Watching Intervention from A&E, your family came up with this great idea for you to have an intervention. They packed your bags and shipped you off to a treatment facility 3,000 miles from home. Perhaps your first week wasn’t all that fun, but after 20 or 30 days you realized that you were feeling better, looking better, and thinking better. The reality may have come to you that this plushy; ocean view treatment facility is a whole lot nicer than the filthy apartment you were living in. Rather than finding a way to stay alive, eat, and get high, you’re now reflecting on your life up to now and the choices you have made. Everyone around you is talking about sobriety, and dancing on their new found spiritualism.
Some one else is responsible for your meals, how you spend your day, where you go, who you talk to. It’s fabulous! The world has been lifted off your shoulders. Imagine, there are people just like you that haven’t got a clue how to live in a world without drugs and alcohol. Wow, there are people who have stayed clean and sober for years, decades even, and they seem happy and like they are walking on the top of the world. The sun is shinning and each day is sunshine. Your family talks with you and are proud of you and all you have accomplished!
Your counselors are the confidants you needed to help you work through all your issues, but you are not from here. Your parents paid for 90 days, the money has run out, and now you need to go home. All your sober friends are here. This little pristine world is here. The reality hits you between the eyes; your gut starts to turn. You want to go home, you want to live a normal life, see your family, and see your friends. Torn between two worlds, a group of new friends who never new you using, or family and friends that have only known you as a user, liar and a cheat.
Leaving treatment is a difficult time. Aftercare is a real part of Addiction treatment. Here are just a few real statistics
FIVE SOBERING FACTS
1. More than half of people completing addiction treatment will relapse on alcohol or other drugs in the 1st year.
2. The first 30-90 days following discharge is the window of greatest vulnerability for relapse after treatment.
3. Between 25-35% of people who complete addiction treatment will be readmitted to treatment within one year, and 50% will be readmitted within five years.
4. Recovery is not fully stabilized (point at which risk of future lifetime relapse drops below 15%) untilfourtofiveyears of sustained recovery.
5. Relapses following addiction treatment produce higher death rates from accidental poisoning/overdose, AIDS, suicide and homicide, cardiovascular and liver disease.
The good news is you can go home! The better news is you can maintain your sobriety where ever you live. Going through this part of the transformation from a life of addiction to a life of sobriety is difficult. Your first consideration before leaving treatment should be who will be calling you, not just random calls, but structured and daily for a minimum of 14 days while you settle in. This is an integral part of the Recovery program from Motivate 4 Success. In those first 14 days, individuals find themselves completely separated from everything and everyone they have known in sobriety. Your old friends and colleagues appear to look at you differently. The smells, sounds, and sensations are all changed from what you know in sobriety.
Two things are highly apparent; in sobriety, you do not know how to really talk to people who are not in a program, and the people that you have known, do not know the sober you. While you were in treatment you have made dramatic changes to your personality. You have changed. You are not the same person, and they need to get to know you all over again.
You have the skills to stay sober, but you do not have the experience of dealing with your past. The people, places and events, you had created while you were using. It can be done. It is not that difficult, working with a coach, you will learn this new skill set and be able to create new relationships with the people that love you. The people that love you need to learn to accept and understand the new you. You have been given the gift of sobriety. They haven’t had the option to learn recovery. Help each other; make sure you have solid foundational support for yourself and your family. Above all else, remember it is progress, not perfection.
