For a recovering addict the surrounding environment can have dire effects; familiar sounds and smells can trigger the urge to use substances or alcohol again. Sometimes escaping the noise of everyday life and experiencing the silence that drug rehab has to offer is the first step in a long process of recovery.
City dwellers encounter sounds and smells at hyper speed. For those who live in urban centres, getting away from the cars and tall buildings and into an addiction treatment programme outside of a city may seem like even more of a change in pace.
What is it about the move from taxis to trees, from old environment to new, that may make drug rehab even more effective?
The physical removal
The concept of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ applies here. When you cannot daily see the objects or people that remind you of using drugs or alcohol, the urge to abuse may lessen.
Moreover, a constant stream of new stimuli may allow you the chance to not only experience a new external environment, but to investigate your internal workings including the various emotions and behaviours that led you to an addiction treatment programme.
The natural world as an example
As reported by The New York Times in 2009, there’s a drug rehab programme made up of farmers. On a plot of land called Renewal Farm, recovering addicts split their days between tending to rows of vegetables and participating in counselling sessions at a nearby rehab centre.
The reporter sums up well the differences between recovering addicts from a city, who come to the countryside for an addiction treatment programme: “The men’s lives are shot through with such contrasts. They are urban, transplanted to the country. They have dark pasts, but they spend their days in bucolic surroundings.”
Nature has something to teach us about being healthy. Either by observing, or in the case of the Renewal Farm profiled in the Times’ article, planting and tending, the natural world teaches us that with daily focus we can grow and prosper. We can grow into the healthy lives we were meant to have.
By choosing an addiction treatment programme outside the safety of our daily surroundings, we force ourselves to look again at the world around us, a world that includes addiction but also includes rehab.
