- Highlights
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- Forget Will-Power: You don’t relapse because you lack will-power – you relapse because you haven’t learned how to compensate for addiction-caused changes to brain structure and functioning.
- Brain Healing: Addiction causes brain change. Your brain will heal, but it requires sustained abstinence.
- Relapse Prevention Skills: You get addiction treatment to learn relapse prevention skills, like learning to deal with cravings, avoiding temptation, preventing and coping with stress and negative emotions, and many more.
Relapse Prevention Therapy (RPT)
Anyone can quit for a while, but to maintain recovery you need to learn relapse prevention skills; the specialized information and tools that help you overcome stress, cravings and temptation.
Why do you need addiction treatment? Well, one major reason for getting help is to learn the skills you’ll need to avoid relapse once finished with treatment. With a firm grasp of relapse prevention techniques, you never have to drink or use drugs again.
Are you able to stop for a few days, weeks or months but find that you always fall back into bad habits? Well, if so, don’t beat yourself up about it – relapse has nothing to do with a lack of will-power, in fact, addiction causes changes to the structure and functioning of your brain that make it exceedingly difficult to stay abstinent.
- Your brain will heal, but only if you give it time, so it’s a catch 22 situation – you need to stay abstinent to let your brain recover, but your addiction-altered brain makes prolonged abstinence virtually impossible.
- Fortunately, in a relapse prevention program, you learn special techniques to compensate for these brain changes, and with these ‘tools’ at your disposal, you have effective methods to resist cravings and deal with difficult situations – without resorting to drugs or alcohol.
In a quality addiction treatment program, you can expect to learn:
- How to identify, avoid and cope with threats to your sobriety.
- How to minimize and manage drug and alcohol cravings.
- How to prevent and cope with stress without resorting to substance use (stress is a major cravings and relapse trigger.)
- Better problem solving skills.
- Self care and physical health and fitness skills.
- How to make use of social and environmental supports.
- How to recognize the signs that indicate a drift toward relapse, and how to stop this drift in the early stages.
- And many more skills.
It’s not a matter of will-power – will-power has little to do with your ability to stay abstinent! If you can’t stay clean and sober then you have to face reality; trying the same old quit methods will bring the same disappointing outcome (relapse.) You can overcome addiction, but to do it you’ll need a powerful array of tools and skills that you can turn to, especially in moments of great stress and temptation.
Are you ready to learn how to stay clean and sober forever? Make contact now to learn the life-changing skills of relapse prevention.
Page last updated Aug 25, 2014