Addiction is an uncurbable disease whose symptoms make detection and diagnosis a complex road to navigate. You can learn to cope with the lingering effects of addiction that may never cease.
This does not mean that living a healthy, sober life is impossible; there is hope. There are many strategies available to help you continue to build a lifestyle centered on sobriety, even after your primary treatment program has concluded. Aftercare is essential to balancing your newfound lease on life.
What Is Aftercare Planning?
Aftercare planning is a crucial stage of the recovery process. You will be tasked with refining newly-adopted coping skills and grounding strategies while navigating life outside of a dedicated treatment facility. Aftercare plans incorporate various elements, from creating strategies, addressing social needs to practicing responsibility, accountability, and financial independence.
No two aftercare plans will be identical. Personalized approaches to maintaining sober practices are essential for long-term recovery. Having goals to build motivation and consistently develop sober practices and communities can help define your new lifestyle.
Aftercare plans help prevent relapse by addressing personalized stressors and needs while building on your newfound lifestyle. By reinforcing your decision-making skills and imparting strategies learned in sobriety, you can further work toward social, personal, and professional goals.
Establishing a Stable Social Circle
Your social environment greatly influences continued sobriety. Having a stable set of supportive, understanding individuals is paramount for an effective aftercare plan. Establishing this social circle helps to continue deepening and defining essential relationships while laying out roles and expectations for each connection.
Defining these expectations, as well as what supports may or may not be able to offer in difficult times can be instrumental in prioritizing your hard-earned sobriety. Stable social networks filled with close friends, family, loved ones, or trusted peers can help define your aftercare plan and strategy based on your personalized needs.
These social circles also act as a relapse-prevention network. Healthy persons who are all working to better understand addiction and recovery act as a resource for the more unmanageable or frustrating experiences faced when getting clean. Having a safety net of trusted individuals who can enact a prevention strategy or escape plan is integral to any successful aftercare plan.
Plans to Promote Responsibility and Accountability
Aftercare plans are unique in that they seek to balance your newfound lifestyle in sobriety with their changing environments and goals, all while ensuring that you have the needed support to maintain a healthy mindset. Aftercare plans are instrumental in allowing newly sober individuals to prove themselves by setting responsibilities and expectations.
Taking on new tasks around the house, making and keeping appointments, and having clear-set rewards for maintaining these responsibilities can all help to continue to define yourself in your sobriety. Likewise, having clear consequences can equally inform your sober decisions and identity, all working to provide a space where you have an opportunity to exemplify your transformation and continue to develop your life skills.
Creating a Plan for Financial Independence
Finances will always be stressful – and this is may not be unique to your sobriety. However, it is still an incredibly important factor to consider. Your time using addictive substances can come with a plethora of financial consequences on top of the mental, emotional, physical, and social components. Getting aid to pay for rent, groceries, or other essentials may have affected families and relationships, and aftercare plans should include a strategy to address this part of life.
Working with supports and loved ones to create a budget is a difficult transition rather than relying on supports to cover expenses. However, it is also necessary. Effective aftercare plans will include a strategy to discuss and implement new financial budgeting skills, further bridging your agency and independence in sobriety.
Continued Outpatient Care
After you graduate from a treatment program, the journey of recovery has just begun. There are still many stresses and hurdles that will appear, some of them real and others imagined.
Continuing to attend recovery-focused functions, such as individual and group outpatient therapy, 12-Step meetings, or other recovery-based fellowships is crucial to maintaining long-term recovery. There can be any number of stresses that come with leaving a curated treatment facility. Having both professional and personal support during this time is essential to cope with this important transition.
Prepare Early
Creating a personalized, comprehensive aftercare plan is a difficult task, and there are many elements to consider. However, developing your aftercare plan as early as possible can ensure that you have the time to consider as many elements as possible to personalize the most effective strategy for yourself.
There is no point that it is “too early” to begin planning for how your recovery foundation will look. The more time you have to develop these plans, the more personalized they become.
Aftercare planning is just as important as addressing addiction and recovery within a dedicated treatment facility, and we at Avalon Malibu understand the importance of developing an effective, comprehensive aftercare plan. Addiction and mental health disorders affect each individual both inside the recovery sphere and beyond, and having a plan in place is crucial for maintaining the changes one has worked so hard to achieve. Your time with us can be personalized to fit your unique needs and goals, all working to help you explore your own best practices and interests in recovery and help you create an effective aftercare plan pertinent to your situation alongside caring professionals, supportive peers, and loving personal supports. Between art therapy, music, mindfulness practices, yoga, acupuncture, massage, and more, there is no shortage of new experiences and therapeutic approaches to try in your journey to a transformed future. For more information on how we can help you, call (844) 857-5992.
