According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), 50.2 million U.S. adults consider themselves to be in recovery from substance use and or mental health challenges. The prevalence of people in recovery is partly due to the guiding principles of holistic recovery. While hope is a foundational part of recovery, it is built on and supported by community bonds. Support from your peers, family, and friends provides the whole-person care you need to heal in mind, body, and spirit.
At The Guest House, we know humans are naturally social creatures who seek each other out for help and support. Meanwhile, access to important interpersonal connections like group therapy and alumni programming helps form community bonds. Furthermore, through community bonds, you can find the security you need to share your experiences for healing.
However, you may question how community bonds support recovery. How can access to community resources like peer support help you process and dismantle self-defeating thinking and behavior patterns? Expanding your knowledge of peer support can provide insight into the value of community bonds for long-term recovery.
What Is Peer Support?
Different levels of peer support can exist as informal and formal systems of care in recovery. Peer support can be found within different levels of care like group therapy during treatment and as a part of your alumni program in aftercare. In addition, peer support for community bonds can also be connected to peer recovery support services. As noted by SAMHSA, peer support can be contained through a wide range of activities and interactions between people who share similar experiences.
Through peer support, you and your peers can share your lived experiences with substance use and or mental health challenges to guide and support each other’s lasting recovery. Furthermore, peer recovery support services are a type of peer support delivered by peer recovery coaches. The type of peer support you receive in group therapy compared to peer recovery coaches is similar but has some differences.
First, in group therapy, your peers are other individuals in treatment who are actively learning from and supporting each other through the recovery process. Similarly, a peer recovery coach also brings their lived experiences of recovery to support long-term healing. However, the major difference between peer support and peer recovery coaches is specific training. A peer recovery coach can provide non-clinical training and supervision to help you initiate and maintain recovery. Moreover, a peer recovery coach can also provide assistance to help you enhance your community bonds with peers and loved ones.
More specifically listed below are some of the ways a peer recovery coach can provide support and foster community bonds for long-term recovery:
- Can help you build a recovery plan
- Identify and build a roadmap to your hopes, dreams, and goals
- Provide emotional support
- Instill hope that recovery is possible
- Offer informational support
- Dispel myths about substance use disorder (SUD) and other mental health disorders
- Access to SUD, mental health, and other well-being educational information
- Referrals to community resources for health and well-being
- Provide instrumental support
- Housing
- Employment
- Educational opportunities
- Offers access to affiliation support
- Connections to recovery community support to foster community bonds
- Recovery events
- Sober activities
- Building community bonds through alumni programming and family services
Looking at the many ways peer support can be incorporated into your recovery plan highlights the value of community bonds. Further, peer recovery coaches showcase the numerous ways in which community bonds can be built in recovery. Therefore, addressing the individual components of peer support, family involvement, and alumni programs can present the whole-person nature of holistic recovery.
The Value of Peer Support for Community Bonds
Stressful and traumatic life experiences can erode a variety of important elements of your well-being. Feeling overwhelmed by negative life experiences can erode self-esteem, sense of belonging, and emotional regulation among others. Moreover, difficulties with SUD and other mental health disorders can further impair your resilience to distress. The cycle of negative thinking patterns and beliefs can lower barriers to relapse.
Self-defeating thinking can convince you that others do not understand your pain and you are alone. When you think you are alone in your challenges, you are more likely to self-isolate and disconnect from potential supportive relationships. Being cut off from valuable community bonds in peer support can leave you feeling hopeless about yourself, others, and the world. Thus, with poor mental, emotional, and social well-being, it becomes easier to engage in self-defeating behaviors again like substance use. However, community bonds can be an important component of recovery in which you are reminded that you are not alone.
Here are some of the tools utilized in peer support to foster opportunities for recovery:
- Providing mutual sympathy and understanding of challenges
- Working together to build and achieve goals
- Supporting problem-solving coping strategies for each other
- Actively listening to each other
With a better understanding of peer support tools, you can reflect on the way these tools support personal well-being and community bonds. Listed below are some of the ways peer support can effectively support community bonds and healing:
- Promotes feelings of hope
- Fosters emotional resilience
- Increases sense of connection with self and others
- Promotes a sense of empowerment
- Decreases feelings of loneliness and isolation
- Increases self-expression
- Gain more useful information and resources
- Promotes connectedness through sharing
- Decrease self-stigma
- Greater self-esteem
- Increases community bonds through mutual supportive relationships
- Improves treatment retention
- Reduces prevalence of relapse
- Decreases involvement with the criminal justice system
- Improves access to social support
- Increases access to services and resources
- Housing stability
- Employment opportunities
- Educational attainment
Therefore, the many ways peer support empowers well-being reflect the need for interpersonal relationships to support building and maintaining resilience. Through peer support, you can establish community bonds to discover or rediscover the foundational hope you need for long-term recovery. Understanding the value of shared lived experiences with peers presents the idea connection is important to health and well-being. Thus, seeing the impact of peer connections highlights the reality that community bonds formed in close relationships can be particularly empowering in the recovery process.
