Seeking professional help is a crucial first step in how to rebuild your life. Professional treatment offers the necessary structure and support to address these issues comprehensively. You cannot keep spending time with the people you used rebuilding your life after addiction to drink or use drugs with. No matter how much they may say that they support you in your sobriety, the fact is that they most likely do not. No amount of sentimentality is worth your sobriety, your health, and happiness in the years ahead.
How to Rebuild Your Life: Strategies for Long-Term Recovery
In one study, two-thirds of the adults relapsed in social situations in which they experienced urges and temptations to drink or use. One third experienced relapses when they were experiencing negative emotions and urges to drink/use. By contrast, most adolescents relapsed in social settings when they were trying to enhance a positive emotional state.
Step 4- Follow Through
It’s important to learn to love yourself and reclaim your life after addiction if you want a future that is not just sober but also bright. Find sober friends – Developing a sober network is an essential component to the recovery process. Most often, the people you meet in your drug treatment program or your 12-step meetings are the ones who will become your biggest supports. Like you, they are living proof that life after addiction is possible. If any temptations or negative situations come your way, they can help you navigate through them. Not only can they help you relearn sober social skills, but they can also offer advice, tips, and encouragement through the best and worst of days.
Need help getting addiction treatment?
In resuming your life after addiction treatment, connect with support systems or treatment programs geared toward people in early addiction recovery. Setting achievable goals and tracking personal growth can boost confidence, reinforce positive behaviors, and provide motivation for continued success in recovery. Recognizing and celebrating milestones, such as sobriety days, therapy programs, or personal milestones, reinforces the importance of the recovery journey and provides a sense of accomplishment.
Incorporating Meaningful Activities
This is the perfect time in your life to start discovering what fills you up in the best ways. The importance of a solid support system in drug addiction recovery cannot be understated. Find people close to you, whether current family and friends or new sober friends and mentors, and call on them. That said, June is “Rebuild Your Life Month” at RCA, a perfect time to reflect on the challenges and opportunities of addiction recovery. It’s a time to learn how to find purpose and meaning in life after overcoming addiction and gain insight into the various ways to rebuild your life after addiction.
- It is the stage in which they learn how to live – eat, sleep, work, socialize, learn – without the dark cloud of addiction over their heads.
- For now, if you drink coffee, consider limiting your intake to one or two cups daily.
- Recovery from addiction is not a linear process, and increasingly, relapse is seen as an opportunity for learning.
- Now, your new future is a blank slate, and you can decide who and what you want to be, accomplish in life, but you must make that decision and carry it out.
- Some of your relationships will be rooted in your pattern of addiction.
Once you’ve set specific, measurable goals, your support system can help encourage you during milestones and lift you up when you feel your lowest. Feeling anxious about the prospect of returning to work is normal. This is a sign that you care about maintaining your progress and don’t want to see that slip away. It’s possible to have a life after addiction — you just have to know what to do. She is also the the Co-Host of the popular Elevate Experience Podcast, a no-holds-barred look at addiction and the power of effective treatment. As President and Chairman of the Board, Dan’s mission is to grow the unique Elevate model outside of California and to bring it nationwide.
Life After Addiction: What Living Sober Would Look Like
Employers are not permitted to question job seekers who abused substances. The employer cannot change a contract at any one time in the event that the blood testing results are positive. You also have the right to take a medical leave for substance-abuse treatment if you need it under the Family Medical Leave Act but you have to have worked for an employer for at least 12 months. As part of your job, your employer will have to offer you reasonable accommodation and support while you’re recovering.
- You may start to doubt that you can get through fentanyl detox treatment and give up before you’ve even given it a fair shot.
- Goal setting in recovery can help people figure out the steps they need to take to accomplish long-term recovery.
- Recovery from addiction is not solely a physical process; it also involves nurturing your mental and emotional well-being.
Focus on relationships.
There are groups, such as Greysheeters Anonymous (GSA) to help people to overcome food bingeing and food addiction. When a person feels good while eating food, this is probably an evolutionary advantage, intended to help humans, and other animals, to learn to eat foods that help them grow and store energy. The problem comes up when the brain’s reward system is damaged, and the person finds the eating of high calorie foods to be comforting and difficult to control. Overeating and binge eating is a very common serious consequence that occurs for people after quitting drugs.
Start Recovery Today
Picture your perfect future and make whatever changes you need to in order to get yourself there. There is plenty of evidence that a CBT treatment plan for substance abuse can help you successfully recover from addiction, but that’s not all therapy can do for you! Therapy, CBT or otherwise, can be very beneficial for mental health. People who suffer from disorders like anxiety, depression, ADHD, OCD, BPD, bipolar, ED, and more can learn to manage their symptoms through therapy.
- During individual psychotherapy sessions, you’ll learn that even friends and family members who are happy that you’ve become sober still may not fully support your new lifestyle.
- To forgive yourself is not the same as forgetting your mistakes.
Set and pursue goals
Dan brings a unique and modern perspective to substance abuse and the problems faced by addicts, families, and society. Endurance, objectivity, productivity, logistics, and time/people management. I have a genuine interest in our employees and their wellbeing. My goal is for everyone to enjoy coming to work, and for their days to be as productive as possible toward the end of helping people put their lives back together.