 When you're ready to get clean and sober, sometimes you only have one chance to do it, especially because relapse rates are so high. So when it's time for you to get help for your drug or alcohol addiction, you want to make sure you're doing it the right way. And there is a way to do that. So in this video, that's exactly what we're talking about. So stay tuned. What is up everybody? This is Chris from the Rewired Soul, where we talk about the problem, but focus on the solution. So you might have noticed that I now have my mic right here, my other mic crapped out, but anyways, let's jump into this thing. So there are so many abbreviations and levels of care out there for drug and alcohol rehabs, and it gets confusing. You got detox, you got inpatient or residential, then you have partial hospitalization program, which is also PHP. You have IOP, intensive outpatient program. You have OP outpatient program. You have sober living, which is also called SLE. And all of these names and abbreviations flying around all over the place, they can get super confusing. And these are all different levels of care, which I will talk about in another video. So make sure you hit that subscribe button so you get all this information. But anyways, there is one crucial first step, and that is going through an assessment with an addiction specialist. Okay, there are people who are certified and trained to assess you for your addiction. It's very important to meet with an addiction specialist when you're ready to get clean and sober, so you know which level of care to go into. If you don't know which level of care to go into, then you're probably going to make the wrong choice. You're probably going to fail at your recovery, which is going to lead to a relapse. And then what happens is that you start thinking that you're a hopeless case, and you're just going to die a drug addict or alcoholic, which doesn't have to be the case. So when you're ready to get clean and sober, you need to go see an addiction specialist. I work for a Drug and Alcohol Treatment Center, we're a national organization. And when you call in to the call center, we have professionals who take you through an assessment. Now, what is this assessment? The standard assessment that is used in the United States is called the ASAM criteria. This was created by the American Society of Addiction Medicine. This is broken down in six different dimensions. And basically when you go and meet with an addiction specialist, they're going to give you a bunch of questions that you need to answer. And based on the answers that you give, then they can decide, okay, what level of care do you need to go into? All right. So like I said, I will dive more into the separate levels of care in another video. But right now I really want to focus on what happens during an assessment. And I will kind of briefly touch on each one and give you examples on what will work and what wouldn't work for you. All right. So like I said, this is broken down into six different dimensions. Let's start out with the first one, dimension one, acute intoxication and or withdrawal potential. All right. So this is part of the medical evaluation. They're going to go through and see, like, do you have symptoms of withdrawal? If you have symptoms of withdrawal, which I've talked about in previous videos, these things can kill you. Okay. Some of you want to, you know, try to detox on your own. You want to be a big tough guy or a tough woman and prove that you can do this thing, but it can kill you. The first thing that they're going to assess is your withdrawal potential. Are you physically dependent to these drugs or alcohol? If that is the case, you need to go to a detox center first. Some facilities like the ones I work at, they have detoxes built into the facility. Sometimes there are facilities that are primarily just a detox, but this happens and this choice is made once they do a medical evaluation dimension to biomedical conditions and complications. So aside from withdrawal potential, they're going to look at any kind of other illnesses that you might have. Like, are you a diabetic? Do you have cancer? Do you have heart disease? You know, is your liver, is your liver failing? Do you have kidney problems? They're going to look at your medical history, right? And they're going to see, do you have any medical needs that also need to be treated? Because, for example, it's a bad idea to send you to the lower levels of care, like an outpatient facility. If there isn't a medical staff on duty, who can be there if you have any kind of medical complications. So that's dimension two. Dimension three, emotional, behavioral or cognitive conditions and complications. This is where they evaluate your mental health. Now many drugs and alcohol, they can create symptoms of mental illness, anxiety, depression, things like that. Sometimes those go away after you've been clean for a while. Sometimes they stick around. But this is basically a mental evaluation. The first two dimensions is a physical evaluation. This is a mental evaluation. Are you suffering from severe depression? Do you have a lot of anxiety? Because if that's the case, then you might need a higher level of care where they can make sure that they stabilize you mentally before putting you into a lower level of care. Dimension four, readiness to change. This is a huge one. Like, are you being forced into getting sober? Like, is your family pushing you in? Like, what is your reason for getting clean? What is your readiness to change? Like, this is important too, because let's say you're somebody who doesn't want to get sober. You don't want to get clean. You don't want to get sober just because of circumstance. Maybe your job or wife or family shoved you into this thing and you don't have a high readiness to change. Again, putting you into an outpatient program would be terrible. I will link to a video in the description about how I got my best friend sober. His readiness to change was extremely low. And that's why I got him to go to outpatient just as a foot in the door to prove to him that outpatient wasn't going to suffice for him because he had a very low readiness to change. So as you go through this evaluation, they're going to see like, do you even want to get sober? Because if you don't, you're probably going to get into a higher, more structured, intensive level of care. All right. Now, dimension five, relapse, continued use or continued problem potential. So they're going to look at your relapse history. If you are a chronic relapse or if you have tried to get clean multiple times and you keep relapsing, if you are somebody who can only stay clean for like five seconds before going out and using again, it would be a bad idea to put you in an outpatient program or sober living. If your cravings and your obsession to get higher drunk is extremely high and you are a chronic relapser, you need a higher level of care. You need an inpatient treatment program. You need structure. You need a staff who is around 24 seven. You need people who are there to keep you safe from yourself. People, this is a common mistake I see so many times is people who are chronic relapsers and then they're just like, oh, I'm just going to go to an outpatient program. 