Residential rehabilitation is effective in-part because it is very immersive. The extended inpatient treatment style surrounds the client’s life and eliminates concerns about the outside world, enabling the client to focus solely on their recovery. The purpose behind this style of treatment is to surround the client with a different world than the world their addiction thrives in. One of the reasons addiction is so powerful is because people have free reign in their day-to-day lives to indulge in their addiction, so escaping its grasp long enough to change one’s way of thinking is nearly impossible. Inpatient rehabilitation physically separates a person from their addiction because they submit to lockdown inside a safe facility where there is no access to their addiction.
Because a person’s thought patterns are unhealthy when they are heavily addicted, and because addiction so often occurs in tandum with disorders and mental illnesses, the treatment and the staff of a residential rehab is there to help the client interpret and reinterpret their life events. This oversight of objectivity and clarity is critical to adjusting the client’s thought patterns and behaviors and make them healthier. Treatment that is outpatient or sporadic is less effective in this way because the client is still heavily immersed in their old thought patterns.
The mere duration of the treatment is essential to its success. A person’s thought patterns do not change overnight. There are many exercises the recovering addict should go through in order to ensure changes to their behaviors and thought patterns. Statistically, the longer the treatment goes, the more effective it is. When treatment is brief or continuously interrupted, it allows for opportunities to fall back into old patterns. To summarize, residential rehabilitation is the method of addiction treatment that offers the most separation from the addiction itself, and the most immersion into a healthy lifestyle.