Recovery Involves Learning to Negotiate

What a Drug Rehab Should Have: Learning to Negotiate

When someone is immersed in addiction, he loses most of his or her abilities in a fog of drug or alcohol abuse. He can no longer manage the usual give and take that occurs between people. He can seldom think any farther than how he will get his drugs or drink for the day. This is a crippling change that destroys his relationships.

Perhaps he never learned how to make the kinds of daily negotiations that are needed to get along with others. If he did, he loses them when cravings drive his every decision. To get sober and stay sober, he will need to learn how to interact with others again. This is a skill that is essential to living in the real world. When a person loses that ability, he is likely to have other difficulties.

What is a Negotiation Skill?

Negotiation is defined as the “reaching of agreement through discussion and compromise.” This is a skill that requires that he is able to communicate with another person. It further demands that he can empathize enough with the other person to be able to compromise or at least see the other’s point of view.

If you look at negotiation as a path to getting achieving goals and smaller objectives while still allowing the other person to get something that he wants, you can see that this goes on all the time in interpersonal relationships.

Negotiation is one of the skills that one should learn in recovery, according to the World Health Organization’s guidelines. This is one skill that comes into play whenever one is interacting with others. If the recovering person does not learn the skill of negotiating, he may experience setbacks and losses that lead him back into the drug abuse trap once more.

Negotiation Skills Can Be Learned in Rehab

One can regain the ability to deal with the give and take of personal relationships when it is taught as part of a comprehensive rehab program. This is one of the life skills taught at Narconon drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs all over the world.

Narconon Helps Recovering Users to Learn to Negotiate

The Narconon rehab program includes several courses in life skills that can improve a person’s ability to negotiate. Each person goes through training that teaches him how to communicate honestly and directly without flinching or backing away from another person.

On a very gentle approach, each person has a chance to practice simple communication skills, starting with the most basic elements and then adding more sophisticated skills until competence is built up again. Gradually, a person learns to use his communication skills effectively for the purpose of negotiation or any of life’s interactions.

Another course in the Narconon program includes improving one’s condition in life. On this course, the student studies how to apply precise formulas to his situation and to evaluate his condition correctly. The result of knowing the data taught in this course is that the person knows exactly what steps he must take in order to improve his condition in life. This awareness strengthens his position in any negotiation.

Chanel Got Clean and Turned Her Life Around at Narconon

Chanel went to Narconon Arrowhead in Oklahoma in time to turn her life around before she could destroy everything. Prior to arriving at Narconon, Chanel said she had no real relationship with her family. She was only concerned about using drugs and even dropped out of school due to her drug addiction.

Toward the end of the Narconon program, Chanel said she learned how to handle many parts of her life again, not just her addiction. She said she would definitely recommend the Narconon program to anyone to help them with drug and alcohol addiction, but not only for that. She said, “It helped me with all parts of my life. Now I’m the person I want to be.”

Your loved one can recover his ability to negotiate along with lasting sobriety at Narconon.

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Reference:

Conclusions from a United Nations Inter-Agency Meeting, World Health Organization, Geneva, 1999.