Healing Together: The Positive Impact of Family Involvement in Recovery
Challenges with SUD and or mental health disorders do not affect just the individual struggling with them. In reality, your self-defeating thinking and behavior patterns have a significant impact on you and your loved ones. According to BMJ Open, addiction has a profound impact on the physical and psychological well-being of your family. Some of the adverse effects your challenges with addiction can have on your loved ones include:
- High levels of distress
- Physical health issues
- Increased family conflict
- Financial instability
- Unstable housing and employment
- Unemployment
- Increased mental health challenges
- Greater occurrence of intimate partner violence (IPV)
- Higher prevalence of unintentional and intentional adverse childhood experiences (ACEs)
Despite the harm addiction can have on the whole family, traditional rehab treatment has focused solely on the individual. Although the needs of the individual are important to recovery, holistic care showcases the value of community bonds for overall well-being. Therefore, family-focused care in recovery can be a vital part of the recovery process for whole-person healing. The need for community bonds to dismantle maladaptive thinking and coping strategies makes family involvement in every stage of recovery valuable.
As noted by the National Center on Substance Abuse and Child Welfare (NCSACW), SUD presents many obstacles to treatment and recovery, but acknowledging the family voice can help. Family involvement in treatment can give you and your loved ones the safe and non-judgmental space you need to understand and reconnect with each other. Through family-focused services, the harm to individual family members and the family as a whole can be reduced. In addition, family-focused care increases entry into treatment, treatment completion, treatment retention, and positive long-term health outcomes.
Now you may wonder how having your loved ones involved in treatment can help, especially when there is conflict. When substance use has been a source of conflict and relationship deterioration in your family, the benefits of family involvement in treatment can feel especially confusing or daunting. However, as noted in the Journal of Substance Use and Addiction Treatment, much like learning adaptive coping strategies, families are powerful resources. The community bonds of your family can truly act as another source of comfort, hope, guidance, and support among many other things to persevere and thrive in recovery.
While toxic family relationships can harm well-being, access to supportive family relationships provides an endless fountain of love and support. Thus, even when there is conflict with loved ones, healing can be made possible for everyone with the right support resources. Listed below are some of the things that can be uncovered through family-focused care to support long-term healing for the whole family:
- Addresses family skill-building needs
- Problem-solving
- Healthy coping skills
- Active communication
- Supports family relationships and processing
- Helps build togetherness through community bonds
- Reduce stigma-related attitudes and behaviors in the family
- Increase hope and motivation to dismantle unhealthy thinking and behavior patterns together
With a deeper awareness of family as a source of recovery support, you can understand the benefits of an alumni program. Engaging in an active alumni program can give you access to multiple branches of support through community bonds.
Fostering Community Bonds Through Alumni Programs
Active alumni programs are a vital part of lasting recovery as they connect you to both instrumental and affiliation support. However, as pointed out in Alcohol Research Current Reviews, many traditional rehabs do not provide environmental recovery programs like an alumni program. Therefore, many people after recovery find themselves living in communities where barriers to relapse are lower. Without those community bonds following treatment, you become more susceptible to the challenges of early recovery.
After treatment, you may feel like you have been taken out of the safety of your program and thrown back into the den of wolves in the real world. While building coping skills is valuable in recovery, it is easier said than done to actively use those adaptive coping strategies independently after treatment. Thus, having an active interpersonal network of peers, close relationships, and other support resources can make getting through those early days and any difficult day more manageable.
Holistic recovery is not about just getting by or getting through the day. Rather true whole-person recovery is about giving you the tools and support you need to thrive in every part of your life. Furthermore, as the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (ODMHAS) states, recovery requires a community for long-term healing. A dedication to community bonds through community integration initiatives is integral to a holistic approach to care. Healing your innermost self only comes with an understanding of how other factors of life, environment, and relationships impact your well-being.
