Recovery may be a steep mountain, but it has been climbed many times before. There are maps, supplies, campsites, watering holes, and experienced mountaineers to help you make the trek. In this post, we here at Villa Kali Ma will share a few ideas that may help you along the trail.
How women can plan ahead for life after rehab
To formulate a plan for life after rehab is essential. The staff of your rehabilitation facility will work together with you to make a comprehensive aftercare plan, covering every aspect of your post-rehab life.
Where you will live, who you will be hanging out with, what you will do for work, and how you will stay active in your treatment are all mapped out in your Relapse Prevention Plan.
A good plan outlines the recovery road in great detail and includes emergency protocols and contingencies – what you will do to protect and guard yourself against relapse when tested. This includes a full assessment of all potential risks and triggers and identifies useful tools and interventions that you will use to keep yourself safe and strong.
In addition to a good relapse prevention plan, we suggest that each woman embarking on a new chapter of life practice a little bit of active imagination, to foresee and create a path through life that will be good for her.
Here is a 2-part journal prompt:
Part I: The Dreaming
The inventor Nikola Tesla was famous for picturing the entirety of his creations, even testing them in a variety of applications and scenarios in his mind, before even beginning to build a prototype to prove his invention out in the real world. Do the same now for your ideal after-rehab life.
Allow your intuition to guide you in picturing the ideal scenario. If all goes as perfectly well in the next year, what is your first year after rehab like? Describe it in great detail, in the present tense, essentially dreaming up the invention of your new life.
Sample Dreaming:
After leaving rehab, I move into my sober living facility. I like the space and the people, it’s comfortable and even kind of fun to have roommates again. I make friends with the other girls and find support and connection in the meetings we go to. It feels like a little home and positive family, where we are able to laugh and cry together as needed. Soon after settling in, a synchronistic connection gets me an easy, interesting-enough job, that feels safe and steady, where I can feel useful and earn sufficiently…
Part 2: Preparing for Possible Problems
Now, like Tesla did, imagine all the possible things that could go wrong, and again allow yourself to dream up what the solution to those problems would be or could be. Think ahead in the mindset of preparing for potential scenarios, and ask yourself a series of what-if questions. Write up a list of “What ifs”.
What if I am tempted to relapse?
What if I slip?
What if I run into an old friend who’s still using?
What if my ex calls me?
Each of these questions can be pre-solved in imagination. The exercise of pre-seeing a solution helps strengthen your intentions and keeps you in solutions.
Sample Anticipatory Problem Solving:
-What if one of my friends relapses?
-If someone close to me relapses, and I feel upset or tempted, I could go to a meeting and seek advice on what to do in this scenario, I know a lot of people will have been through something similar. I could offer to take her to a meeting or back to rehab, but if I’m not feeling strong enough I can also say something like “I love you, but I’m not strong enough to help you right now because I have to protect my own recovery”…
Mentally preparing in this way can be a huge assist in rehearsing and preparing for possible scenarios. Of course, none of us knows exactly how life will roll out in the details, but through envisioning, we can clarify our intentions and this genuinely helps us act wisely in difficult moments.
If you’re not sure what the challenges in early recovery are, ask around! Your recovery people can tell you. Here are some potential prompts to consider, that we here at Villa Kali Ma suggest you think about:
- What will I do about dating and romance?
- How will I handle holidays and family gatherings?
- What will I do about work? How will I make a living, and also protect my sobriety?
- What will I do if something happens that makes me feel ashamed or embarrassed? What if I am triggered to use?
- How will I handle conflicts?
- What if I am invited to a location I don’t think I should go to, such as a work event where they are serving alcohol, but I don’t want to share that I’m in recovery?
- What will I do for fun?
- Who is safe to talk to about recovery topics?
- How will I make sure I follow my relapse-prevention plan, no matter what?
How can family members help with this transition?
Family members can be an enormous resource in the first year after rehab. The good news is, that the path of helpfulness is relatively simple (though we won’t claim it’s easy). Our advice in a nutshell? Detach with love.
Tips for family members:
1. Let Go of Personal Attachment to the Outcome
Sticking to recovery after rehab is not a guaranteed outcome. It should not be taken for granted that a newly sober person will succeed. Nor should it be, on the other hand, assumed that they will fail. The truth is, we do not know, we shall have to see.
There is nothing you as a family member can do to control what happens. It is between the recovering individual and their path. If you feel attached to the outcome, try to let go and trust as best you can. Worry can easily turn into an interfering energy.
2. Believe in the Them
It’s ok to regard the addict with suspicion, but remember that the addict is a usurper. Somewhere in there, the person you love is fighting to get free. Therefore, hold space and unconditional positive regard for them. It takes a lot of courage, surrender, hard work, emotional release, and personal transformation to succeed.
