Addictions take a tremendous toll on their victims including those who are stuck in a personal addiction, their spouses and their families. Addiction is also an enormous drain on society. Addicts are often consumed with selfish resource consuming activities that take time and money to feed. The potential of a restored life is tremendous to that person, and their family in addition to the economic and social good to a community.
The founders of this business have decades of experience around addiction. Some have fought their own addictions and others have provided life restoring therapy in personal and group counseling.
We have taken a long-term approach to building out solutions with several principles in mind:
Most addicts don’t help themselves
While they may have good intentions, the reality with addictions is that most cannot overcome their disease alone. They need the help of a trusted support network that in our research has proven critical to long term sobriety and freedom from the chains of their addiction.
Addicts are responsible for their own healing
Addicts are responsible for their own healing and the repair of the lives around them that they have damaged. At the core of our products, we have focused on enabling the individual addict to be honest, complete and consistent. However, most addictions cloud the mind of their victims and perpetuate the bad behavior during large parts of their day. They live with the lies that one look, one drink, one more bite will not hurt. Those justifying thoughts are the beginning of the one-way path to acting out. And so, to fight against those hazy moments, we have found that an addict needs to set up accountability rules that require a certain daily behavior and alerts to help when that behavior is not followed. Again, the responsibility to change is placed with the addict, but the system supports compliance with healthy behavior.
Most addicts will accept help
They need it but most are embarrassed or ashamed to ask for help. And most addicts in active recovery were pushed there by a partner. They may fight the insisting, but that is the addict thinking who does not want to give up the addiction. Once addicted, a life without the addiction is scary. You see, these addictions become a crutch. They are used to compensate for fear, loneliness, rejection or boredom. Those who surround addicts must bravely, consistently insist that an addict get help.
Daily matters
While many therapy programs are set up with weekly one-on-one or group meetings, the reality is that six other days pass between sessions and an addict is quick to forget what they say or commit to in those weekly sessions. The rising of the sun leads to another chance to start again. Each day, we have found, an addict needs to renew his commitment to living the next 24 hours free from addictive thinking.
All people deserve a life of love, joy and happiness. Addiction robs us of those things. Take24.co is here to help as many people recover from their addictions as quickly as possible.
Still interested in more detail, here are a few more objectives of this business as it serves its mission of helping more people to recover faster:
- Affordability — These solutions lower the price for addicts to begin to get help. Professional therapy, while absolutely beneficial and recommended for long term healing, is also expensive. Our services complement professional therapy. We don’t focus on clinical content but instead on the tools that individuals and therapists can use to map out a recovery plan and comply with it on a daily basis. We also believe that addicts who live by the idea that therapy is too expensive are not honestly acknowledging the tremendous cost of an addiction that continues to wreck a person’s life. More on that later but there are significant financial costs plus the non-financial cost to ruined marriages, wrecked families, lost employment let alone the foregone value of your time. We think addicts should do almost anything to afford professional therapy. The long term good will return many times over the cost of therapy. Still for those who choose not to have a professional therapist, we think our solutions affordably help.
- Accessibility — It turns out that many people don’t know where to find help or don’t know how to fit group therapy or individual counseling into their already hectic lives. Our set of tools and services will be available by mobile phone so wherever you are the solutions are close at hand. And in the end, recovery is worth investing time and energy into. Recovery is absolutely worth spending your time on. Still we also know some addicts need private help now to gain the courage to disclose the problems to their partners who may today not know about the addiction. We get that too and our tools are an entry point for people who want help before making a big disclosure to others that a change in your schedule might require.
- Compliance — Addicts tend to have bad habits when it comes to disclosure and performance of specific recovery steps. The inherent nature of a long-term addiction suggests that addicts continue to return to their drugs of choice time and time again even after telling themselves they would stop. Our tools and services provided proactive solutions for addicts including prompts and alerts to remind them to stick to their daily commitments. Reporting in the software assesses a person’s mental intent which we know comes before actions.
If a person falls out of compliance with daily check-in’s, their support group can be alerted in order to swoop in and give much needed support. - Speed of recovery — Without proactive efforts, most addicts Will cycle through periods of sobriety and relapse. This pattern of success and failure is all too often typical when addicts try to recover without outside help. Those intermittent slips and relapses are very discouraging and reset the sobriety clock. They are the enemy to true healing. Our solutions increase the likelihood of consecutive days of sobriety.
- Increased trust — During recovery, spouses or partners are never quite sure whether their addict partner is complying with a program or whether they are stuck in another string of acting out. On one hand, if a partner worries every day about their addict partner’s compliance, they quickly become paranoid and the stress and anxiety become overly consuming and takes up a lot of their mental time. On the other hand, if they act like the addiction is not there, they leave a partner vulnerable to relapse and they may unknowingly be isolating their addict partner or living with distance in their relationship. And spouses are often not the best people to give daily accountability to the addict. Our research suggests that addicts need a way to be completely honest about all the small details that fill their heads. Those small thoughts lead to acting out and verbalizing them to another person or in a journal entry gives strength to the addict to overcome and that disclosure weakens the power of the addiction. Most spouses don’t want to know these details. They are hurtful, unfair, and make a spouse feel less than the object of the addict’s obsession. Plus, the volume of thoughts an addict has would be overwhelming to a partner and would dominate what is likely limited talk time during a given day. Furthermore, spouses feel out of control and vulnerable constantly when they learn just how often triggers abound in the world around us. Did they expect to be with a partner with so many bad thoughts? Of course not. Still, an addict must surrender addictive thoughts to remove their power. Most spouses simply want confirmation that daily accountability and compliance with a recovery plan is happening. If they get that, they will slowly gain trust and over time they will see a change in the addict’s behavior. Long term sobriety changes an addict and trust soon fills the previous constant questioning.
- Professional insight — Many therapists are pen and paper guys and end up spending a lot of time taking notes about their patients. Many sessions are consumed with conversation trying to remember what happened and a fraction of the session time is left to talk through the insight that a therapist hopes to provide. Imagine instead if a therapist had access to the many intra-day check-in scores and journal explanations. On top of that data, they are given visual trend reports that become the basis of their insight. Imagine the highs and lows of an addict and the near relapses that a therapist could spot in the data. This sort of weekly record has the potential to turn the session into a discussion about those handful of inflection points within the week. In that case, a therapist can begin to suggest intervention plans. Imagine if there was a moment each week a few days after therapy that the addict begins to lose focus. The triggers are gaining power and an addict is hovering near relapse. Consider then if the therapist or a peer addict were given an automated prompt when that situation arose and reached out to the addict. This is the power of technology to warn, to notify and to intervene when the addict is most weak. In addition, a therapist can look across a group of patients effectively increasing his or her efficiency, helping more addicts recover more quickly.
Lastly, why do we call this business Take24? Well this concept was coined by others but suggests that we are each granted one day at a time to make a difference. Many addicts end their check-ins by asking God for another 24 hours of sobriety. In other words, they are hoping and praying for sobriety for yet another day. And so this term has special meaning to that addict who is fighting every minute, every hour, every day, week, month and year to increase the length of their sobriety but that journey starts one day at a time.