Listed below are some of the barriers that can disrupt addiction and or mental health treatment and lasting recovery:
- Public, self, and institutional stigma
- Poor self-esteem and self-worth
- Fear of discrimination
- Poor mental health literacy (MHL)
- Excluded from employment opportunities
- Denied housing opportunities
- Limited or no education resources
- Restrictive policies that favor punishment over harm reduction
- Financial instability
- Unreliable or no transportation
- Lack of social support
- Other loved ones still misuse substances
- IPV
- Lack of outreach services to address housing and employment needs
- Few specialized treatment programs and trained clinicians for co-occurring conditions
- Systemic barriers to care
- Racism
- Higher prevalence of poverty
- Lack of educational resources for attainment
- Disparities in access to health resources
- High prevalence of contact with the criminal justice system
- Discrimination based on gender identity
- Cisgender women
- Transgender individuals
- Non-binary individuals
- Exposure to exclusionary attitudes and practices based on sexual orientation
Despite sociocultural and systemic barriers that continue to permeate society, long-term recovery is possible. Through a commitment to community integration and the fostering of community bonds in an alumni program, recovery happens. An alumni program gives you access to the social and emotional support and other resources necessary to live and recover in your community. Some of the ways an alumni program can support your well-being and foster community bonds include:
- Financial resources
- Housing resources
- Support groups
- Peer support
- Weekly alumni meetings
- Sober activities and events
- Recovery information
- Addressing aftercare needs
- Relapse prevention
- Treatment resources
- Mental health resources
- Physical health resources
- Opportunities to be of service to others
- Listening and sharing lived experiences with each other
- Volunteering in your community
- Food pantry
- Soup kitchen
- Homeless shelter
- Food drive
- Clothing drive
- A recovery coach or mentor
Through a wide variety of activities, services, and resources in an alumni program, you can be empowered to build community bonds, heal, and effect positive change in the lives of others. Listed below are some of the ways an alumni program can help you and your loved ones foster long-term recovery:
- Enhances self-efficacy
- Increases knowledge
- Improves health
- Promotes education
- Fosters hope
- Offers opportunities for stability
- Financial
- Housing
- Transportation
- Emotional
- Builds resilience
- Provides a support system
- Social connection
- Community bonds
- Sense of belonging
- Insight on how to build your own support network
- Decreases opportunities for isolation and loneliness
- Motivation
- Supports meaning-making
- Helps you discover or rediscover your purpose
Looking at the long-term benefits of alumni programs highlights the idea that relationships are at the heart of recovery. Everyone goes through difficult, stressful, and traumatic experiences. The commonality of life stressors and trauma does not diminish the impact it has had on your life or negate your right to feel negative emotions about it.
Rather, the universality of negative life experiences speaks to the value of mutually supportive relationships. Even when you have a bad day or life just feels too overwhelming to cope with, your support system is there. It is the foundation of supportive relationships that carry you through hard days and celebrate you on the good days.
Exploring Opportunities for Community Bonds at the Guest House
Here at The Guest House, we know addiction thrives in isolation. When you feel disconnected from others, you lose those internal and external reminders of your worthiness for love, hope, belonging, and existence. Therefore, we are committed to providing peer and family-focused programs that support community bonds that you are worthy of connection, healing, and purpose.
We recognized how equally important connection is to the work of recovery. Whether you are in treatment or returning home, you are actively learning how to rediscover yourself and find balance as a sober person. You are taking the steps to set and achieve your recovery goals as you face new stressors, experiences, and responsibilities in your daily life.
The real world outside of treatment can feel daunting, but much like in treatment, you are not alone. Through our different levels of care, you can find the specific care you need to thrive in your life. Whether you are looking for community bonds with peers, broader community resources, or reconnecting with loved ones, there is a right path for you. At The Guest House, you will never be alone in meeting the challenges and enjoys of life in recovery.
Graduating from treatment is an incredible accomplishment that you should take pride in. However, it is important to remember that maintaining recovery is a process of continual learning and growth. Treating each stage of recovery like another step toward a specific finish line can put you at risk of relapse. Yet, relapse prevention and lasting recovery are possible when you invest in supportive connections with others. As a foundational part of holistic recovery, building connections through therapeutic tools like peer support, family-focused services, and active alumni programming can support whole-person healing. Connection-driven resources and services can improve self-esteem, foster hope, and increase resilience among others. To learn more, call The Guest House today at (855) 483-7800.