The biggest challenge you face during the first six months after rehab is actually feeling everything you experience. In the past, you dulled your emotions, thoughts, and perceptions through drugs or alcohol. Therefore, early in recovery, you experience many raw emotions and feel frustrated, fearful, stressed, and hurt in ways you have not for many years. During this time, you need solid relapse prevention techniques.
Having a relapse prevention plan proves very important. This plan helps you anticipate the people, activities or places that make you want to drink, so you feel prepared when they occur.
What Is Relapse Prevention?
A relapse happens when you pick up your drugs or alcohol and use them again after beginning recovery. However, preventing relapse starts well before you actually reach for those items. You must avoid this slip at all costs, to ensure one use does not turn into a binge, renewed addiction or even overdose death.
Your relapse prevention plan takes whatever form you find most useful and convenient. For some, it is a written document. Others use flash cards, a workbook or a verbal plan developed in addiction counseling. You concoct your plan with an experienced counselor’s help because their support helps you see all angles of potential relapse.
What Must Your Prevention Plan Include?
One of the most critical parts of your relapse prevention plan is identifying your own triggers. You must know what triggers send you into the emotional vulnerability that leads to relapse. Even simple daily stress triggers many people. Other triggers include family interactions, memories of past trauma, certain places, or other people who use drugs or alcohol.
Besides your triggers, you must know what you used your substances to achieve. Some people use drugs to ease anxiety. Others turn to drinking or drugs for depression relief, relaxation during marital problems, to combat boredom or out of loneliness.
Once you gain an understanding of your substance abuse issues, you must plan how to avoid relapse. This plan includes clear steps for you to take to safeguard your sobriety. You must also identify your support system and who you will talk to about your vulnerability to relapse.
Relapse Prevention Starts in Rehab Treatment
Your relapse prevention as a whole starts in your drug addiction treatment program. From your first moments of sobriety, you start learning about your individual addiction and relapse triggers. Then through quality therapies and educational sessions, you develop the plan that keeps you sober for the long term. Your only obstacle to relapse then becomes not using your plan.
In addition to planning for prevention of relapse, you need an array of therapies and treatment methods, such as:
- Addiction detox program
- Residential treatment
- Medication assisted treatment
- Psychotherapy
- Individual, group and family therapy
- Recreational and art therapy
- Acupuncture and massage
- Relapse prevention planning
Get to know more about how Pillars Recovery helps you prevent relapse after your hard-won sobriety. You can live the life you want with long-term wellness, with Pillars Recovery’s help. So call 866-790-1930 now.
