Helping teens heal from substance abuse has a significant impact on their lives, both in adolescence and adulthood. To effectively help teens, it is important that they learn skills that protect them from further challenges with their mental health and substance abuse. That is why treatment at Sustain Recovery focuses on improving skills like self-awareness that make a lasting impact. Self-awareness helps teens heal from substance abuse, while giving them a tool that makes a lasting difference in their ability to manage challenges in the future without looking to drugs or alcohol as a way to cope.
Substance Abuse in Teens
Many teens are at high risk for substance abuse. While every situation is unique, risk factors for teen substance abuse include:
- Family history of substance use/abuse
- Lack of parental monitoring
- Substance use at home
- Lack of social connections and engagement in school
- Abuse or neglect
- Mental health disorders
When teens begin to abuse substances, it impacts them in a unique way. This is because teens are at an important stage in their development. Substance abuse impacts their development and often creates issues both in their teenage years and far into adulthood. As a result, it is important that teens learn skills that help them heal and manage their mental health and substance use into adulthood.
Helping Teens Improve Self-Awareness
Teens are in the process of learning about themselves. During adolescence, teens learn many things about themselves. This includes learning to identify emotions, thoughts, and reactions. Additionally, it often means learning about how they are and have been impacted by experiences in their lives, including societal violence and trauma.
It takes time for teens to improve their self-awareness. However, treatment at Sustain Recovery utilizes many different tools that help. Traditional psychotherapy techniques aid teens by giving them a space to be open and process their experiences, feelings, and thoughts, while getting feedback from a counselor who helps them improve their self-awareness. Additionally, other therapeutic techniques, like group therapy, family therapy, and non-traditional therapies, help provide teens a space to improve awareness of social needs in a safe and supported space.
Self-Awareness Helps Teens Heal
Healing from substance abuse issues is very challenging for teens. Teens are often not aware of what factors influence their substance use and why it is so important for them to take strides toward healing. Fortunately, learning to improve their self-awareness helps teens understand how to care for their needs and cope without abusing substances.
Mental Health and Self-Awareness
Substance abuse and mental health issues often go hand in hand. Each teen struggling with their mental health and substance abuse will have their own unique challenges. However, their mental health challenges put them at more risk for substance abuse. Therefore, it is important to help teens understand this connection and build skills like self-awareness that help them manage both mental health and substance abuse challenges.
There are many unique reasons why a teen will struggle with both a mental health disorder and substance use disorder (SUD). However, many teens with mental health disorders struggle daily with symptoms that disrupt their life. To cope, they may begin to use substances to get through the day. Unfortunately, this results in substance abuse. Improving self-awareness helps teens understand the mental health challenges they are facing and how substance abuse often makes them worse over time. While self-awareness is not the end of the line, it is essential in helping teens understand how to manage their mental health.
Self-Awareness Helps Teens Struggling with Substance Abuse
Teens abuse substances for many reasons, including trauma, social pressure, and the lack of emotional coping skills. Self-awareness of the specific challenges they face helps teens heal. It is only when they understand what is causing them to reach for substances that they can learn new skills that help them feel like they have a choice in how they cope.
Often, when a teen struggles with substance abuse, they also struggle with emotional issues. For some, these emotional challenges may originate from trauma. However, many teens also struggle to identify and manage their emotions in general. Unregulated emotions often lead to substance use as a way to cope with the anguish they are feeling inside. Fortunately, by improving awareness, teens can identify how they are feeling. Through treatment, they can learn new skills and methods to manage these emotions, which helps with both short-term and long-term substance abuse recovery.
Self-awareness is extremely helpful in ensuring that teens know how to manage social pressures with substance use. This is because self-awareness helps teens improve resistance skills. Resistance skills are necessary for teens to know when they are going to feel pressured socially to use substances and how to manage these situations. Therefore, by improving self-awareness, teens can manage these situations. This results in long-term behavioral changes surrounding substance abuse.
Teens commonly lack self-awareness and are in the process of learning about themselves and their needs. Helping a teen do so now can set them up for success later on in life. Doing so also helps them heal from substance abuse and can help them stay sober long-term. At Sustain Recovery, we believe in providing treatment that makes a lasting impact on a teen’s life. Therefore, we incorporate skills such as self-awareness that, once learned, help teens manage their mental health and heal. If you are interested in learning more about our treatment programs and how they help teens build a foundation of skills, call us today at (949) 407-9052.
