Why Being of Service Helps Ourselves

We started Experience Recovery because our local Orange County community was in need of skilled rehab and recovery services. Through the years, we’ve found that being of service is actually the best way of helping ourselves. Problems that are unique to our hometowns have to be taken care of by the community; we can’t always rely on government programs or policies to be nuanced and effective enough for the unique needs of our hometowns. By being of service to those around us, we empower our communities, solve local problems at their roots, and gives ourselves a purpose.

Servicing the Needs of Our Communities

If the epidemic drug problems of the 21st century have shown us anything, it’s that different communities are susceptible to different problems. The melting pots of urban, industrialized cities like Los Angeles and New York have their own pockets and sub-communities, separated by wealth, ethnicity, geography, among a number of other factors. Yet all of these have been afflicted with their own drug epidemics. Native American reservations and Orange County college towns might seem worlds apart, but both have seen countless victims to drug and alcohol addiction, stemming from their own unique histories, economies, and cultures.

In the past couple of years, we’ve seen rural communities being torn apart by opiates and prescription drugs. Reports of illicit drug use are on the rise in rural areas. The distance between rural homes poses a two-fold problem. Traveling, home-visiting doctors have to spend hours on the road between patients, making travel inefficient and impractical. Likewise, seeking out a doctor or care program can be difficult for hard-working rural families, and that extra difficulty poses a real possibility of discouraging patients from seeking help when they need it most.

In urban communities, a number of different circumstances bar patients from adequate care. The high cost of living, fear of medical bills, debt, and other financial woes are married with a growing distrust in public services, especially among minority groups.

Problems like these can prevent patients from finding adequate treatment, and because addiction spreads from parents to children, this can leave intergenerational roots of drug and alcohol dependency.

Why Healing a Community Means Tending to the Roots

After rehab, patients some patients are actually at the highest risk of overdose. Rehab flushes the chemicals out of your system. With exception to a few specific opiates, many addictions aren’t treated with a supplement to replace the initial addictive substance. As we remove the drug from our system, our tolerance for the drug slowly reduces. If a patient leaves a recovery program and returns home to the same environment that caused their addiction in the first place, their chance of relapse is greatly increased.

As such, adequate treatment often involves understanding the roots of the patient’s addiction, and either tending to those roots through therapy and acknowledgment or strengthening the patient to withstand similar pressures.

As we work with our community, we often see similar patterns emerge from one addiction to another. Whether they are exacerbated by financial insecurity, depression, stress, or other cultural influences, we can better understand the needs of our community. By working at the very roots of the problem, we not only stem the current growth of addiction but also manage the problems of our community first-hand. By helping our community, we’re really helping ourselves. We’re restructuring the foundation of our own homes, and building the very village where we’ll raise our own families.