Addiction is often described as an escape from reality. As you embark on your recovery journey, you’ll soon find the conflicts, mundane tasks, and difficult situations that you have been avoiding are rearing their ugly heads once again. To make sure that your new sober life is productive and pleasant, you’re going to need to develop life-skills that you’ve been neglecting. Let’s take a look at some of the skills that will be instrumental to living your best life.
1) Taking Control of Time
Addiction renders time almost meaningless. When all you need is a few grains of powder or glasses of liquor, your day is structured around simple tasks and choices. But sobriety will bring an almost overwhelming array of options, decisions, and hours to fill up. Most treatment facilities structure the client’s day down to the minute, using ceaseless activity as a way to distract those in recovery from cravings, and also to offer a prelude of life on the outside.
One way to continue your education on time-management would be to explore transitional housing or a structured after-care program. Another option is to build a detailed schedule with your counselors, peers, or sponsor. By establishing standards and accountability, you can build healthy habits, which will eventually become both rewarding and self-sustaining. Time is a gift, and learning how to get the most out of the precious hours life has allotted to you can be the greatest blessing that sobriety offers.
2) Creating Boundaries
Addiction takes an emotional toll, and it is often itself a response to severe psychic pain and trauma. As you dive into sober life once more, it’s essential for you to establish the boundaries that you’ll need to enable you to regain the equilibrium necessary for spiritual and emotional well-being. Rokelle Lerner, an expert on recovery, co-dependency, and family dynamics defines healthy boundaries with the aphorism “what I value I will protect, what you value I will respect.”
Establishing boundaries is a two way street, which is often the result of an unspoken collaboration between you and your friends or family members. Your boundaries are based on your own values and needs, and establish for you and those around you a definition of acceptable and unacceptable behavior. For those in recovery, these are incredibly important, as they’ll enable you to root out triggers, toxic influences, and unnecessary stress which can all contribute to relapse. The Hazelden Betty Ford center offers an illuminating guide to boundaries and how to set them if you’re unfamiliar with the process.
3) Conflict Resolution
Conflict is a cause of stress to just about everybody, everywhere. It can cause profound anxiety, anger, fear, and a great many other negative emotions. For many addicts, the substance they’ve been using offers an escape or alternative to the conflicts that are practically unavoidable in family life, romantic relationships, and the workplace. Developing your communication skills in recovery and beyond can allow you to handle conflict in healthy ways. Early recovery can be an emotional roller-coaster, and re-establishing relationships damaged by your addiction can lead to some tense situations. A focus on improving communication skills will help you navigate these situations with a minimum of stress, anger, and resentment, enabling you to avoid unnecessary conflict while addressing the unavoidable confrontations life is certain to offer up in a positive fashion.
4) Self-Care
Addiction has changed your brain in ways beyond the obvious dopamine receptors and neural pathways that have been re-wired. Your self-esteem, sense of self-worth, and overall mental well-being are probably at an all time low when you make the decision to seek treatment. Not to mention the fact that you have almost certainly neglected to exercise, eat nutritious food, and pursue any other healthy habits. As you progress on your recovery journey, you’ll realize just how important self-care is for keeping yourself positive, motivated, and satisfied in your new sober life.
At Tabula Rasa Retreat, we’re firmly convinced that it’s a fundamental building block for success. We emphasize to all of our clients the benefits that can be gained from kundalini yoga, mindfulness practice, and a host of other therapies that we encourage those in recovery to try. A routine that optimizes your physical and mental health can be an immensely powerful weapon in the battle against addiction. There’s no better way to ensure that you stay on the right path than to wake up every day feeling energetic, positive, and ready to engage fully with the world around you!
5) Setting And Achieving Goals
Obtaining and using a substance used to be your primary goal every day. It gave your life a purpose, and motivated you to solve problems and confront difficult tasks. In recovery, you will lose that fundamental sense of purpose which drove your behaviour, habits, and actions. Many people emerging from treatment are soon beset by a feeling of purposelessness in their new lives.
The best way to avoid this malaise is to set personal goals for both the short and long-term. In order to be effective, your goals should be realistic, achievable, and trackable. “Become a better person” is a worthy ambition, but it isn’t an effective goal to work towards. Think big, and then consider the steps that can be taken each day or each week in order to work towards the desired outcome. You need to establish aspirations that you can consistently work towards, and you need to track your progress and hold yourself accountable.
Using the guidelines of SMART goals can be a huge help. SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. The framework can help you to avoid many of the pitfalls that make you fail in living up to your New Year’s resolutions again and again. Seeing yourself progress towards goals that would’ve seemed impossibly ambitious when you were using can provide you with the motivation and meaning you’ll need to make sobriety work for you.
If you’re looking to put an end to addiction and start developing the tools you’ll need for a healthy and sober life, get in touch with Tabula Rasa Retreat today!
For further information visit www.tabularasaretreat.com or call PT +351 965 751 649 UK +44 7961 355 530