Your recovery from addiction is a long game. Addiction can be treated but isn’t cured. You have to keep working at it to avoid its damaging influence. Fortunately, some resources can help with that. Serenity Treatment Center of Louisiana, for example, has an aftercare program dedicated to helping people who finished treatment continue to work on their sobriety over the long term. Here are a few strategies for maintaining long-term sobriety.
Join an Aftercare Program
As soon as you leave your treatment program, and preferably before you leave treatment, try to join an aftercare program. Aftercare gives you some of the support resources that you had in treatment, like group meetings and sponsors, long after your treatment program ends.
Aftercare programs are an effective way to reinforce sober living skills without the need to rejoin a treatment program. Programs are usually provided by treatment centers as a means of helping you transition back into your life. However, you can find aftercare programs that are community-run and offer free services.
Change Your Environment
Your environment has a high level of influence on how you act day to day. If you can right after treatment, change your environment. Your goal is to eliminate the factors that trigger your addiction from your life entirely. If you allow those triggers back into your life, you are more likely to relapse.
Building a new environment can be difficult, especially if you have little control over where you live. However, you can eliminate some of the triggers that you have control over. For example, avoiding the people that you used to do drugs with is a good idea. You can also limit references to your drug of choice in your life.
Any steps that you can take to distance yourself from substance abuse, the less temptation you will feel.
Your Support Network
When you are having difficulties, always lean on your support network. These are the people in your life that you know have your best interests at heart. A large part of ending your treatment program is rebuilding relationships with your support network. That way, you always have someone that you can lean on.
When you are feeling stressed or triggered, lean on your support network. Spend more time with them so that they can help you through a tough situation. You will be less likely to get off track.
Contact Serenity Treatment Center of Louisiana
Sobriety isn’t something that you just arrive at. It takes a lot of hard work to get there, and just as much work to stay there. Build yourself a system to help you keep your sobriety over the long term.
At Serenity Treatment Center of Louisiana, we help you establish the right sobriety-based habits that make it easier to support your recovery long-term. We even have an aftercare program to help you make that final transition back into the community and establish the connections that you need to stay sober. Contact the Serenity Treatment Center of Louisiana by calling us at (225) 361-0899 or filling out our online form, and let us help you change your life for good.
