Stress & Trauma Program

Trauma is defined as a mental or behavior state resulting from emotional or mental stress or physical injury. What is unfortunate about trauma is that while it can be defined in a short concise sentence, it can take over a lifetime to cope with the affects and professional help is often necessary in many cases. Unity Recovery Center’s stress and trauma treatment program specializes in dealing with traumatic and stressful situations in one's life. The Unity Recovery staff teaches its patients how to handle these situations and helps them begin to understand how to properly deal with day to day life and the trials that may come with it.

Addiction in many cases is a disease of the emotions. Many addicts are unaware that there are underlying factors triggering their drug or alcohol abuse and that these factors need to be addressed even before the physical addiction is treated. Because addicts turn to drugs and alcohol in order to suppress the stress, anxiety, sadness, or anger that may be associated with a traumatic event, they are ignoring the root of the problem, which is only manifesting with time. This is a dangerous move because addiction is a progressive disease. There starts to become a gradual build up of dependence, a time when the addict needs more and more drugs and alcohol cope with these emotions, and this gradual dependence happens both physically and mentally.

It is not a secret that stress, trauma and addiction often go hand in hand. For someone who possesses poor coping strategies, past traumatic events and stress can easily trigger an addiction, leading a person to heavily drink or abuse drugs over and over again in order to mask their emotional suffering. It is because of this vicious cycle that Unity Rehab knows it is almost meaningless to treat the physical addiction alone, without prying into the “root” of the patient’s addiction. If the root of the problem is ignored, no matter how well detox and rehab worked for the physical aspect of an addiction, the chance of relapse after a patient leaves our facility is almost guaranteed if the emotional triggers have not been addressed.

The goal of our stress and trauma program is to help our patients learn how to handle their emotional stressors in a healthy way, placing primary emphasis on the development of more holistic or natural coping skills. This helps our patients deal with stressful and traumatic incidents safely and drug and alcohol free when they leave our treatment program and enter the real world again.