Having a strong social support network is important for mental health and healing from addiction. However, many individuals who struggle with addiction and mental health disorders have poor social skills that make creating a community difficult. Fortunately, individual therapy at Buena Vista Recovery can help. By working one on one with a therapist, clients have the opportunity to dig into their strengths and weaknesses, uncover past issues, and build new social skills. This helps them to build a strong social support network that will help them to heal and move forward in their lives after addiction and mental health treatment.
Individual Therapy at Buena Vista
Effective addiction treatment is often a combination of detox, medication, and therapy that helps a client to modify their behaviors. Detox and medication help a person to heal physically from their dependency, while therapy helps to build improved coping skills and create new behaviors that support a client’s sobriety.
Individual therapy at Buena Vista Recovery helps clients to do just that. While working one-on-one with a therapist, clients work through the root causes of their struggles with addiction. They will build a better awareness of themselves and the challenges they face. Additionally, they will create new skills that help them to recover from addiction more successfully.
If a client is struggling with a mental health disorder alongside addiction (a dual diagnosis), working with a counselor can also help with this. Individual therapy can be a way to work through a wide variety of co-occurring issues. Therapy helps clients to build the skills to manage their mental health. This in turn enhances their recovery and overall wellness.
Building a Better Social Network at Buena Vista
In recovery, as in life, support is important. Having a reliable social network helps clients to make changes and feel connected with others in their community. This community affords a person the opportunity to lean on others when in need and help them in return.
However, many individuals who struggle with addiction and mental health disorders feel isolated. Due to substance abuse, they may have stopped spending time with loved ones. Additionally, they may not have the skills to create healthy and supportive relationships. However, individualized therapy can help change this dynamic. While working with a counselor, clients will improve their awareness, better understand issues they have had in the past, and build new skills that help them to build a better social network both during and after treatment.
Improving Awareness
Awareness is often the first step to making a change. However, improving awareness in isolation can be difficult. In individual therapy at Buena Vista, clients can bounce ideas off of a counselor. The counselor can then help them to improve their awareness of how and what they are communicating. Often, the way they have been communicating is not how they intended to. Through this process of building awareness, clients begin to discover the way that they truly want to communicate with others. This helps clients to have better relationships and more robust social networks in the future.
Understanding Past Challenges
Part of improving awareness is learning from past challenges. Many individuals who struggle with addiction have had poor-quality social connections. However, many clients do not fully understand why. The reason, of course, will be unique for each client.
When a client improves their awareness and understanding of past issues, they can begin to move forward. This will include learning new skills. For example, if they struggled with being open about their struggle with addiction, individual therapy will help them explore why. A client can then work with the counselor to learn how and when to share their experience and how it will benefit their social connections both during treatment and afterward.
Building New Skills
Creating a community involves having good individual relationships. However, building and maintaining healthy relationships requires social skills. This includes listening and sharing. Social skills can be difficult to master. While a client may have a good basic understanding of social protocols, holes in their knowledge can create challenges in relationships.
In the safe and supported environment of a counselor’s office, clients can begin to understand the basics of social skills. With the help of their counselor, they can then begin to practice those skills. This might involve role-playing or simply discussing a social situation in which the client ran into trouble.
Every individual will have unique challenges with building a community. That’s why individualized therapy sessions are the perfect place to build these skills. A counselor will help to identify what specific skills need improvement. Then, together the client and counselor will design a therapeutic program that helps to slowly build skills without overwhelming the client. Over time, clients can start to practice these skills in other settings like in group therapy. All the while, they will have the support of their counselor in individual therapy to continue their development of positive social skills.
Individual therapy helps clients to recognize their weak points and build social skills. This helps them to build and maintain relationships. By working with a counselor one-on-one, individuals can improve awareness, dig into the issues that have occurred in past relationships, and build new skills. At Buena Vista Recovery, individual therapy is often an integral part of treatment. Therapy helps clients to adjust their behavior in a way that benefits their mental health and helps them heal from addiction. If you or someone you love is struggling with mental health or addiction, our programs at Buena Vista can help. Call us today at (480) 741-9414 and we will answer any questions to help you on your journey to healing.
