How to Prepare for a New Experience at Lanna Rehab

There is no doubt that it’s a big challenge to move on from the traumatizing experience of being addicted and recover from it so that you can live life fully once again. The road to sobriety, like any other road in life, is fraught with peril. With a lot of temptation and challenges facing you, picking up the pieces of your life after addiction is easier said than done. After undergoing detoxification and rehabilitation for months on end, you might feel unprepared to rejoin the world and pick up where you left off. Just as your time in rehab has taught you that it takes time and patience to undo your addiction habits, it’s also natural that you need ample time and patience to reintegrate yourself back into society.

Lanna Rehabilitation Center in Chiang Mai, Thailand has an aftercare service that keeps tabs with your progress outside of inpatient rehab as a sort of guarantee that you won’t have to return there due to relapse. Through such programs, you’ll get valuable assistance in figuring out what life after rehab is supposed to be like and how you can have it.

What’s Next for You?

After undergoing detox and rehab, you’re pretty much set to reenter the world. However, you can’t just pick up where you last left off. You probably had enablers, a bad home life, strong peer pressure to use drugs and/or alcohol, and an environment where drugs and alcohol were readily available to you, thus leading to your self-destruction. You need sufficient preparation in reentering the world as a drug-free person after going through months of rehabilitation. This preparation will help you figure out what to do next in order to ensure that you don’t experience any relapse.

• Turning a New Leaf: For quite a long time, you’ve probably spent days, months, or years binging on alcohol and abusing drugs. However, after rehab, this is the perfect time for you to enact the fantasy of redoing everything from scratch. You now have a new lease on life. You’re about to turn a new leaf. You can write a new chapter in your life where you get to pick up where you left off or decide on where to turn at what’s literally the crossroads of your existence. It’s time to figure out where to begin with your new beginning. You should be excited at the prospect of having new life experiences while sober and with a clean slate.

• Helping You Stay Sober: To assist you in keeping sober, you should keep in mind concerns about your life after recovery or after you’ve left your rehab treatment facility. After all, even though you yourself have been treated, that doesn’t mean the people that enabled you to become an addict instead of stopping you won’t necessarily have a change of heart. Or you might even have friends and family that remained as addicts even as you’ve recovered from your own addiction, so going back to such an environment is simply not recommended. If it’s your family that’s the issue, family therapy might be called for to address everything that tends to be swept under the rug in your regular home life.

• Resume Work and Building a Work Ethic: Once you’ve recovered enough to become sober and resist the urge or impulse to do drugs without your control, there will be a hole left that was once filled by your vice. You can fill in that hole with work and building your finances. You can also spend your time looking for a job if you’ve become unemployed after rehab. Your free time can now be used to focus on paying debts, making your bank account grow, and continuing your career that probably suffered from your drug addiction. However, avoid overdoing it and becoming a workaholic.

• Don’t Blame Yourself: You should learn to love yourself again after all the shame and guilt you probably have over becoming an addict. Actually, it’s important to remember that addiction isn’t your fault. Your genetics and/or environment probably pushed you towards this condition. It’s also important to remember that it is a disease and you shouldn’t shame yourself over catching this disease. People aren’t shamed for getting cancer, diabetes, or heart disease, so you shouldn’t be ashamed or guilty over catching the addiction disease. Yes, you have responsibilities and choices that led you towards this road but shaming yourself won’t make you sober. It might even drive you to relapse!

• Pay Attention to Yourself: Improve yourself little by little because getting over your addiction is already a step in the right direction when it comes to becoming better than you used to be a couple of months or weeks ago. Aside from spending time on work to give you a renewed sense of self-worth, you can also fill in your time by taking up hobbies and good constructive habits that better you as a person. Do volunteer work. Learn a new language. Read more books. Donate your blood. Learn to relax instead if that’s what led you to becoming addicted to drugs. Pick up something that will make you better instead of worse.

• Watch Out for Stress: Once you’re back in the daily grind of work, you can easily burn yourself out or drive you to turn back to the substances you just went to rehab for in order to cope once again. This is why rehab aftercare should be all about learning the triggers and stressors that led you to using alcoholism or drug dependence in order to deal with everything. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and dialectal behavioral therapy (DBT) are two techniques that have been proven quite useful in changing people’s perspectives so that they can develop a stronger, more relaxed, and more mindful brain that is able to combat stress – rather than relying on dangerous chemicals.

