03 Nov Skating Through Recovery
Recovery from addiction isn’t easy. In fact, addiction treatment is, in itself, very involved and lengthy and requires a terrific commitment on the part of the individual. Recovery requires even more. Recovery picks up where treatment leaves off. It’s the reality of living sober. It’s how you manage your life, how you choose to live.
It is making the choice to change how you live, to get back into life on every level. To recommit to life. And it has to be a life-long commitment.
That is not an easy change to make for people who have been used to self-medicating for an extended length of time, often for years.
At Lanna Rehab we try hard to get into our client’s heads, and help figure out what it is that will motivate them toward the right choices in life, in making positive, lasting changes.
Sometimes we do this by tapping into real world activities that our clients are into and taking it a step further. If we can incorporate something a client has passion about into treatment and recovery, the better the chances of success.
For example, we recently had a number of clients who like skateboarding. We thought, hey, that’s great! It’s physical, it requires skill and, if you’re going to get good at it, commitment. It’s kind of perfect. So, we incorporated that passion into a program just for them.
We asked those clients to come up with a joint project and they decided they wanted to build a skateboard ramp.
They set about as a group to select a location, then create plans for building the ramp. This was fantastic group participation and involvement. They showed fantastic focus and determination.
They created the plans, then set about several days of construction to build the ramp. Once it was done, some of those who could skate taught others how to skateboard.
Just in this seemingly simple project we saw clients reawake passion and talents that had been dormant for some time. As they handled the responsibility of planning and creating the ramp they rediscovered their own talents and worth.
The value in creating something, building it, and maintaining or gaining an interest in something they can maintain back home was valuable on so many levels. It showed that if they put their minds to things they can do things they never thought possible. That the only limit to what they could do was the one they put on themselves.
To some, this might seem like a simple thing. But the Occupational Therapy aspect of Lanna and allowing clients to do projects that are unique and interesting to them is what makes Lanna’s individual program exceptional and preferred.
This is probably the first skate ramp built at a rehab anywhere in the world.