Understanding that your family member needs support, respect, and recognition that they are doing something very important and vulnerable, will help you have proper reverence for what is happening.
What normally gets in the way of this is our own fears about them, (and less heroically, what their choices will mean for us!).
As best, you can take care of your own needs so that you do not unwittingly impose your needs too much on your loved one, and try on the idea that if you have faith in them, they are more likely to make it than if you worry.
3. Refrain from Trying to Do Recovery For Them
Your recovering beloved needs to walk on their own two feet. It is not the time to carry your beloved like a baby, but rather to let them toddle their way forward, metaphorically speaking, so that they build strength. They will fall down, yes they will. They might suffer a lot (is there anyone who doesn’t?), but they will also learn through this, to get up and to move forward.
You can be very empathetic and kind, offering simple statements like “I know, I understand”, and “I’m sorry this hurts so much”, but do not under any circumstances start doing for them what they must learn to do for themselves. They must be in the driver’s seat of their own recovery, even though we may be rightfully scared that they will crash the car. Pray for the best, and let go, it is literally not possible for you to do it for them. If you try to do it for them, you will mess them up.
4. Be Honest
Speak the plain truth of what you are experiencing. Harshness, criticism, and judgment aren’t helpful, but truth is. Truth is not opinions, distortions, and interpretations, but just the facts.
Learn to use observation language, such as “I noticed I got really tense when you said you don’t think you’ll go to the meeting tonight, after all. I notice my thoughts are centering on the fact that you told me you are doing 30 meetings in 30 days, and I’m wondering what it means that you want to skip. I’m wondering if it’s a bad sign. I know it’s up to you to handle your recovery, but I wanted to share that I got a bad feeling when you said that.”
What your beloved does with your truth-reflection is up to them. It might be bitter medicine that saves their life. Or they might ignore it. But you will have done your best.
5. Help Them Stick to the Plan
It is very helpful for people in recovery when their family members are aware of the Relapse Prevention Plan, even having a copy to refer to and occasionally pull out of the drawer and look at it together.
For example, in a good relapse prevention plan, there will be answers to questions like, “What do I do if I’ve had a slip but not yet a full-on relapse?”. Family members can always say: “Let’s see what the plan for this situation says: here it says the first step is to call your sponsor. How about we do that?”
The importance of not stopping recovery efforts
Sometimes, we need to remember the long game. Recovery is won, day by day, through consistency and repetition and starving out the enemy within. The addict within us cannot survive if every day, we make sincere efforts to recover. On any given day, we do not have to do all of the recovery work – only today’s piece.
If we keep doing recovery actions, we will keep recovering. If we stop doing recovery actions, we stop recovering and return to addiction.
It really is that simple. In recovery, there is no in-between – we are either walking up the mountain towards the heavens of recovery, making daily progress, feeling ourselves more and more to be enfolded into the sunny warm arms of life’s love for us, or we are sliding back down to cold shadows of addiction and its hatred for us.
There will come a time when we are tempted to rest, to skip, where we say, surely I have earned a break. I’m too tired to go to a meeting, and I just went to one yesterday.
Be careful in those times. Be careful of what your idea of a break is, and especially of what a reward is. These are the danger zones.
In anticipation of such moments, take a pause right now to consider what you could do:
What could I do when I feel tired out and depleted like I have been putting a lot into my recovery, and I need some restoration, some joy, some pause from it being such a steep climb? What are positive ways to restore, relax, to celebrate? What can I do when it all feels like too much emotional processing? How can I be nice to the part of me that’s working so hard, but not fall in with the addiction again?
Whatever you do, don’t stop climbing the mountain of your recovery. Some days you will only take a few steps, and other days you will make great advances. But every day must be oriented towards recovery.
It is a challenging, but important truth, that if we don’t find a way to keep moving, to stay warm and active, we may fall back into the cold teeth of the beast walking just a few steps behind us.
Villa Kali Ma can help women prepare for life after rehab
Preparing for life after rehab isn’t as complicated as it sounds. We can learn from the experiences of others; there are best practices and known routes up the mountain of recovery. Your sponsor will be your main mountain guide, recovery veterans a valuable resource.
At Villa Kali Ma, we take thorough care that when you leave the safety of our halls, you are outfitted with all that you will need to have the best chances of making your ascent.
The mapping, planning, preparation, and teaching of recovery survival skills, including awareness of what to do in any and all contingency scenarios, is our specialty.
Though it is your choice to recover, and only you can walk the steps up the mountain, if you desire to be free, we can help you memorize the path inside and out, before you even set foot on the trail.
Interested in how we may be able to help you recover a life of meaning, joy, and purpose? Reach out to connect!