What You'll Learn:
- Recovery from addiction is an ongoing process, with the risk of relapse being an integral part of the journey.
- Adopting day-by-day sober strategies is crucial for managing the overwhelming prospect of long-term sobriety.
- Building and maintaining a strong support system is essential to avoid isolation and enable recovery.
- Focusing on physical and mental wellness, along with recognizing warning signs, fortifies resilience against relapse.
1. Take It Day by Day
When you leave rehab, the prospect of staying sober can feel overwhelming. You see the rest of your life laid out before you and realize there will be ample opportunities to relapse. This feeling of being overwhelmed is normal. However, while you should let yourself experience it in the moment, you do not need to react to it. The fact is that if you leave rehab trying to stay sober for the rest of your life, you cannot win. You cannot achieve your goal until the day you die. This is why it’s so important that you take your recovery day by day. Every single day, you can commit to staying sober in the present. You can live life to the fullest in the moment. Is there a possibility you will relapse tomorrow? Yes, but that does not change the way you lived today. Staying in the present and focusing on a continued path of recovery is always going to be more effective than trying to find a guarantee that you'll never relapse.2. Avoid Your Triggers
In drug and alcohol rehab, you will explore what things trigger your urge to use substances. These triggers will include places, people, situations, and access to the substances themselves. Recovery does not make you immune to these triggers. Unfortunately, many people leaving rehab believe they have to become immune in order to succeed at recovery. They imagine that they have to be able to stay sober in every potential situation. Instead of avoiding triggers, they seek them out. Think back to the analogy of the broken leg for a moment. Seeking your triggers out is like hopping around all day on the recovered leg just to make sure it is fully healed. Eventually, you will either reinjure the leg or fall over and incur an even worse injury. After rehab, avoid your triggers when possible. There will be occasions when you can’t help but be triggered, but by keeping these to a minimum, you preserve the resources which help you stay sober.3. Rebuild Your Support System
Isolation is dangerous for any recovering addict. For many people, it is one of the factors that led them to use substances in the first place. As such, it is crucial that you have a support system to lean on when you leave rehab. However, this is particularly hard for people leaving rehab. When you are addicted to substances, you tend to hang out with people who enable you. You sabotage your relationships with those friends and family members who try to help you. Lying and manipulation become a normal part of how you relate to people and you leave your relationships in tatters. Upon leaving rehab, you need to determine how you are going to rebuild your support system. Some of your old relationships will be salvageable, while you may have to let go of others. Avoid the people who enabled your addiction (unless they are members of your family who attended family therapy with you). You may be able to make new friends at recovery support meetings or at 12-Step meetings if you want to take part in the 12-Step Program.4. Focus on Your Health
The better you feel physically, the more resilient you will be against relapse. When addicted to substances, people generally neglect their bodies. In addition to the damage done by the substances, they develop unhealthy eating habits and rarely exercise. Getting back into shape after leaving rehab is tough but extremely rewarding. Exercising and eating healthy are two of the most basic ways to feel better physically and emotionally. If you worked with a nutritionist during rehab, continue to follow their guidance. Consider seeing a personal trainer or joining a gym. Choose an exercise regime that you are most likely to enjoy.5. Pursue Mental Wellness
A lot of your recovery process will be driven by proven psychological strategies. These will help target the acute issues you face in recovery, such as challenging distorted thinking, effective communication, and the pursuit of self-actualization. However, your mental wellness goes beyond maintaining the status quo. In rehab, you will learn mental wellness techniques that offer a holistic approach to recovery. These techniques include mindfulness and meditation. By helping you live more fully in the moment, mindfulness and meditation give you the fortitude to withstand the push and pull of tough emotions. You will more easily make it through difficult periods without relapsing, while beginning to find more meaning in the simple act of living.6. Make a List of Crisis Survival Strategies
In an ideal world, you would be able to stay Zen throughout any tough times, effortlessly letting urges wash over and pass you by. However, as a person experiencing the stresses of modern life, this is like hoping for a miracle. The strategies which best help you withstand harmful urges will fortify you, but sometimes you need simple ways to feel better. There are many different crisis survival strategies. As laid out by dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT) principles, they fall into 5 categories: distraction, self-soothing, improving the moment, making a list of pros and cons, and TIP skills. Distraction includes doing things you enjoy that will take your mind off your distress. Self-soothing includes using your physical senses to relax. For example, you may have a warm bath, listen to calming music, drink herbal tea, etc. Improving the moment includes changing the way you think or feel about what is currently happening. You may find meaning in the situation, take a ‘vacation’ under the bedcovers or on a blanket in the garden, visualize calming scenarios, etc. Making pros and cons is exactly as it sounds. This can be especially useful when you are struggling with the urge to use substances. By going through the pros and cons of what using substances will achieve, you begin to see clearly how it will make things worse. TIP skills refer to the process of changing your body chemistry with techniques such as dipping your head in cold water, holding your breath, rapid exercise, etc. For a comprehensive list of crisis survival strategies, take a look at this handout.7. Recognize Warning Signs
There is no guaranteed way to prevent relapse, but you can look out for warning signs. Relapse rarely happens suddenly, especially if you have done a lot of hard work in recovery. The following warning signs indicate that you may be at higher risk of relapse:- you have returned to addictive patterns of thought
- you are engaging in compulsive or self-sabotaging behaviors
- you are putting yourself in situations where you are around substances or users of substances
- your behaviors are becoming more reckless
- you are beginning to consider substances as a viable way of avoiding pain