99.9% of the time they fail because their brain is wired for relapse. Their brain tells them, oh, you can relapse. It's not a big deal. It's going to be okay. And they fail and they abandon the whole treatment idea because they are not even safe from themselves. So during your assessment, they're going to go over and see how many times you've relapsed and you know, do you need a higher level of care? Lastly, which is also these are all important. I don't know what I'm talking about. Lastly, dimension six, your recovery slash living environment. This is huge too. So my treatment center, like I said, we're a national organization. Most of the time, most of the time we send people to a different state to go to one of our treatment centers. For example, I live in Las Vegas. We have two facilities in Las Vegas. We will send if somebody lives in Las Vegas, we'll send them to California or Texas or Florida or the Northeast or wherever we have one of our facilities, we get them out of their environment. One of them is because of friends, friends are using buddies. It is very hard to stay clean in the town that you're from. It's not impossible, but it's very hard to stay clean in the town where you're from when you know that right outside the doors is your dope dealer. You know that your dope man is five minutes away. You know what I mean? So if you're in a completely different state, it's a lot easier now. I know a lot of people don't have the resources to travel to other states to go to treatment. But let's talk about your living environment. Let's talk about situations in which it would be terrible for you to live in the house. Situation one, let's say you have a wife or husband who likes to get drunk or high. What are the chances of you staying clean and sober in a program, even if it's outpatient, if the person you're living with is constantly getting high or drunk, right? What if you live in a very toxic environment? This could be with a spouse. This could be with a family member. Let's say you have an abusive spouse who is mentally, verbally or even physically abusive. Is that a good structured supportive environment? Probably not. Let's say you live with your parents and you have a very toxic relationship with your parents. Is it a good idea to live with your parents while you're getting clean? Probably not. So when they're doing this assessment and they're looking at your living environment, they say, okay, is this going to benefit this person's recovery? Or is it going to hinder this person's recovery? Now, there's a completely opposite side of the examples I was giving. You might have a very loving, kind, generous, supportive family and you might actually benefit from living with them. For example, when I got clean, my mom was seven years sober. She is a woman in recovery and she's also the clinical director at an outpatient building. So me living with her was a very good idea, depending on who you ask. Like, yeah, we got into our arguments and our fights, but I had a mother who understood my addiction. So some of you people out there, I tell my clients all the time, like, if you're not ready to go back home and deal with the BS from your family, like, don't do it. Because a lot of us, we have family members who don't understand addiction. They're constantly judging us. They're constantly bringing up the past. And to some extent, they have good reason to be. But for us in early recovery, it is a very bad living environment, which is why, you know, when you're discharging from whatever kind of treatment center you go to, they might recommend that you go to a sober living home or you go to another state and do sober living or just take a break from your living environment for a while. Because some of it's very toxic and can hinder your recovery. So those are the six dimensions of the ASAM criteria. Again, this is from the American Society of Addiction Medicine. This is the standard across the board. When you're going in to get assessed, like, one question that you can ask the person assessing you is, are you using the ASAM criteria? This is the top notch criteria that people use to evaluate what kind of treatment you need. There are some variations of it, but typically places are using the ASAM criteria. That is one way that you can vet the treatment center that you're going to, because you don't want somebody taking a shot in the dark at what type of treatment center you should go to. All right. So I hope, whether you're an addict looking to get sober or whether you're a family member who has a loved one who's thinking about getting sober, I really, really, really hope this video helped you. Again, I make videos like this all the time. So if you have any questions, feel free to reach out. Again, I'll put up my Instagram account on here. You can DM me on there. My email is the rewiredsoul at gmail.com if you want to contact me there. If you have any questions, put them in the comments, reach out to me, do whatever you've got to do. I'm here just to help people like you. All right. But do me a favor, pass this along to people you know, spread awareness, let people know how to get drug addiction help the right way. All right. And if you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. And again, if you are new here, I have so many videos to help you out with addiction recovery, mental health, and all that stuff. So click the little round subscribe button and check out over to the left of me, click or tap on one of those thumbnails, check out some of the other videos on this channel. But thanks again so much for watching and I'll see you next time.