Poor boundaries can and will cause stress in your life.  Stress leads to relapse.  So working on and building adequate and well defined boundaries are essential to long term relapse prevention.  Most clients arrive at a drug rehab center with very poorly defined boundaries.  It is because of such vague and undetermined boundaries that most drug and alcohol rehabs have such strict rules about forming relationships while attending drug rehab.

There are 4 main areas in which to set boundaries in your life.

1) Physical - involves keeping yourself safe from physical harm

2) Emotional

3) Intellectual

4)Spiritual

All these areas require specific guidelines for safety.  A simple way to start is to look at all the ways in your past relationships you have not protected and cherished these four areas.  Have you been in any relationships where several if not all of these were damaged?  Boundary work requires time, effort and planning.  Simply saying it will not happen again is not enough.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 at 6:47 pm and is filed under 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.