The recovery advocate serves an important role in rehab treatment for others, helping to guide patients through the trials and tribulations of rehab and early recovery. But while the recovery advocate is working to help others find recovery, it can be easy to forget to focus on their own needs, particularly if they are a recovering addict themselves.
The importance of self-care in the life of a recovery advocate must be emphasized.
Self-care is an important aspect of recovery. The addict, struggling with substance abuse, is focused on little else than their addiction and feeding it, so the act of taking care of themselves and making decisions for their greater health can be a freeing, almost revolutionary, act for the recovering addict.
The recovery advocate spends a good deal of time encouraging recovering addicts to practice self-care as part of the larger recovery process. Without proper self-care, it is far too easy for a recovering addict to fall back into bad habits, find themselves confronting unfortunate triggers and ultimately stumbling into relapse.
But it can be possible to do so much preaching to others that you forget to practice what you preach. While not all recovery advocates come from a background of addiction and substance abuse, there are those who do and they have the same challenges and issues to handle as their charges in addiction treatment.
This means they have the same need for self-care as any other recovering addict, if not more. They work with people struggling with substance abuse day in and day out, after all, hearing about the struggles of others and working to process the challenges of maintaining sobriety for others. The chance of encountering triggers during such work is higher than average, yet the recovery advocate has less recourse to an outlet than those they serve as such an outlet.
The recovery advocate, therefore, must do what they can to ensure they practice proper self-care whenever possible. They need support from friends and family, a viable network of aid from group meetings and sponsors, a proper gameplan to handle cravings and triggers and strategies to avoid relapse. They must accept that caring for others does not mean they cannot also care for themselves. They must, ultimately, advocate for themselves as much as they do for others.
Good Landing Recovery promotes proper self-care for all patients, but recovery advocates are encouraged to practice good self-care as well. Without thorough self-care, a lasting recovery becomes much less likely, so Good Landing makes self-care an important part of the treatment regimen at all levels.
For the recovery advocate, self-care is an absolute must, both as an example for others and as a proper preventative measure for their continued recovery. If the advocate is a recovering addict, they must maintain their own sobriety and good self-care is key to doing that.