If you’re moving out of addiction treatment, you have a long road in front of you. For many, that path of recovery, where you have to spend years fighting cravings and rebuilding your life, can seem overwhelming. The truth is, you do have a long road in front of you. It’s important that you acknowledge that and build a foundation on which you can maintain continued recovery. That often means treating recovery like you would any other life goal. Most importantly, that means you need more than motivation, you need a strict sense of discipline and habits to keep you going.
When does recovery end? Never. You’ll always have to stay ready to resist cravings. You’ll always be one step away from using or drinking again. However, as time passes, addiction and cravings are pressing parts of your life less and less often. You’ll spend less energy staying in recovery – but you’ll still need the habits, motivation, and structure you built to resist cravings some of the time.
It’s important to keep in mind that staying in recovery will be something you’re doing with the rest of your life. As long as you don’t relapse, you are in recovery. That is your life now. That means you need to plan your recovery for the long term. It has to be sustainable, achievable, and replicable. And that means basing your recovery on good habits and good foundations. Chances are very high that you learn the basics of these in your recovery center. However, they are:
Essentially, you need to build a quality life for yourself. You need structure and good habits. You need to have fun with people. You need things to do with your time. And, that act of building things for yourself should be part of your motivation to stay in recovery.
Understanding why you want to stay in recovery is an important part of maintaining motivation to stay there. For example, if you know what you’re aiming for and what you’re getting out of it, you can motivate yourself to stay away from things that hurt your goals. You want to know:
Often, it will be a good idea to sit down and regularly rework that list. For example, if you change your goals, you’ll still want your motivations and reasons to stay in recovery to make sense for you. Some examples include:
You don’t have to use the same format, but make sure you understand your objectives, and don’t be afraid to put down even tiny things that don’t seem like they matter to most people.
As time goes by, you’ll likely find that motivation goes up and down. One day you’ll wake up with no motivation at all. Other days, you’ll be inspired to move mountains for your goals. You can’t rely on it. Therefore, you’ll want to build discipline. That means understanding that you’re not using because you have good reasons not to, you’re not using because you’re inspired to stay clean and sober, you’re not using because you don’t want to be an addict and you set those boundaries for yourself. Staying in recovery should be just like going to work, staying at work, making yourself a meal, and going to bed. You do it because you set those boundaries for yourself and you uphold them. That will eventually get you through a lot more days than motivation ever will.
How do you get there? By treating recovery like something you decided to do for yourself and that you will stick to. It’s your life and you get to choose, you set the boundaries, and you work within those boundaries to make the best life that you can.
It’s important to ensure that you get ongoing mental health support and treatment, even after leaving your rehab facility. That can mean short-term support in the form of ongoing treatment after you leave rehab. You can also go to a sober home where you can stay for up to 2 years. That will mean getting daily support and guidance as you work to rebuild your life. In other cases, simply attending ongoing counseling, getting follow-up support when you start to struggle, and attending alumni events will be enough. Most people need a mix of ongoing treatment or self-help and support groups. This means you may want to talk to your rehab center and your counselor to get advice on what you should do to follow up treatment. In addition, you may want to schedule checkups every 3-6 months to ensure you’re still doing okay so you can get additional treatment when and where you need it.
Therapy is a normal and healthy part of life. There’s no reason why you can’t get counseling and therapy 5 years after rehab. It will give you the tools to stay in rehab which means you will have the tools to stay healthy and to stay in recovery. That will, eventually, help you to stay motivated.
Staying motivated for recovery is important. It’s also important to have good structure, to build discipline, and to get help when you need it. That, plus understanding your goals and where you want to be will help you to work towards staying motivated for recovery and for building a better life for yourself.
If you or a loved one needs help with mental health treatment, drug rehab, or alcohol rehab Compassion Recovery Center is here to help. Contact us to learn more.
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Compassion Recovery
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To fulfill this, we aim to adhere as strictly as possible to the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG 2.1) at the AA level. These guidelines explain how to make web content accessible to people with a wide array of disabilities. Complying with those guidelines helps us ensure that the website is accessible to all people: blind people, people with motor impairments, visual impairment, cognitive disabilities, and more.
This website utilizes various technologies that are meant to make it as accessible as possible at all times. We utilize an accessibility interface that allows persons with specific disabilities to adjust the website’s UI (user interface) and design it to their personal needs.
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Our website implements the ARIA attributes (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) technique, alongside various different behavioral changes, to ensure blind users visiting with screen-readers are able to read, comprehend, and enjoy the website’s functions. As soon as a user with a screen-reader enters your site, they immediately receive a prompt to enter the Screen-Reader Profile so they can browse and operate your site effectively. Here’s how our website covers some of the most important screen-reader requirements, alongside console screenshots of code examples:
Screen-reader optimization: we run a background process that learns the website’s components from top to bottom, to ensure ongoing compliance even when updating the website. In this process, we provide screen-readers with meaningful data using the ARIA set of attributes. For example, we provide accurate form labels; descriptions for actionable icons (social media icons, search icons, cart icons, etc.); validation guidance for form inputs; element roles such as buttons, menus, modal dialogues (popups), and others. Additionally, the background process scans all the website’s images and provides an accurate and meaningful image-object-recognition-based description as an ALT (alternate text) tag for images that are not described. It will also extract texts that are embedded within the image, using an OCR (optical character recognition) technology. To turn on screen-reader adjustments at any time, users need only to press the Alt+1 keyboard combination. Screen-reader users also get automatic announcements to turn the Screen-reader mode on as soon as they enter the website.
These adjustments are compatible with all popular screen readers, including JAWS and NVDA.
Keyboard navigation optimization: The background process also adjusts the website’s HTML, and adds various behaviors using JavaScript code to make the website operable by the keyboard. This includes the ability to navigate the website using the Tab and Shift+Tab keys, operate dropdowns with the arrow keys, close them with Esc, trigger buttons and links using the Enter key, navigate between radio and checkbox elements using the arrow keys, and fill them in with the Spacebar or Enter key.Additionally, keyboard users will find quick-navigation and content-skip menus, available at any time by clicking Alt+1, or as the first elements of the site while navigating with the keyboard. The background process also handles triggered popups by moving the keyboard focus towards them as soon as they appear, and not allow the focus drift outside it.
Users can also use shortcuts such as “M” (menus), “H” (headings), “F” (forms), “B” (buttons), and “G” (graphics) to jump to specific elements.
We aim to support the widest array of browsers and assistive technologies as possible, so our users can choose the best fitting tools for them, with as few limitations as possible. Therefore, we have worked very hard to be able to support all major systems that comprise over 95% of the user market share including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and Microsoft Edge, JAWS and NVDA (screen readers).
Despite our very best efforts to allow anybody to adjust the website to their needs. There may still be pages or sections that are not fully accessible, are in the process of becoming accessible, or are lacking an adequate technological solution to make them accessible. Still, we are continually improving our accessibility, adding, updating and improving its options and features, and developing and adopting new technologies. All this is meant to reach the optimal level of accessibility, following technological advancements. For any assistance, please reach out to