As soon as you have completed your addiction treatment, you will have a whole new world ahead of you. It can also be a pretty frightening time if you fail to prepare yourself for a range of new emotions, challenges, obstacles, and opportunities. While addiction recovery treatment itself wasnot easy at times, not having the security and constant presence of your counselors and the support and encouragement of fellow addiction recovery group members around may leave you feeling a bit lost, but it doesnot have to be this way. Let’s see a few suggestions to help you find your way on the other side of your addiction recovery treatment.
Prepare yourself for changes ahead. Before your emotions and fears get the better of you, stop and take a moment to reflect on what’s happened to you up to this point. You have likely gone through detoxification, active addiction treatment with therapists involving individual and group counseling, possibly medication to ease withdrawal symptoms, 12-step meetings, and coping skills and relapse prevention training.
Part of your overall addiction treatment program probably included creating a personalized recovery plan just before you finished your active treatment. This is a very important document. It serves as a roadmap for your future, but it is certainly not set in stone. In fact, it is meant to be a flexible, constantly changing guideline that you alter as you achieve milestones you have set for yourself or as new opportunities arise that you would like to investigate. Some goals that you thought you wanted while you were in addiction treatment may prove to be no longer viable.
The truth is that it is hard to see very far ahead when you are deep in the midst of treatment. Part of the reason addiction treatment programs are effective is the fact that it is structured. While you are learning about the disease of addiction and how environmental, genetic, and other factors played into you becoming addicted, how to recognize cues and triggers, what to do to avoid falling into relapse, and other important aspects of addiction treatment, you followed a schedule. You always knew what was on the agenda for the day ahead.
Now that you are either out of addiction recovery treatment or are close to it, you will not have the benefit of that daily structured recovery treatment regimen. You will need to create your own plan for how you will move forward. But before you do that, you adopt a mindset that embraces change. You need to see that change is good. Look at the tremendous changes you have already made in your life. You overcame your addiction by your determination, genuine commitment to becoming clean and sober, and your desire to live life to the fullest.
You will not know what tomorrow will bring, and that’s actually to your benefit. Some of the greatest discoveries of a person’s potential are surprises. When you open yourself up to the possibilities of whatever is out there for you, those opportunities to change will appear. So, for now, your first step on the other side of addiction recovery treatment is to prepare for a lot of changes ahead.
