Success means many things to many people. For people dealing with drug and alcohol problems, success might be a painful word.

Drug and alcohol abuse can prevent people from achieving their definitions of success. If people consider success to be making lots of money and becoming wealthy, addiction can definitely mess with those plans. Drug and alcohol habits are expensive. People with such habits often miss work or even lose their jobs, which obviously affects their ability to make money.

If people measure success by their relationships, addiction could affect that type of success too. Drug and alcohol abuse often isolates people from the people who love them most. If such habits don’t isolate them from people, drug and alcohol users often neglect, abuse, or mistreat the people in their lives in other ways.

Clearly, abusing drugs and alcohol aren’t the pathways to financial and personal success. But addiction doesn’t make a person a failure. With the proper help, addiction is a temporary setback to success, not a permanent barrier to achieving a person’s goals.

How? From the financial angle, yes, if people spend money on drugs and alcohol, they’ve lost that money. But if people are sober, they’re not spending any more money on drugs and alcohol. It might seem like a small point, but people in recovery can use such points as illustrations of their progress. They can use this progress to build confidence, and maybe this confidence can keep them from using again.

Addiction doesn’t end a person’s ability to make money, either. After successful recoveries, people might be able to resume their careers or find other jobs. Again, addiction can be temporary.

Successful recoveries can also help people achieve personal success. Addiction can wreck havoc on personal lives, but treatment can help fix such damage. Many treatment centers offer family therapy that can help people repair broken relationships. Treatment can do such much. It can help people achieve success.