• Cutting Off Toxic People: You need to know which toxic people who got you into drugs and alcohol in the first place to cut off. You see this step found in many an outpatient rehab service with 12-step programs like AA and NA, but in the case of inpatient rehab centers, this step won’t be fulfilled until you’ve already completed rehab treatment. Regardless, you should definitely figure out what to do in order to avoid drugs or alcohol as much as possible. Sometimes, people can be as toxic as the drugs you’re taking so it’s best to cut them off and make connections with positive people that will lift you up instead.

Advice from Experts and People Like You

You can also get advice from the rehab treatment experts and ex-addicts who’ve been in your shoes and have gone through what you have gone through. This is why both inpatient and outpatient treatment feature the 12-step treatment popularized by Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Narcotics Anonymous (NA) in one form or another. It features counselor volunteers and former addicts that share their stories with recently recovering addicts in a group therapy setting on top of the 12 steps to recovery that assist you in reframing your perspective for the better.

• A Sense of Community: These counselors, sponsors, and ex-addicts will assist you in every way possible because they’ve been there and done that. Aside from AA and NA, you can also depend on groups like SMART Recovery in order to supplement your inpatient addiction treatment with outpatient meetings from people who know what you’ve gone through. They provide a feeling of community and solace to you on a regular basis during what’s probably your darkest hours or your lowest of lows. Camaraderie should assist you in getting out of your funk since no man is an island and we humans are all social creatures in the end.

• You’re Not Alone: AA, NA, and SMART Recovery volunteers, counselors, staff, and crew are there for you so you don’t feel alone in your struggles along with the friends and family that’s waiting for you (if they’re the ones who entered you in rehab in the first place). There are also those you’ve alienated because of your antics while addicted. Your AA/NA/SMART buddies can assist you in reconnecting with them or asking for their forgiveness. As for your fair-weather friends who abandoned you, enablers, drug suppliers, and the like, you can safely cut the off of your life.

• The AA and NA Sponsor: AA and NA also use the concept of a sponsor to help you out. The sponsor is someone you can turn to when you’re fighting your cravings and compulsive need for drugs that could lead to relapse. He is the former addict who is now volunteering his time and experience in order to help recovering addicts jump that final few hurdles towards sobriety. Once you’ve overcome your own hurdles, you can volunteer to sponsor someone else in AA or NA, which is how the sponsor system works. You graduate and become a sponsor yourself, sharing what you did to overcome relapse.

• Dropping Your Friends Who Use: Not all of your addicted friends are toxic people even most are probably enablers that introduced drugs to your life. Some are victims of circumstances themselves who’ve become trapped in the world of addiction and the downward spiral of despair. Maybe you can help them kick the habit too. It’s ultimately your decision to drop them or continue being friends with them but without indulging in their vices. Is it in your best interest to spend you time with people who use the drugs you were addicted to and just went to rehab for? Take note that peer pressure is quite dangerous and can lead you to relapse.

• Aside from Work and Recovery: You don’t need to let recovery and work be the only things going on in your life. Having fun and learning to relax can also pay dividends in your recovery since stress and overwork are also triggers that can lead you to go to the dark side of drug and alcohol usage to better cope with all that pressure. There are ways for you to have fun without drugs or alcohol. Your idea of fun will continue to change as you try different things and encounter new life experiences. As you grow older, what you used to consider as fun in your youth might be different from what you think is entertaining at present.

• Positive Activities, Habits, and Hobbies: There are many ways to fill in the void left by not using drugs and alcohol any longer. You can do more positive and constructive things like doing sports or exercising. You can learn to play team sports like basketball, baseball, football, soccer, volleyball, and more. You can do more one-on-one sports like tennis, table tennis, badminton, boxing, MMA, or most any martial art like karate, judo, jujutsu, taekwondo, kung fu like winchun, and so forth. Learn to live and enjoy life, even if it’s something as simple as listening to live concerts, go to the movies, or watching the newest Netflix series for binge-watching.

• Become Creative with Your Options: Maybe the way for you to stick to new hobbies and activities instead of relapsing on cocaine, methamphetamines, heroin, PCP, Ecstasy, and/or marijuana is to become more creative with your drug addiction substitutes. Try something you’ve never tried before with the thinking that you should be willing to try (most) anything once with the proper amount of common sense. You can do something simple like play board games and ride bikes or something more esoteric like go on improv shows or attend Burning Man if you’ve been there.

