Your Life Continues
When you choose the Caring Center of Wichita, wherever you are at in your life and recovery is where we will meet. We do not believe in a “one size fits all” approach, but rather believe that recovery is as unique as a person’s path to where they are in life.
We understand your pain is real. Whether you suffer from the brain disease of addiction or mental health disorders like depression, anxiety, bi-polar, and others — your suffering is real and can take on many forms that impact your life in variety of ways that you may want to improve or change.
To grow into the person you want to be, you must change.
Changing your attitude, your priorities, and possibly chaotic or desperate lifestyle will challenge you because…
Change requires a temporary surrender of security.
You may think the key word appears to be surrender but it is actually temporary. Temporary because the massive insecurity will soon pass as you develop new habits, new behaviors, and new thinking patterns along with your lifestyle changes.
Too often change does not happen until the path we are on becomes harder than actually changing. New York Times bestselling author, Gail Sheehy, believes,
“If we don’t change, we don’t grow. If we don’t grow, we aren’t really living.”
Gail Sheehy Author, Speaker, Pop Sociologist
And put another way in Melissa Etheridge lyrics,
“The only thing that doesn’t change is change.”
Melissa Etheridge Singer, Songwriter
So many people refuse to grow and change. They want the security blankets they’ve carried with them since birth. The world looks scary when you first peek out from behind your own security blanket — and it is scary. Some days more than others.
However, as each day passes, you become more comfortable with your new way of life. Eventually you become more confident in yourself as you slowly see that you and your life are changing. This is a very subtle process that occurs over time that contrasts the dramatic and instant reward you feel with that first drink or hit. This is an inside job that builds feelings of self-worth and self-esteem.
Little by little your desire increases to have a joyful future.
You start to enjoy the natural brain patterns that help you think, act, remember and feel without hiding behind your security blanket of drugs and alcohol. People start listening to you again. You see you’re gaining their respect — again. You start choosing friends who genuinely care about you for who you are. Getting high and wallowing in negativity are no longer part of your life and friendships.
In the end, your feelings of purpose and joy take over and change you — for the better. You find meaning, purpose, direction, and hope in your life where there was none.
Change is a process
Treatment and recovery from drug and alcohol use and mental health disorders is a process — not an event. Commitment to living a healthy life, along with consistently attending therapy sessions, work hand in hand in your recovery process.
There will be times when you need to surrender yourself and just trust in the process, in order to experience progress.
We consistently see more successes in our patients who believe in the process and commit to either individual and/or group therapy sessions.
It helps to talk about what you’re going through and how you are feeling with others — knowing you are not alone. It helps to see other patients as they progress through their process with you. It also helps to receive the positive reinforcement and support you get along the way. You also began to see how more often than not, your use of drugs and alcohol was tied to mental health problems such as anxiety, depression, and other disorders and to deal with trauma because it produced a great reward in your brain and alleviated those bad feelings.
Mental health problems are often a result of our childhood and responses to events then and throughout our lives, but they are also often a result of our use of drugs and alcohol to manage our lives and the problems they created in the process. We work wilt all of our patients to explore and understand the origins and connections to mental health problems with substance abuse.
It’s important to be inspired and motivated because it isn’t easy in the short term. But it helps to stay in the now as you wake up every day with the understanding that you have a problem that you have a desire to change, you are committed, and you’re taking action on that while maintaining this focus on a daily basis.
Before you know it, you look back and see how much your life has changed, and how much just changing one aspect of your life can have dramatic ripple effect in many other areas of your life.
I believe and know this in my soul because it happened to me. Today my life is beyond what I could ever imagine it to be when I was mired in the throes of my addiction. My addictive lifestyle eventually led me to serve 10 years in federal prison for cultivation of marijuana. I am so grateful for former President Bill Clinton who allowed me to serve only 10 years of my 25-year conviction. President Clinton commuted the remaining 15 years of my sentence before he left office in 2001. Out of 5,488 petitions for commutations he received, I was one of 61 granted.
Many of our clients succeed at living a life full of happiness — and you can too.
All of us at The Caring Center of Wichita have seen many patients reach their goals and live successfully with families, careers, and communities.
Let us help you discover and define who you want to be, then let us help you be that person.
Call us anytime for an appointment. If you leave a message, we’ll get back to you the next business day.
Our office hours begin at 8am on Mondays through Fridays ending at 9pm for evening appointments and group sessions. We’re available for appointments on some Saturdays.
Let’s see if we are good for each other. Call us at 316-295-4800 anytime of day or night.
Take care.
~Peter
P.S. As a reminder…
Our staff at The Caring Center of Wichita follow these guiding principles when working with all our patients.
- We are non-judgmental.
- We meet you where you are at.
- We help you come up with your own answers.
- We match the science of addiction to your recovery experience.