A support network of positive relationships, not only reduces relapse but is necessary to live a quality life and to meet your life goals.

Planning for and taking action on outstanding legal and debt issues can reduce stress and improve your relationships.

Returning to work or school requires thought about how addiction has impacted your work and school life.

Completing a resume is a a useful way to reflect on past history and get ready for future opportunities.

Relationships cause and reduce stress. Starting, improving or ending relationships requires basic communication skills, planning and action.

Making Success Happen

What are the key activities that predict success in life and success in growing beyond the addiction experience?

Developing and maintaining a positive network of relationships (support network)
Regular exercise and relaxation activities
Healthful diet and sleep patterns
Meaningful work, school and spiritual life
Clear life goals

How does where you live support these activities?

It is essential that the life style habits that you develop at drug rehab treatment are transferable to your home life or you will relapse.
This is going to require research, planning and action on your part.
As the following slides come up, take a moment to reflect and answer the questions.
You are actually doing an initial assessment of your community and where you live.

Keep Yourself Relationship Ready

Maintain your energy by staying healthy and active.

Use your communication skill and emphasize listening, feedback, and conflict management.

Change yourself before you change your relationship.

Don’t just run away from a bad relationship, first use it as a mirror to look at yourself, to understand what part of you is creating this relationship.

Love is not a limited commodity you can use up.

Learning new ways to interact and behave can cause your feelings to be renewed if not with this person, with someone else.

Improving Relationships

Check out your life goals with each other regularly to make sure you’re both on the same path. Update your life goals regularly.

Intimacy requires honesty, openness, confiding concerns and fears, as well as hopes and dreams.

Good grooming is a powerful way to maintain attraction, stay in shape and take care of your attractiveness.

Never go to work or to sleep angry. Forgive before you go on your way for the day, even if you don’t agree
Apologize for mistakes. Apologies are crucial and predictive of couple happiness

Reduce your dependency on one person for all your needs. This leads to unhappiness so maintain a support network of relationships.

Maintain your self-respect and self-esteem. It’s easier for someone to like you and to be around you when you like yourself.

Meaningful work or volunteering is one of the most important ways to strengthen a sense of self.

Share responsibilities as relationships work best when they are two-way streets.

Improving Relationships

We are attracted to people for many reasons.

Evaluate potential/current partner and yourself by character, personality, values, generosity of spirit, link between words and actions, and relationships with others. Write down your own and your partner’s beliefs about relationships which may be different and conflicting. Know and share your needs. Many men and women fear stating their needs and hide them. The result is disappointment and anger at a partner. Closeness occurs with honesty, not mind reading. View yourself and your partner as two unique individuals bringing different perspectives and strengths.

Learn how to handle the negative feelings. They are the unavoidable result of differences between two people
If you don’t understand or like something your partner is doing, ask about it and why he or she is doing it.

Solve problems as they arise and don’t let resentments simmer.

Learn to negotiate because people’s needs change over time, and life’s demands change too, good relationships are negotiated and renegotiated all the time.

Listen to your partner’s concerns and complaints without judgment. It opens the door to confiding.

The Four Normal Stages of a Relationship

1. The New Love

This is the love that romance novels are written about.
It’s exciting and seems like the most important thing in your life.
Constant need to prove you are in love through time spent together and exclusiveness of relationship.

2. Mature Love Begins

You have proven to each other that you love each other, you don’t have to keep proving it.
Your love is shown by dependability, trust, respect and honesty.
You begin to get the rest of your life back

Do your relationships commonly end at one of these points?

3. Looking to a Future Together

Reconciled that life is not about non-stop romance and enjoy meaningful tenderness.
Some little things that were “cute” in the beginning of the relationship are acknowledged and accepted or adjusted e.g. going out every Friday night with the guys or gals; being completely inept in the kitchen.
Begin to realize and accept every one is an individual with strengths and weaknesses.
Acknowledge annoying traits, try to gently help partner change, or accept that this is one of the less likable aspects of your partner.

Do your relationships commonly end at this point?

4. Decide You’re Happy Together

After you’ve been with your partner a while, you truly are best friends.
You’ve made it through good and bad times.
You trust each other that you won’t run off if things get bad - you know you’re in it for the long haul.
You’ve seen each other at your best, and you’ve seen each other at your worst.
You know you’re both not perfect and you want to work to improve.

Fisher, Helen E., “Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love,” Henry Holt & Company, 2004

Living Through The Process

While some of these feelings may seem overwhelming, they are all “normal” reactions.

They are necessary to the process of healing, so that we can eventually move on and engage in other relationships.

Planning for our feelings can reduce the sense of panic or being overwhelmed.

Use stress management, relaxation and exercise and be patient with yourself.