• Widen Your New Horizons: Many people try out drugs and become addicted to them because they have or feel like they have nothing better going on in their life. Even simple boredom instead of outright trauma (like being a Child of an Alcoholic) can lead to using drugs then abusing them to the point of dependence. You can remedy all this by widening your horizons and trying something new every day. Get out of your comfort zone and get funds for skydiving lessons. Learn a new language. Learn how to swim, bake, camp, or DIY arts and crafts. Continue what you learned from rehab like yoga, meditation, and so forth.

• Fun Is All About Attitude: While you were undergoing inpatient rehab, you were probably taught many things by your CBT and DBT therapists, particularly when it comes to approaching life with a new lens or a new perspective every time so that you won’t be overwhelmed by it, even if you undergo particularly traumatic experience that can leave you mentally scarred with conditions like depression, PTSD, and addiction. Instead of using chemicals as your coping mechanism, you should learn first that fun is about your attitude. Anything can be fun with friends, family, or loved ones. Anything can be constructive and beneficial with the right mindset.

• Issues to Watch Out For During Recovery: The dangers of relapse are always at the corner of your mind or under the surface of your consciousness. It’s there, like childhood trauma that includes muscle memory on how to burn that spoon or make those lines of coke on glass. You might have detoxed from painkillers but end up trouble sleeping because of your strong cravings for them. You can end up running many miles every day or using exercise DVDs to fill in the void left by not using those painkillers. Running releases endorphins that supply you with a new type of high. You might even overdo it too in a bid of overcompensation.

• Everything in Moderation: While the high you can get out of jogging or running isn’t as “good” as doing a line of coke or snorting crystal meth, it’s a lot less dangerous, more beneficial to your health, and it’s not as mind-blowing for a reason. You’re not supposed to overdo it. Actually, now is the time you learn to practice the art of moderation. If you have to drink, drink moderately. Right now, because you’re a recovering alcoholic, you should probably abstain altogether, but once you master self-control, then alcohol won’t take over your life anymore. There are many ways to fill in that void. Just don’t fill it in with activities that will destroy you as much as drugs will.

The Nitty-Gritty of Life After Rehab

Many addicts tend to abuse certain chemicals and develop an addiction disease because there’s a hole left in their life that they attempt to fill in with substance abuse, like alcohol or various drugs. It’s certainly difficult enough to deal with your pain alone, but what about your friends and family whose trust you’ve probably betrayed in the course of fulfilling the compulsions you had when you were completely addicted to drugs and/or alcohol? How do you win back their trust, even if they’re the ones who put you put to rehab in the first place care of an intervention? How can you win back your own trust after you’ve seen your body move like it has a mind of its own towards using more drugs?

Thankfully, Lanna Rehab has everything you need in order to assist you in making that next step towards sobriety and a normal life that’s drug-free. It’s a rehab tourism magnet with a resort-like setting and a holistic approach towards addiction treatment and recovery. In fact, Lanna provides a complimentary “Refresher Week” every calendar year once you’ve completed at minimum of their 28-day inpatient treatment program and remained sober. This “Refresher Week” will be of tremendous help in keeping you focused and resetting your inner compass for continuous recovery. It includes everything originally provided to you in Lanna, including your private room, all therapies, meals, trainings, massages, meditation sessions, Reiki session, and excursions — and all at no cost. Many clients have taken this free week every year for 10 years and look forward to reconnecting with the therapists and staff every year. They can attest that it helps keep them motivated to stay sober and even help others.

Lanna Rehab Can Help You Deal Preparing a New Life Experience After Rehab

Addicts come from all walks of life. You could be an alcoholic due to being part of an alcoholic household, such that you’re only perpetuating the destructive behavioral pattern you learned from your own parents. You could be a party animal who does dangerous things like mix alcohol with Ecstasy or Adderall. You can even be a crackhead at the street or a high-powered attorney who takes meth as your coffee. Whichever the case, you will probably end up in rehab in one way or another, if not jail or the morgue. Once you complete rehabilitation, you might soon ask yourself “What’s next?” Lanna Rehab might have the answer.

Unlike other rehab centers in your locality or even around the world, Lanna Rehab has a comprehensive aftercare service that allows patients to truly move towards the path of sobriety. They don’t abandon their patients as soon as they leave their inpatient center. For more info on how to prepare you for life after drugs, then give Lanna Rehab a call at their 24/7 hotline. Call now!