The Benefits of Long Term Addiction Recovery Care
There are many addicts who know they need help. They want that help, but they’re afraid of everything it entails. Minimizing the process doesn’t make it easier for anyone.
Addicts should enter into recovery knowing that it is a comprehensive process that requires constant maintenance. Many addicts spend the rest of their life focused on maintaining their recovery, where they might have instead spent the remainder of their lives focused on surviving their addiction.
For maintained success, recovery needs to remain a lifelong mindset. Long term addiction recovery care helps addicts keep their addictions in the past.
If you’re ready to begin the process of rehabilitation, you need to know how to make every move count. Plan to make recovery a cornerstone of your wellbeing and healthy lifestyle from every day here on out. The benefits are endless.
The Process Starts With Admitting You Need to Recover
Recovery creates a drastically positive new future for addicts. It reshapes the entire trajectory of their lives. It changes everything they know and encourages them to become an entirely new person.
Even though all the change is positive and necessary for a happy, healthy, productive life, change is still a scary thing. When you don’t know what the future looks like, it’s hard to take that plunge.
If you’re waiting for a glimpse into the way your life will play out after recovery, you’ll be waiting forever. You need to accept that there are a lot of unknowns at the end of the tunnel, but that you’ll undoubtedly be better for them.
If you’ve been an addict long enough, you know that any other life would be a lot easier and a lot more peaceful than what you’ve had to endure. Be eager to accept the potential for something wonderful.
The Most Physically Demanding Step is Detoxification
The first thing you’ll do in a rehabilitation program is detoxify from the substance or substances you’ve become dependent on.
This process can be scary and uncomfortable. A lot of addicts have reservations about pursuing recovery simply because it’s against human nature to run towards known discomfort. Like you don’t look forward to having a rotting tooth pulled out even if it’ll benefit you in the long run, you may not be eager to go through the process of detoxing.
If you’ve ever had a hard time obtaining your drug of choice, you already have a glimpse of what detoxing might feel like. You know the way your mind and body react when they’ve been without the substance for too long, and you know that completely stopping will only amplify that feeling.
Detoxing isn’t a result of your body being deprived of something it needs — not in the traditional sense. Your body isn’t going haywire and making you sick because it desperately wants the drug. It’s going off the rails to make you better. In a lot of ways, detoxing is the closest thing to human reanimation you’ll ever experience.
Drugs or alcohol can affect your brain’s ability to regulate its own chemicals and properly supply your body with the hormones it generates to make your body work perfectly. When the substance is gone, everything begins to kick back on. Your body floods with adrenaline and frantically works to re-establish the proper chemical balance in your brain. The symptoms of withdrawal are the side effects of coming back to life.
Even though withdrawal is scary, it’s a very good thing. It’s the first step in reclaiming your mind and your body.
Medical professionals at your inpatient care facility will be with you to monitor you through every step of the process, assuring that you’re coming back around safely and that your body is properly nourished and hydrated throughout the process.
The best case scenario is that you’ll only ever have to put yourself through this process one time. It’s a lot to overcome, and it’s never any easier if you relapse or develop an addiction to a new substance. You don’t ever want to tax your system that way again, and long term addiction recovery care can prevent you from going through the same ordeal twice.
Inpatient Recovery Gives You The Groundwork You Need
Detoxification might be a crucially important step, but it’s only just the beginning. If you detox and go back home, you haven’t actually solved anything. There’s nothing to stop you from going back to the drug or drink in place of a proper coping mechanism.
People with immaculate willpower and nothing to escape generally don’t become addicts or alcoholics. Many people use drugs as a coping mechanism. If you love every single moment of your life and everything is wonderful, you wouldn’t feel the need to alter your mind just to catch a break.
There are things you deserve to deal with, and you are worth the work. Things that stress you out. Things that make you sad. Stories you’ve never told anyone. Heartbreak, grief, disappointment, depression, and feelings of failure.
You’re carrying those around with you all the time, and you shouldn’t have to. When you don’t know how to resolve negative feelings on your own, you’re more likely to drown them out with your substance of choice.
Learning to open up is hard. Not in the same physically demanding way that detoxing is hard, but difficult on a completely new level. It requires emotional vulnerability, something that inspires fear in a lot of people. Unless and until you can break down that wall, you may never resolve the source of your addiction.
Inpatient facilities arrange group therapy for participants, and this is one of the most helpful tools for developing the groundwork you need.
When you’re in group therapy, you’re surrounded by perfect strangers that you have immeasurable things in common with. They all feel the same way you do. Maybe their life experiences and circumstances were different, but they still found themselves in the same place.
They’re not here to judge you, and you’re not here to judge them.
Individual therapy sessions will give you a safe and comfortable space to discuss things you’d rather keep private. Your individual therapist will work with you to identify your negative coping mechanisms, discover the root of your feelings, and help you create a new roadmap for your life.
Getting this roadmap and navigating this roadmap are two completely different things, and what’s why long term aftercare is important.
What Happens When You Return to the Outside World?
Inpatient rehabilitation is a sheltered and insulated space. It needs to be. Recovering addicts need to be kept safe. They need temptations out of their line of sight. They need access to doctors and mental health professionals to help them through one of the most difficult times in their life.
When the patient and the provider both decide it’s time to return to the outside world, the real journey is only just beginning.
You’ll spend some time talking with your mental health professional about what your plans are for exiting rehab. You likely realize that the places you used to go and people you used to be around will only provide a source of negative inspiration. They can undo all the progress you’ve made.
That’s why so many people relapse when they leave rehab. They have all these great ideas and great intentions. They have a desire to live a healthy, happy, and productive life. But they don’t know how to begin. All they know is the life they left. That’s why long term addiction recovery care is necessary — to prevent slips that can set back the course of the new life you’ve worked so hard to start.
What Long Term Addiction Recovery Care Does
The moment you’re out in the world, a lot of familiar feelings, people, and places are going to come back. These will likely create strong associations in your mind with using. Your mental health professional told you this would happen, but you won’t really understand the extent of how it feels until you find yourself faced with those feelings or situations.
Your former inclination would have been to use. Your new inclination needs to be to talk to someone.
When you find yourself struggling to stay on track or make the right choices, the best thing you can do is talk to an addiction specialist or a mental health professional. You’ll have fresh instances in your mind that you can describe to that professional, and he or she will be able to help you work through them.
Turning to therapy will keep you from turning to drugs, as long as you’re diligent about your visits and applying the professional advice you’ve been given. As long as you’re willing to acknowledge problematic feelings or urges and act on them responsibly, you’re far less likely to revert to your old unhealthy coping mechanisms.
Conclusion
Long term recovery is something that is self managed. After you leave your rehabilitation facility, you’re in charge of the decisions you make.
Nobody can follow you around and give you real time guidance. That’s why you need a long term recovery plan. You need to know what to do when things get tough. You need to have a professional you can turn to for further guidance.
Having a system of resources at your disposal is important. When you know how to do the right thing, it’s so much easier not to do the wrong thing.
It’s a long journey ahead, and everything we discussed is at the very end. If you’re ready to start at the very beginning, explore your treatment options with Starbridge Recovery today.
Sources:
https://www.drugabuse.gov/news-events/nida-notes/2017/03/impacts-drugs-neurotransmission
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/depression
https://psychcentral.com/blog/5-surprising-ways-to-make-the-most-of-therapy/
