in the numbers of heroin addicts coming in for treatment. Similar drug treatment programs in Broward County have seen an 87 percent spike in heroin admissions in 2012 alone.

Heroin overdoses in Delray Beach alone have shot up from three in 2012 to 27 in 2013. Now, authorities are finding bags of heroin laced with the powerful synthetic opiate drug fentanyl. Fentanyl is five times more potent than heroin, according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC).

The Fentanyl-laced bags of heroin present a real overdose danger to people in need of our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program, because many of the people who buy these bags of heroin don’t know what they’re getting. Dr. Rodriguez, the physician in charge of our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program, would like heroin users to remember that there’s no regulatory body overseeing the quality, purity or potency of illegal drugs.

Why Do Addicts Overdose?

Addicts overdose because they take more drugs than they can handle. Sometimes the people in need of our Suboxone treatment program aren’t aware of the potency of a particular batch of heroin, and use too much.

Over time, addicts build up a tolerance to their drug of choice – we see it all the time in people who come in to our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program for treatment. As they build a higher tolerance, they must take ever-higher doses of the drug to get the same effect.

Then something happens to affect the addict’s tolerance. Maybe they come into our Suboxone treatment program for treatment, get clean for a while, and then relapse. Even if the addict doesn’t come in to our Delray Beach treatment program, there are other factors that can affect his or her tolerance level. The supply of drugs might dry up, for instance, or the addict might have trouble getting money to buy drugs, or the addict may simply end up using less potent heroin for at time. No matter what the cause, a drop in tolerance can mean one more addict who never lives to get help from our Suboxone treatment.

Where’s All This Heroin Coming From Anyway?

The heroin sending record numbers of people into programs like our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program is the purest and strongest heroin that’s been seen in the United States for years. The brown powder and black-tar heroin from Mexico that used to send people into our treatment programs has been supplanted by pure white powder heroin from South America.

“Hillbilly Heroin” Has Given Way to Actual Heroin

When we started our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program years ago, it was with the goal of helping prescription painkiller addicts. Prescription painkiller addiction quickly became a huge problem throughout the country after opiate painkillers like Oxycontin hit the market in the 1990s. Dr. Rodriguez was one of the first addiction specialists to address the problem when he established our Suboxone treatment program in Delray. Prescription painkillers became known as “hillbilly heroin” because rates of opiate addiction were highest in Appalachian states like West Virginia.

“Pill mill” doctors in Florida doled out these drugs indiscriminately, to both locals and “drug tourists.” Our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program helped those struggling with opiate addiction to get clean.

Law enforcement officers cracked down on pill mills, but that wasn’t enough to eliminate the need for programs like our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program. Here at our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach facility, we understand that taking away an addict’s drug of choice isn’t enough to end that person’s thrall to addiction – especially if a cheap, plentiful substitute drug is available. The pill mill crackdown saw most prescription painkiller addicts turn to heroin, instead of to programs like our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program.

If you or someone you know is using heroin, please call our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program right away. Don’t take even one more dose – just call our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program now at 888-699-5679.


Suboxone Treatment in Delray Beach Is Not Drug Abuse

Our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach is one option for the treatment of opiate addiction. It’s valuable for many people because opiates are so addictive that it’s practically impossible to “quit cold turkey” when you’re addicted to these drugs. Not to mention, less than 25 percent of patients who quit using opiates “cold turkey” remain clean and sober after the first year. Opiate addiction is a chronic condition with a high relapse rate; our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program mitigates the risk of relapse.

How Our Suboxone Treatment Delray Beach Program Works

Patients who enter our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program receive a medical evaluation from our physician, Dr. Raul Rodriguez, who has more than ten years of experience treating opiate addiction and personally spearheaded the development of outpatient opiate treatment programs like our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program.

On the first day of our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program, the recovering opiate addict is given a dose of Suboxone sufficient to relieve their symptoms entirely. It’s important that the addict experience complete relief of symptoms throughout our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program, to reduce the risk of relapse.

Over the course of our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program, the recovering opiate addict is slowly weaned off the drugs until he or she can finally stop taking Suboxone with few or no withdrawal symptoms. Unlike methadone maintenance programs, our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program allows you to obtain your medication in the privacy of a doctor’s office. You’ll be allowed to take a supply of your medication home with you to take each day at the time that’s best for you. We recommend you take your medication in the morning, since it can cause a boost of energy. Some people who take Suboxone at night report problems sleeping.

How Our Suboxone Treatment Delray Beach Program Is Different from Drug Abuse

People who claim that opiate maintenance programs like our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program are just legitimizing drug abuse or “replacing one addiction with another” do not understand the nature and efficacy of opiate maintenance programs. Taking Suboxone under the supervision of a doctor is not drug abuse, for several reasons. They include:

  • Taking Suboxone as part of our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program does not get you high. Buprenorphine, the active ingredient in Suboxone, is a partial opioid agonist, meaning it only stimulates the brain’s opioid receptors enough to relieve withdrawal symptoms – but not to cause the euphoria that makes opiate drugs so addictive.
  • If a person participating in our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program does take a full opioid agonist – like morphine, heroin or prescription painkillers – he or she won’t feel the effects of the opioid. Naloxone, another ingredient in Suboxone, will block those effects. Therefore, our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program prevents illegal drug abuse.
  • People taking Suboxone as part of our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program aren’t doing it recreationally or to have a good time. They’re taking Suboxone to treat the symptoms of a medical condition, in this case, opiate addiction.
  • Our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program ends the high-low cycle of addiction. People in our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program no longer swing from the euphoria of an opiate high to the agony of opiate withdrawals. Along with eliminating withdrawal symptoms, the treatment also removes the euphoric highs. The recovering addict is evened out – he or she feels normal and can function normally. Drug abuse does not allow a person to function or feel normal.

Our Suboxone Treatment Delray Beach Program Is Effective

Studies show that programs like our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program are effective – in one study conducted by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, 650 people struggling with addiction to prescription painkillers were treated with Suboxone, in a program similar to our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program. Forty-nine percent of the study participants experienced improvement while being treated with Suboxone.

If you or someone you care about is struggling with opiate addiction, our Suboxone treatment Delray Beach program can help. Call The Delray Center for Healing today at 1-888-699-5679 to learn more about our program and what it can do for you.