Allow yourself to feel the sadness, anger, fear, and pain associated with an ending. Denying those feelings doesn’t help.

Recognize guilt, self blame, and bargaining as defences against feeling out of control and being unable to stop the other person from leaving us.

Some endings we can’t control, because we can’t control another person’s behaviour.

Give yourself time to heal, and be kind to yourself for the duration: pamper yourself, ask for support from others, and allow yourself new experiences and friends .

Talk it over with someone to gain perspective.

If you feel “stuck” in a pattern of negative relationships and unable to change, talking to a professional counsellor may help

Where are You at in Your Current Relationships?

Think about how it has changed and may change?
Think about if your relationships commonly stall at a certain stage and then you begin over with another person?

Emotions when coping with a break up

Denial:
can’t believe that this is happening to us
can’t believe that the relationship is over
Anger:
angry and perhaps enraged at our partner or lover for shaking our world to it’s core

Fear:
frightened by the intensity of our feelings
frightened that we may never love or be loved again
frightened that we may not survive our loss

Self-blame:
blame ourselves for what went wrong
replay our relationship over and over, saying to ourselves, “If only I had done this. If only I had done that”

Sadness:
Crying
Withdrawing from others

Guilt:
feel guilty, particularly if we choose to end a relationship
don’t want to hurt our partner, yet we don’t want to stay in a lifeless relationship

Disorientation and confusion:
don’t know who or where we are anymore
our familiar world has been shattered
have lost our bearings

Hope:
initially fantasize about a reconciliation
think parting is only temporary, that partner will come back to us
heal and accept the reality of the ending
dare to hope for a better world for our self

Bargaining:
plead with our partner to give us a chance. “Don’t go” or “I’ll change this and I’ll change that if only you’ll stay”

Relief:
relieved that there is an ending to the pain, fighting, torment or lifelessness of relationship

People’s Needs Change

Regardless of how much we compromise in relationships, some relationships will ultimately end because people’s needs change over time.
Some relationships are time limited.
They are useful in shaping us into stronger, more resilient people.
They teach us how to experience love, joy and, sometimes, sadness, intense pain and grief.
These feelings are normal, and they are necessary in the process of growing and healing, so that we can eventually move on and engage in other more fulfilling relationships.
New relationships are possible when you have allowed your feelings to heal and have processed the lessons from the previous relationship
.
Take some time and write down what you have learned from an old relationship; think of one in particular that had meaning for you.

Ending Relationships

While much research examines the origins and development of love, courtship, and the building and maintaining of intimate relationships, few provide detailed information about what emotional and psychological changes occur when two people end an emotionally intimate relationship.

Ending a relationship is one of the most avoided and feared human experiences.

As a culture, we have no clear-cut rituals for ending relationships or saying good bye to valued others.

We are often unprepared for the variety of feelings we experience in the process.

Changes caused by life events

Death of a loved one, children leaving home, retirement of a parent, marriage of a sibling, all these events can cause us to rethink or evaluate our life goals and our relationship goals.
Avoiding changing the way we behave in relationships or evaluating why a partner in a relationship may be changed by life events, increases stress and increases the troubles that are experienced in a relationship.

Ending Relationships

Sometimes we need to consider ending a relationship as the best way to move ahead in our lives.

Take a moment and jot down how you responded in the past to ending relationships:
Thoughtfully acknowledging the good and the bad in a relationship
Ending the relationship with dignity
Avoidance, waiting for the other person to make the first move
Quickly and suddenly ending the relationship without bringing closure and tying up lose ends
Using drugs, alcohol, verbal or nonverbal violence or aggression

Ending relationships in an angry or overly dependent manner puts you at high risk for relapse.

If you are thinking about the end, take the time to write things down and reflect

To help assess where you are at ask yourself:
Is it possible to make changes within the relationship?
Is it a relationship that is putting my life goals and recovery at risk?
What practical steps might be taken to improve things?
Are there any clear advantages in ending the relationship and if so, what are those advantages?
Are there any clear advantages in maintaining the relationship and if so, what are those advantages?

Changes in the pattern of the relationship

If you have a longer term relationship, what kind of patterns do you keep repeating?

Draw closer and then the break up that is symbolized by verbal or physical violence, followed by making amends.

Find others and then returning to the old relationship even though it needs changes.

Withdrawal from relationship or manage tough times through alcohol or drugs
Are you or your partner changing your pattern of behavior?

Changes caused by stages of life reached

Even though we age and mature physically, we sometimes do not face the changes our relationships require because of life milestones we have reached.
Finishing school or university or recognizing a new stage or age in one’s life can cause one to rethink relationships and change how we behave in them.
Going through detox and rehab can change life skills and life values.
Are you still using the same communication mechanisms you used when you were fifteen, twenty or twenty five?