Staying Stopped From Drug And Alcohol Use
Maintaining sobriety from drug and alcohol addiction is a proactive process; certain skills and attitudes need to be developed and utilized.
There is an old adage that states quitting drug and alcohol use is easy, staying quit is the hard part. drug and alcohol relapse prevention is the art of staying stopped There are certain attitudes and behaviors that can be developed that will decrease the likelihood of returning to drug and alcohol use.
Here is a list of the top five sobriety tools:
Motivation level – In order to achieve difficult goals it makes sense that the motivation has to be very high. People who rank their sobriety as a number one priority often have better results than those who put maintaining recovery on their ‘to do’ list. There should be an absolute commitment not to drinker drug ‘no matter what’.
Handling cravings – Thoughts and cravings of using drugs or alcohol will occur to anyone in recovery. The skill that needs to be developed is to stop these thoughts and cravings from becoming an actual using incident. The good news here is that cravings generally decrease in frequency and intensity over time.
Coping skills – Coping skills are either undeveloped, or underutilized. Some examples of life skills that may need some work are the ability to communicate, basic social skills, knowing how to develop and maintain interpersonal or intimate relationships.
Identifying, owning, and processing emotions – there is often stated rule in relapse prevention that advises people in recovery to avoid “people, places, and things” that could be dangerous to the recovery. In reality, is may not be the situations or triggers that are more dangerous, but our rather our inability to handle the emotions that these things generate. Our actions are often generated by our feelings.
Self-esteem and self-confidence – There needs to be some internal reward for going through all the effort of maintaining sobriety.If a person does not have the self-confidence in their ability to remain abstinent, certainly undercuts the motivation to keep working at it.
Relapse back into drug and alcohol use happens with alarming frequency for great number of people. It is therefore only prudent to develop plans that decrease the possibility of relapse.
