Whats Your Addiction Relapse Hot Button
Do you know what your addiction relapse moment will be? This question isn’t meant to stir up fear and panic inside you. It’s meant to make you think honestly about yourself. What are the personal areas of your life that are most vulnerable, making you seek the comfort of hiding in alcohol and/or drugs?
Drug Addiction Has Dark Days
If you’ve struggled with drug addiction, you have certainly known some dark times in your life. Even if you’ve been to drug treatment before, you know you are never done with the recovery journey. Much of what goes on in the daily life of a drug addict has to do with emotions. When a person has a mental illness or a drug addiction (or both), feelings are put in charge. Good sense and rational thinking make rare appearances, and don’t have a lot of say.
With that much raw emotion dangling out in the air, your vulnerabilities hang right out there, too. Oh, you might disagree with me on that one. You’ve done a pretty solid job of hiding your deepest shame, your conflicting beliefs, your guilt. Ironically, the more strongly you protect these weak spots (without honesty), the more you expose your less appealing personal qualities.
Anxiety and Feeling Weak Can Be Relapse Triggers
For example, let’s just say that you have some significant anxiety. You thought you were in control of many things, but you are now facing reality. If your confidence was built on this perception of control, you are suddenly feeling pretty weak.
To protect these feelings of weakness and strong anxiety, you may take bigger risks at work to impress others. You might do more finger pointing about other people’s failures that “make you look bad.” You are scared and you believe others will know you are/were a fraud. But you’d much rather go down in flames than have anyone realize how anxious and ashamed you feel.
This is what it’s like having your emotions run the show. To make matters worse, you might begin to use alcohol or drugs to help you calm your disturbing feelings. It’s a lot of work to hold down your anxiety and deflect “attacks” – maybe a drink or a hit will help you forget. Of course, you would probably define this as just chilling out, having fun, or de-stressing. You are actually giving your fragile emotions more weapons to use against yourself.
Anxiety over losing control is just one example of an addiction relapse hot button. Yours might be shame over being abused as a child, and anything that triggers those memories. Or, you might struggle with bipolar, and the appeal of the manic cycle may overshadow your good sense to seek treatment at that time. It doesn’t matter so much what your relapse hot buttons might be, just that you know honestly what they are.
Drug Rehab Is Not A Cure For Drug Addiction
One problem with relapse is that some people hold a fantasy about drug rehab, that it ends their addiction for good – they will never experience the woes of drug addiction ever again. While some people certainly do hold on to their sobriety for years, the fantasy of drug rehab as some kind of “fix” is just that – a fantasy.
Does this mean that you should be discouraged about going to drug rehab? Absolutely not.
Be cautious about all-or-nothing thinking. Drug treatment isn’t a cure for addiction, but it most definitely provides the best chance for a person to gain long-standing sobriety. The key? Know your relapse hot buttons and keep on them every day.
Tags: drug treatment, drug-rehab, Whats Your Addiction Relapse Hot Button
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