Recovering from substance use disorder (SUD) does not happen overnight. It takes time to build healthier thinking and behavior patterns on your journey to recovery. Therefore, you may find yourself romanticizing your addiction and your life before recovery. When you find yourself feeling stuck and overwhelmed in recovery, it can be easy to imagine a time when you thought your life was easier. However, with support, you can build tools to help you end the romanticization of your addiction and recognize how it has harmed you.
How Addiction Starts
There are a wide variety of reasons why you started using substances. Therefore, from an observer’s perspective, some reasons for substance use may feel obvious. However, your reasons for substance use are unique to your experiences and mental well-being.
According to an article on drug misuse and addiction from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), in general, a few reasons why you may have started using can include:
- To feel good:
- Pleasure
- Euphoria
- Powerful
- Self-confident
- Energetic
- Relaxed
- To feel better:
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Stress
- Pressure to perform:
- School
- Work
- Athletics
- To ease curiosity and social pressures
Moreover, while your reasons for substance use may include one or multiple points of origin, many of the consequences of use are the same.
The Consequences of Addiction
According to another article from NIDA on addiction and health, SUD can negatively impact your physical and mental health. Some of the consequences of SUD include:
- Physical health:
- Cancer
- Heart disease
- Lung disease
- Stroke
- Nervous system damage
- Infections
- HIV
- Hepatitis C
- Heart infection
- Skin infection
- Mental health disorders:
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Schizophrenia
However, if you still find yourself missing your addiction and the perceived fun you had while using, there are recovery tools that can help you dismantle your unhealthy thinking patterns.
Tools for Relapse Prevention
Relapse prevention is an important tool in your recovery to reduce self-defeating behaviors, provide support tools in the case of a relapse, and support long-term recovery. According to the Indian Journal of Psychiatry, there are multiple intervention strategies and techniques that make up relapse prevention. Some of the elements that make up relapse prevention include:
- Identifying and coping with high-risk situations
- Enhancing self-efficacy
- Exploring realities of addiction
- Reframing perception of relapse
- Finding lifestyle balance, including relaxation training and participating in hobbies
- Utilizing stimulus control techniques, such as removing substance-use triggers and paraphernalia
- Fostering coping techniques to effectively manage cravings
At The Guest House, we know addiction is an ongoing process over your lifetime. Therefore, we are dedicated to providing care that meets you where you are on your journey. Moreover, by offering multiple levels of care like medical detox, residential program, and intensive outpatient program (IOP), we can support you in every stage of your journey.
Thus, through our comprehensive person-centered approach to care, we at The Guest House are equipped to support a wide variety of conditions and disorders like SUD, process addictions, and co-occurring mental health disorders. Together, we can discover the root of your addiction and build a plan of care to support healing throughout your life.
Romanticizing your addiction in recovery can increase your chances of relapse. However, with relapse prevention, you can build tools to help you recognize the negative physical and mental consequences of your substance use. Through relapse prevention, you can also learn strategies and techniques to find joy in your life without substances. At The Guest House, we know recovery is a lifelong process, so we provide multiple levels of care to meet you where you are in your recovery journey. To learn how a person-centered approach can support you, call (855) 483-7800.