Learning life skills is a monumental achievement that will greatly assist a recovering addict in life after treatment. Some believe that the proper attainment of key life skills while in rehab is the most important factor in ensuring that a relapse does not occur in life after treatment. When an individual abuses drugs and alcohol for an extended period of time, their quality of living will rapidly decrease, and they will often find themselves in a condition of not even having the basic life skills they need to live well. Often they will be dependent upon others for basic survival.
Recovery is not a finite state of living. After a person has experienced drug and alcohol addiction, they are never quite the same. Recovery must be constantly worked at, in varying degrees, for life. While it is not necessarily true that addiction is a permanent disease that a person will have for life, it is true that recovery is an ongoing prospect. It is true that once one has experienced addiction and has managed to escape it, they should continue to work on their recovery and on improving their lives, in general, to ensure that a relapse does not occur.
According to the American Journal of Epidemiology, twenty-seven percent of people who start abusing drugs die within twenty years. We can see from this that the risks for death from substances does not cease to be relevant after an individual has sought help at a qualified addiction treatment center.
This may seem disheartening at first, but it does not have to be. There is a bright side to even the greatest darkness that addiction creates. A study done by the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs found that both drug addicts and alcoholics who work diligently within rehab and outside of rehab to develop necessary life skills create a significant increase in their quality of life. A recovering individual’s quality of life can be extrapolated on an inverse scale to their likelihood of relapse. The greater the quality of life, the fewer chances that an individual has of relapsing, and vice versa. Recovering addicts almost never relapse when life is good for them, and achieving necessary life skills is crucial for creating a pleasant standard of living.
Life Skills Taught at A Forever Recovery
A Forever Recovery teaches life skills to their clients to ensure that clients are totally prepared for the trials and tribulations of day to day life in the real world after rehab. A Forever Recovery utilizes life skills training to provide the basic life skills to their clients. It is important for a recovering individual to have these skills so that life after rehab is manageable and pleasant.
- Self Help. A life skill that individuals in recovery need to have is the ability to help themselves. While a support group is necessary to anyone’s recovery, one cannot always rely on that support group for help when times get tough. A recovering individual needs to have the tools and safeguards in place to be able to help themselves through anything from a bad day to a full-on crisis.
- Cognitive Thinking. Being able to analytically assess one’s thought process to unearth trigger mechanisms and underlying incentives to abuse drugs and alcohol is key for recovering individuals. At any given moment in the day-to-day life, one needs to possess the cognitive skills necessary for taking a close look at any impulses, decisions, cravings, fantasies, or thought processes that one might be having in that given moment that could lead to a relapse.
- Critical Thinking. Drug addicts and alcoholics have a propensity for not being able to think of the long-term consequences of their actions, or at least they choose not to if they can. This is where critical thinking comes into play as a necessary life skill. According to the World Health Organization, critical thinking is defined by a disciplined thinking process in an individual that is clear and rational. It is an approach to thinking that is unbiased and informed upon by available evidence at hand. When people become addicted to drugs and alcohol, they cannot think critically anymore. They continue to take a substance that makes them ill and harms them and their loved ones. Obviously, this is not thinking rationally. When a person vanquishes addiction in rehab, it is not a guarantee that their critical thinking skills will return as a result. This is why A Forever Recovery makes a point to especially address critical thinking as a life skill.
- Job Preparedness. One of the most common causes of a relapse is an inability to provide for oneself and one’s family. When a person struggles with finding a job, acquiring a job, keeping a job, or advancing in a job, these difficulties can create deep set stress which in turn prompts a recidivism back onto one’s old substance of choice. To ensure that this does not happen, A Forever Recovery offers job preparedness training as a life skill within their program. Truthfully, being able to be an upstanding, employable member of society is part and parcel to being a rehabilitated individual, so this life skill comes naturally to the program at A Forever Recovery.
- Financial Training. Similar to being able to find and keep a job, having financial responsibility is a skill that someone who has spent years abusing drugs and alcohol has likely lost. Though not all treatment programs teach this, A Forever Recovery makes a point to include financial training as a component of their life skills program. Struggling addicts have little to no financial skills, prioritizing money as simply being a tool for acquiring more drugs and alcohol. Addicts rarely know how to make money, how to save money, how to invest money, or how to acquire larger and larger sums of money through rewarding careers and hard work. A Forever Recovery can offer the life skill of financial training to help teach clients these valuable skills and strategies.
- Relapse Prevention. A crucial life skill for anyone in recovery from anything is relapse prevention. Relapse prevention is the strategy for effectively addressing and eliminating cravings and pulls towards recidivism. No matter the strength of one’s sobriety, recovering addicts will likely experience cravings or desires to abuse drugs and alcohol at some point in their path to freedom from addiction. One should not fool themselves that a few short months in addiction treatment at a rehab center will completely remove all traces of a desire for substance abuse after one has spent several years living the life of an addict. Rather, one must focus on acquiring tools, strategies, safeguards, defensive mechanisms, and battle plans should cravings come about after one has graduated from rehab. A Forever Recovery teaches clients how to address cravings, how to guard against negative thinking, how to stay away from peer pressure, and other key mechanisms for preventing a relapse from occurring.
More Information on Life Skills
To learn more about the life skills offered at A Forever Recovery, reach out to our center. Call today to take the first step towards making a better lifestyle and a better future for yourself or for your loved one.