Choosing to enter a treatment facility for substance use is a courageous and important step toward a healthier future. Beginning recovery takes strength, and seeking support is an accomplishment worth recognizing.
Preventing relapse is an essential part of addiction treatment, and this begins on the first day of a recovery program. As part of a comprehensive continuum of care, planning for the transition after rehab helps you maintain your progress and build a strong foundation for lasting wellness. This stage is often referred to as a discharge or aftercare plan.
Why Establishing Solid Ground Is Important
Once you leave a treatment center, you’re like a seedling planted in fresh soil: there are many considerations for nurturing your strong growth and revised approaches:
- Your environment and associations
- A regular pattern of work, activities, and socializing
- Stronger clarity and unfiltered emotions
- Healthier habits and behaviors
- Better coping mechanisms
Whether you completed a 30-, 60-, or 90-day residential program or intensive outpatient treatment, adapting to daily life and all those considerations requires deliberate awareness and intent. During treatment, you might have also just begun to delve deeper into any root causes or conditions contributing to your addictive behavior. As you face these head-on, you’ll need various techniques and applications to help you move forward.
Unfortunately, the National Institute on Drug Abuse reports that 40-60 percent of people with substance use disorder relapse. This doesn’t mean treatment failed. However, it’s a critical indicator that treatment and possibly aftercare methods must be modified to address further needs of whole-person wellness.
This is one of the primary reasons why discharge planning needs to be individualized and thorough in order to expand on what’s learned in treatment and prepare you for the new life you’ve chosen.
What Might Your Discharge and Aftercare Plan Look Like?
How you and your care professionals create an aftercare program involves a number of components based on your specific course of recovery. No one single approach is the golden ticket for success. Effective aftercare isn’t simply about refraining from drug or alcohol use: it’s about crafting a life of deliberate awareness and intent in all areas, including psychological, physical, emotional, legal, vocational, and social.
The scope of your discharge plan may include many of the following:
- Some form of continued counseling, whether individual or group.
- Medically supervised and authorized medication treatment for dual diagnosis disorders.
- 12-Step meetings to cope with the substance challenges previously experienced.
- Family involvement, such as therapy or special sessions.
- Continued outpatient treatment or sober living residency.
- A regular connection to your care center to help gauge progress, such as the Trac9 app.
- Life skills training, such as job training, parenting guidance, financial management, and others.
- Additional classes, such as yoga, meditation, exercise, anger management, and others.
- Facility-sponsored alumni events, online support forums, and continuing care groups.
- Random drug testing, both during treatment and especially if a necessary requirement by an employer.
You’ll work together with your counselors, addiction specialists, and medical experts to develop your comprehensive recovery foundation and have it in place when you complete treatment.
Can Your Aftercare Program Change If Necessary?
It’s important to remember that each discharge plan is a living document of recommended applications. As you continue to progress, it may be necessary to revisit action points like the ones above and modify them in some way, or add/delete points reflective of your current state of being.
You’re evolving, as is your recovery. Structure is important to provide you with the foundation you need, but you’re the only person who can say when you feel triggered, threatened, uncomfortable, or challenged. In some circumstances, you may require extra support to move through a difficult situation to come out on the other side still committed to your health and able to use the benefit of hindsight to understand how certain methods or applications work for you.
It’s also important to remember that similar to other chronic health conditions, one stay in rehab might not be enough to manage your condition effectively. The majority of medical professionals classify addiction as a chronic condition. So, similar to other serious health issues such as asthma, hypertension, arthritis, COPD, and diabetes, substance use disorder or alcohol use disorder sometimes requires adjusted care protocols. Your initial rehabilitation may be just the start of a line of treatment methods used to enable your wellness.
The key is communication: ask for help whenever you need it, use your support networks for continued reinforcement, and view any necessary adjustments to your aftercare as stepping stones toward better health.
Discover Strong Care at Fair Oaks
You’re never alone in your quest for sobriety. At Fair Oaks Recovery Center in Sacramento, California, we’re an inclusive, licensed Chemical Dependency Recovery Hospital—a status issued by the California Department of Public Health to addiction rehabilitation and dual diagnosis/mood disorder treatment facilities. Our medical professionals believe the balance of evidence-based care and holistic approaches allows you to create a discharge plan and aftercare support that not only reflects where you are now, but where you hope to be in the future. Contact our admissions team to learn more about our whole-person care philosophy.
