Inpatient alcohol rehab is the most intensive form of alcohol addiction treatment available. At most inpatient rehab facilities, you will attend programming anywhere between 5 to 8 hours per day, 5 days per week. In addition to attending programs during the day, you also remain in the facility or an offsite residential location overnight.
During inpatient alcohol rehab, you go through your program with many individuals who are just like you. Your alcoholism may have made you feel incredibly alone, especially if you chose to drink by yourself. While in rehab, though, you will develop close bonds with those who are in your program with you. Recovery is much easier when you stick close to a group and inpatient rehab makes it easy to build that group.
Inpatient alcohol rehab uses multiple types of therapies to approach the treatment of your alcoholism. Individual therapy with your own counselor allows you to work through difficult private issues that cause you to drink the way you do. Group therapy helps you process through triggering situations on a group level with input from your peers who are in treatment with you.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
Cognitive behavioral therapy is the most popular type of therapy used during alcohol rehab. CBT operates under the understanding that your thoughts influence your behavior. By working through and adjusting negative thought patterns, CBT aims to change your resulting behaviors. Therapists who use this model believe that your reaction to a situation has more to do with your perception of that situation than the situation itself.
CBT is beneficial for alcoholics in early recovery because many alcoholics drink as a reaction to situations around them. While plenty of people who struggle with alcohol dependence eventually drink regardless of the situations they find themselves in, alcoholism usually starts somewhere. People begin to drink heavily as a result of various types of hardships.
If these traumatic situations are never addressed, you may never find yourself able to quit drinking. The use of cognitive behavioral therapy in alcohol addiction treatment helps you work through the events in your life that trigger your desires to drink.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
Though cognitive behavioral therapy is still one of the most common forms of therapy, dialectical behavior therapy is quickly catching up. DBT is often used to help individuals who struggle with personality disorders and various forms of self-destructive behaviors, such as self-harm, suicidal thoughts, and substance abuse.
DBT works by encouraging you to identify situations that trigger you and make you want to drink. With the help of a therapist, you will pick out events that are triggering and result in a negative emotional state. After identifying these situations, your therapist will help you develop the coping skills to handle these situations.
The development of coping skills helps you to avoid your habitual, negative, undesired reactions to the everyday occurrences in your life. For example, if a fight with your significant other encourages you to drink, DBT helps you develop healthy alternatives to using alcohol as a coping mechanism.
Dialectical behavior therapy is commonplace among many inpatient alcohol rehab facilities and used in both an individual and group setting.