When you’re recovering from an addiction, there is no greater feeling than achieving your first 30 days of sobriety — 30 full days without drugs and alcohol, including nights and weekends. The mental fog created by mind-altering substances starts to dissipate, creating a childlike high on life. Despite what you have put your body through and how hopeless and suicidal you may have once felt, you now have a second chance at life.
[See: 9 Things to Do or Say When a Loved One Talks About Taking Their Life.]
At 60 days, the substance-induced fog is a mere memory and reality can hit you like a bag of bricks. This is a period of sobriety those of us in the addiction field like to call “whack-a-mole” recovery. Just when you think you can breathe a sigh of relief, you start to notice a variety of painful behaviors that seem to have no correlation with substance abuse, but evoke similar feelings. Now, instead of battling drug or alcohol addiction, you may be on your way to sex addiction, gambling addiction, codependency, food addiction or something else.
Why? Because there is almost always a deep behavioral addiction or mental disorder that serves as a catalyst to substance abuse. In an addict’s natural state, he or she wants to reach externally to dull an internal problem. Whether the external source is a person, a mind-altering substance or an adrenaline-provoking action, the goal is to mask uncomfortable feelings by any means necessary. Taking drugs and alcohol from an addict is similar to taking a flotation device away from someone who doesn’t know how to swim: He or she will panic and grab on to anything to stay afloat. Rarely do I see someone enter treatment with an addiction solely to drugs and alcohol.
That vicious cycle is why New Method Wellness, the recovery treatment center where I’m the clinical director, places a heavy emphasis on intensive outpatient treatment after a primary treatment program. Outpatient treatment serves as a safety net for our clients when these addictive behaviors rear their ugly heads. But even if outpatient treatment is not an option for you, there are a handful of tools out there that can aid in combating these addictive behaviors. Among them:
1. Support Groups
Developing a community of people who understand your way of thinking and relate to your reactionary behavior will give you hope for recovery while also augmenting your feelings of connectedness. No longer will you be able to support thoughts such as “Nobody understands me” and “They just don’t get it; I am hopeless.” Anonymous groups exist for nearly every addiction under the sun. Here are a few them:
— Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous
— Gamblers Anonymous (626-960-3500)
— Codependents Anonymous (888-444-2359)
— Overeaters Anonymous (505-891-2664)
2. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, is the most common therapeutic technique to treat addiction. Luckily, CBT is a very interactive style of therapy, meaning it will provide you with behavioral tools you can use outside of the clinic. Here are a few common CBT strategies:
— Thought Monitoring: Make a daily log of your negative and obsessive thoughts throughout the day. Rank each thought on a scale of 1 to 10, based on how much anxiety the thought gives you.
— Rationalized Thinking: You can take thought monitoring a step further by writing a rational response to your anxiety-tagged thoughts. For example, an anxious thought could be, “My boss must want me to fail with this workload,” while a rational response would be, “My boss is giving me these responsibilities because she sees me as a trustworthy employee who can handle this workload.”
— Relaxation Techniques: Breathing work can help immensely when we feel anxious, overwhelmed or when our minds cannot relax enough to think rationally. A good breathing technique is the 5-5-5 method. Breath in for five seconds, hold your breath for five seconds and let your breath out for five seconds. Repeat this breathing technique until you feel relaxed.
[See: 8 Ways to Relax — Now.]
3. Outside Therapy
I always recommend seeking help from a therapist. Specialized therapy allows the recipient to delve deeper into the core behavioral addiction while establishing coping mechanisms to integrate into everyday life.
[See: How to Find the Best Mental Health Professional for You.]
While I highly recommend attending outpatient treatment after a 30- or 60-day inpatient program for substance abuse and behavioral addictions, I believe that each one of these tools — or a combination of them — is a good alternative for addressing the chaos that evolves during the recovery process.
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