The greatest fear in addiction recovery is that, once the recovering addict leaves rehab behind and tries to resume their everyday life, the first temptation or craving will prove too much and the addict will succumb to relapse almost immediately.
Resisting such temptations — for they will come, no matter how secure the addict feels in their recovery early on — is vital to ensure that the recovery lasts and doesn’t end almost before it begins. But how can the recovering addict prepare for such cravings and temptations before they come? They must work on building resilience by developing tools for overcoming challenges in recovery.
The best way to resist temptation is through experience and resilience — but the only way to grow those is to experience and successfully resist temptation. If you run into a craving and immediately cave into it and relapse into substance abuse, you haven’t built any resilience, but instead suffered a setback, making resisting future cravings seem even more difficult.
So, it’s an apparent Catch-22: you need resilience to overcome challenges in recovery, but you must overcome challenges in recovery to build resilience. So how do you interrupt this cycle and find a way to successfully insert yourself into it and get the help you need?
Well, there are tools — mental strategies, resources and other elements of recovery you can learn, internalize or utilize to help yourself resist challenges. As you do this, you do in fact begin to build your resilience, making resisting further temptations easier, until you do in fact have the experience and resilience to avoid relapse and maintain a healthy recovery.
But what are these tools? And how can you find or learn them?
Well, a good rehab program should provide you with some before you ever leave treatment. You should be working on developing coping techniques while still in rehab to help you when you will later face challenges.
Such techniques can include actions you may take when you experience a craving — meditation or prayer, for instance, or certain hobbies or activities with your hands you can undertake to distract you from an addiction craving.
But there is help from outside of yourself, too. You may wish to attend support meetings or sessions for other addicts, where you can meet with others who experience your same struggles and can empathize with you and help you through our own struggles. Such programs often pair you with a sponsor, a more experienced recovering addict who can lend you mental and moral support and guide you through challenges when they arise.
And friends and family may be there for you, if you’re lucky enough to have some who will support you in your times of trouble. Seek out those who wish to help you and lean on them when necessary.
At Good Landing Recovery, equipping recovering addicts with the tools necessary to overcome challenges in recovery is a vital task. Only by doing this and helping the addict build their resilience against cravings and temptations can rehab prove to be a lasting success in a patient’s life.
You may suffer setbacks. You may fail and relapse as you try to build that resilience. Don’t let it be discouraging. Failures can help build resilience too, if you redirect them into character building experience and not into destructive guilt and remorse.
Resisting temptation and overcoming challenges is hard, but it is possible. By building resilience with tools for overcoming challenges in recovery, the recovering addict can find lasting success in their recovery.