Posted by AuntieMel on April 15, 2005, at 11:55:47
In reply to roth; or anyone..., posted by justyourlaugh on April 14, 2005, at 12:17:43
This is what I know about Texas, and I'm pretty sure it's true in Florida - my cousin used to be an addiction counselor there:
An addiction counselor is licensed for that only - it doesn't require the psychology license first, but it does require a couple of years of training. What they do is teach methods for staying sober - including looking at why you drink. They do *not* go into things a 'regular' therapist would.
Counseling is usually done in groups - and usually lasts a finite time.
I went through 5 weeks of it in the evenings. The program I went to was through a psych hospital, but on a different property. Participation in the discussion was voluntary whiched worked great for me as I wasn't capable of much input the first week or two. Just listening to the other people helped - they were all in the same boat I was, and all with about the same amount of dry time.
It used a variety of sources - discussions of a daily meditation from a book, movies followed by discussions, etc. One interesting technique was writing a 'farewell' letter to your addiction. There was a lot of talk about AA, but it wasn't AA - we discussed the 12 steps, but we didn't do them.
And since it wasn't one-on-one I wasn't afraid. I don't usually do groups, but here I was allowed to just listen if I wanted to.
poster:AuntieMel
thread:484137
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/subs/20050323/msgs/484670.html