How CBT Can Help Promote Positivity During Treatment for Drug Addiction

CBT focuses on fostering an increased awareness of the thought patterns that drive mental health challenges and addiction. The idea is that once you’re aware of those thought patterns, you can replace them with healthier, more positive thoughts. It sounds simple when explained in this way, but it’s a therapy that takes a really persistent, concentrated effort, and should be guided by an experienced professional. Most will need the help of a supportive therapist to lead them through the process and ensure that they leave treatment with the coping skills and resolve to maintain their abstinence into the future.

Opioid addiction is both a physical and mental experience. Between withdrawal effects (like insomnia and muscle aches) and intense psychological cravings rooted in maladaptive thought processes, trying to break free without help could send you right back to using. “Opiates are especially manipulative because you get outside of your consciousness,” explains one former addict.

Fears you didn’t know you had suddenly vanish. Though the experience of a drug is aromantic and nostalgic feeling, addiction is not. It’s ugly and selfish, because it is so bodily. It is both metaphorical and biological, it is hunger for emotion and chemical alteration.

CBT gets to the core of those “romantic and nostalgic” feelings by asking you to be critical about them, to unpack them and ask yourself what drives your need for them. Perhaps it’s trauma or a mental health need you haven’t yet acknowledged. Regardless, through CBT, you can learn to combat your addiction from the inside out by strengthening your mind against its grip. Eventually, you’ll gain enough awareness of the thoughts and behaviors that drive your addiction that you can learn to navigate and overcome them.

At the core of CBT for opioid addiction lies the idea that opioids reinforce drug-using behavior, and that over time, these reinforcing effects become associated with certain stimuli that trigger use of the drug. Every time you take an opioid, your brain sends dopamine to a specific region of the brain involved in reward and pleasure, a process that acts as the main reinforcer. When these pleasurable effects are felt, they become associated with whatever you were exposed to at the moment of experiencing them, such as the needle you use to inject or the bottle of pills that you keep your prescription in. Because of the brain’s tendency to rely on patterns, those stimuli act as triggers for your addiction, inducing craving upon the sight of them.

By analyzing the patterns that drive your opiod use, you’ll learn what triggers your desire to use, and, with the help of your therapist, start working through them in whatever way makes most sense to you. That might just mean addressing them openly in talk therapy, or exposing yourself to your triggers gradually and with support so that you can start training your mind to resist them.