Stress and Relapse After Rehab Part 2
June 19th, 2005 by Terry Keith
Taking a Look at Your Last Relapse
Take 3 minutes to do the following exercise:
Think back to your most recent relapse.
Picture what was happening in your life, the stresses or irritations you were facing in the days leading up to and just before your decision to use again. Use point form and jot them down.
Now Look at the following list of items and write down those that apply to your pre-relapse situation or stressors.
Common Stressors That Precede Relapse
Loneliness
Feeling manipulated
Anxiety
Depression
Boredom
Fight with your boss
Argument with wife or family member
Money problem
Too little sleep
An illness
A problem at work or school
Bad or no sex
Feel under valued
An insult or criticism
Too much time on your hands
Offer of drug or alcohol from a friend or relative
Girl or boy friend problems
Pencil broke, shoelace broke, tooth broke
Now think again
Quickly read over your stress inventory and compare with the description of your stresses before your last relapse. Are they the same or different?
Add all the items to your stress inventory and underline the ones that are high risk. High risk are the stressors present before you relapsed
Make one last check for any items you may have missed
This is the beginning of an important part of your relapse prevention plan
You canā??t manage stress if you donā??t first take the time to identify it.
This is a simple a basic tool. Basic but extremely important. Drug and alcohol rehab gives you an enviroment to change. Drug and alcohol rehab give you the support to change. Great goals and vision gives you to reasons to change after rehab. Relapse derails all that effort. Sometimes a year’s hard effort in a rehab and after the rehab, can spin apart in a few weeks, if stress is not handled proactively. It is not enough to avoid stress. You must acquire the skill to tame or deflect it to the point that you never use drugs or alcohol again in your life. Take the time to think about what role stress has played in your addiction.
This entry was posted on Sunday, June 19th, 2005 at 5:21 pm and is filed under Drug Addiction, Drug Rehab. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
