Rehab is a powerful event in a person’s life, changing the direction of their destiny and, in many ways, making them a different person. And if this is true in general, it can be particularly true for women who go through addiction treatment and therapy.
The distaff side of rehab can have a dramatic effect on those women who complete the process, particularly when they go through a Christian program based on their religious faith. Indeed, the power of faith can be quite evident in how Christian rehab transforms women’s lives.
Addiction is a difficult time for anyone, but it can be especially hard on a woman who is struggling with substance abuse. Almost all of our media depictions of addiction tend to focus on men — alcoholics drinking at bars, Wall Street fat cats doing lines of cocaine, heroin addicts preparing a needle, almost all of these images in the popular imagination are oriented towards men. There can even be a sort of unfortunate romanticism about the image of drunken writers and drug-addled poets whose unfortunate health problems fuel their art or their achievements in some way.
Not so for women. Whether it’s due to strict gender role concepts or other reasons, women are given less latitude for their substance abuse problems. Women are seen as caregivers and family oriented people, which means they are shamed more for an intensely personal problem like addiction. They are criticized more for neglecting loved ones and responsibilities, even when going into rehab, where men are praised for acknowledging their problems and pushing to deal with them.
But rehab for women is an important part of the process of ending the cycle of addiction and Christian rehab can be invaluable in helping a woman dealing with substance abuse to find a way out and through the curtain of shame and judgment into a better future.
While the stigma of addiction can be felt more harshly as a woman, encouraging some to avoid rehab programs or support meetings, addiction treatment is imperative for women who struggle with substance abuse. And a Christian rehab program can help with that.
A Christian rehab program works to treat patients in a faith-based environment that encourages love and forgiveness alongside the standard clinical practices to help end your substance abuse and find ways to handle addiction and cravings. In the embrace of such a program, the stigma and shame of addiction are treated as well, as the woman in therapy is taught how to move past such issues.
In scripture, God discusses the forgiveness of sins as a process of forgetting past misdeeds, as if they never happened. They are thrown far away, as far as the east is from the west, as one translation puts it. And while the recovering addict can never truly forget their ordeal — in fact, remembering it can help in preventing future relapses — they can work to throw that stigma and shame away in the same way.
At Good Landing Recovery, their Christian rehab program works with women to help them do just that and come out of addiction a changed person, one who has put away their substance abuse and the accompanying stigma and moved forward into a healthy recovery and sustained sobriety.