Many people hear the news of addiction and drug overdose deaths, but what about the people who recover from addiction? Research shows that 75% of people seeking recovery achieve their goal. Even more, over 22.3 million Americans have succeeded in overcoming a drug or alcohol use disorder.
If you’ve just completed a treatment program, you’re likely thinking about what’s next in your recovery from drug addiction. This can be an overwhelming place to be on your journey. The good news is that there are continuing care programs available to give you the proper aftercare treatment.
Keep reading this guide to learn everything you need to know about the recovery process and beyond.
What Happens After You Finish Rehab?
While completing a rehabilitation program is a huge milestone in itself, your recovery doesn’t stop there. Your recovery will continue for the rest of your life, but life after rehab can be positive and productive.
Once you’ve completed your treatment program, you’ll have different options to consider. This depends on the type of treatment program you’ve just completed and where you’re at in your recovery.
The most important thing to remember is you have to keep moving forward each day.
Why Is Continuing Care So Important?
Once you complete your addiction treatment program, you return to a “normal” life. This includes everything from friends, family, work, and your favorite hobbies.
While returning to normal life is important, all of these events occurring at once can trigger temptations and cravings. Studies show relapse rates are approximately 50% within the first 12 weeks after completing an inpatient treatment program.
This is mostly because it takes time to understand your triggers and learn to manage stress and other difficulties without substances. Major life changes are essentially forming new, healthy habits. This includes everything from cooking and paying bills to discovering new hobbies and making time for 12-step meetings.
This process takes time and some days will be more challenging than others. You’ll need to ease into it, with support along the way, and finding the right continuing care program is key to this.
What Are Your Continuing Care Options?
Your first step is to learn more about your options for continuing care programs. You’ll need a combination of therapies and daily support.
These options include:
Recovery Support Services (RSS)
Recovery support services are free long-term services that help people learn how to maintain a sober life. RSS is geared toward people who’ve just transitioned out of treatment.
This program will help you figure out your life without addiction. You’ll get a weekly check-in, mentoring, and empathetic care from people who understand. They’ve been right where you are, and are in recovery themselves. You’ll also receive help with tasks like transportation to appointments.
Other services include:
- Medical and housing resources
- Help with community resources
- Counseling
- Help with overcoming obstacles
- Help with sober housing
- Finding vocational training
- Job searches
- Social benefits
This program will help you for a minimum of an entire year at no cost. This is a fantastic recovery support resource that will help you stay on the right track.
Individual Group Counseling
Substance use and mental health disorders often go hand in hand. Research has shown there is a connection between substance use disorders and mental illness. This includes disorders like:
- Anxiety disorders
- Depression
- ADHD
- PTSD
- Bipolar disorder
- Other personality disorders
Substance use disorder is a mental disorder that leads to the inability to control substance use. Substance use continues despite the negative consequences. Many people with SUD also have untreated mental health disorders and use substances to ease the symptoms.
Therefore, behavioral counseling is essential to long-term recovery. Treatment programs offer this counseling, but you need to continue with it on an outpatient basis. Therapies like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) help treat addiction and mental health issues.
CBT is a talk therapy that helps you identify harmful behaviors and thinking patterns that lead to addictive behaviors.
Other Outpatient Services
In addition to behavioral therapy, you can also access other types of outpatient services.
First, you’ll have access to group therapy sessions like 12-step meetings that offer ongoing support. These counseling programs address many issues that people face in recovery from work and family stressors to successes, and everything in between.
This is where you have to practice being vulnerable and letting people know exactly what you’re going through. It takes time, but you’ll soon find that sharing gets easier, and you’ll start developing close relationships with others in recovery.
You’ll need to continue to work on identifying relapse triggers and how to manage them. You’ll work on different techniques that will help you identify triggers:
- Noticing your feelings
- How to listen to yourself
- Being understanding of your feelings
- Managing stress
- Identifying people and places that trigger you
Even items like empty pill bottles and Netflix shows serve as triggers. The key is being aware of your triggers and forming a plan to manage them.
Much of this plan revolves around making healthy lifestyle changes. For example, forming healthy eating and exercise habits can help people stick to recovery.
Recovery Housing
Recovery housing provides a stable living environment after the completion of a treatment program. Recovery housing facilities provide a place that’s between a controlled treatment environment and real-world living.
The great thing about recovery housing is you’ll continue to get recovery support like group therapy sessions. You’ll also have access to counseling services and will live with others on their own path to recovery
Recovery housing also helps you with your career and life skills. This is because many people in addiction are only focused on getting drugs or alcohol. Getting back to things like searching for jobs or doing your own laundry can be overwhelming.
You’ll also get help with rebuilding relationships and learning new ways to manage the stress of daily life. This includes forming a self-care routine to help you with recovery.
You must stay sober to live in a recovery house, but you’ll still experience triggers and temptations. This will allow you to work through them step by step.
Recovery From Drug Addiction: Getting the Right Support
Now that you know more about the process of recovery from drug addiction, you can take the next steps by finding the support you need.
You can turn to Cenikor for all your addiction treatment and recovery needs. We’ve been delivering quality substance abuse treatment services since 1967 and have helped well over 300,000 people with recovery.
We offer adult, youth, active duty, and veteran programs that include detox, inpatient, outpatient, mental health treatment, and recovery support.
Our quality care is also affordable and we have a variety of payment options that include private insurance, payment plans, and sliding-scale payments. We have treatment facilities throughout Texas and New Mexico with multiple treatment program options.
Take a look at our recovery programs and decide which one is best for you.
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