Key Components of a Relapse Prevention Plan

These chemicals cause the euphoric and powerful highs you experience during intoxication. When triggers come about, focus on your reasons for quitting and remind yourself why you started down the path of addiction recovery in the first place. Remember how out of control you felt when abusing substances. Reminisce on the embarrassing things you did and the people you hurt while using. It’s possible to recognize and act upon feelings and events with a relapse prevention plan to help avoid physical relapse. When experiencing a mental relapse, many individuals are experiencing war within their own minds. You may feel as if you want to use, but there’s a part of you that doesn’t.

Relapse prevention plans provide a solid foundation for long-term sobriety. But it’s important to remember that your plan is flexible and can be updated as your life changes. Standard Relapse Prevention has strong empirical support as a helpful intervention for substance use disorder and works about as well as other active substance use disorder treatment approaches.

What Is Addiction?

Another very important aspect of a relapse prevention plan is setting daily, weekly, monthly goals for achieving a healthy lifestyle. Examples could be taking 30 minutes to practice yoga each morning, adopting a new hobby like pottery classes or martial arts, or creating your own healthy meal plan each week.

A relapse prevention plan is comprised of measures, techniques, and many different tools to avoid falling back into bad habits. A relapse is using drugs or alcohol again after a period of abstinence. Since recovery is not a linear process, it has its ups and downs, and relapse can be one of them. Writing a relapse prevention plan and taking the correct steps to help yourself stick to the plan is going to be very effective and beneficial in your recovery. Also, having a physical copy can really ease your mind and give you an easy guide to refer to when the time comes and you may not be in the right mental space. Make a list of the situations and people that make you want to use alcohol or drugs.

What is Relapse Prevention Training?

It may mean walking away from certain conversations or people that are going to cause you stress. In addition to avoidance, have coping strategies in place to handle these relapse triggers, as well. It is important to have techniques in your back pocket to bring you back from a state of wanting to use. This involve journaling, meditation, exercise, cooking, going to a meeting, and other stress management mechanisms. It is an ongoing process that is experienced by a person in recovery and marked by significant red flags or warning signs.

A relapse prevention plan usually entails a personalized set of tools, coping skills, and strategies that help you deal with cravings and life stressors. A relapse prevention plan should be created in collaboration with your treatment team at the end of rehabilitation. It will likely be revisited periodically throughout the rest of your life to ensure it’s working for you. With the understanding that a substance use disorder is a chronic, relapsing disease of the brain, it is clear that the recovery process must involve a concentrated effort to avoid recurrence.

Techniques for Dealing with Mental Urges

Feelings and Emotions – Check in with yourself and your sponsor about how you are feeling emotionally. If your sponsor is not available to talk with, find someone you trust so you can process and understand the feelings and emotions you are having that day. It is important in relapse prevention to write your feelings on a piece of paper, in a journal or on your computer. Writing them out will give you time to think and also help with the processing of your feelings. Early warning signs are subtle changes in a person’s feelings, internal experiences, and behavior that might signal a relapse is starting. Identifying early warning signs allows for early intervention and can help an individual prevent or minimize a relapse.

There are different models to try to prevent a future relapse. • Our holistic therapies include CBT, DBT, Brainspotting, Conscious Recovery, yoga and more. • We useMindfulness for Relapse Preventionand other whole person evidence-based therapies.