addiction recovery

What are some helpful tips for staying sober and overcoming a drug or alcohol addiction?  Well let us take a look at some of the principles that have worked best for many people in the past in helping them to achieve long term sobriety in recovery.

1) Create a new life with purpose.  This is huge.  Most people do not even consider an idea like this in recovery from addiction, as they are too focused on group therapy and simply not taking a drink in the early days.  But eventually you will become better at avoiding your drug of choice, and it will become automatic for you, and then you will be facing more subtle problems in your recovery.  Think long term.  This is where you want to be constantly building a new life for yourself in recovery, building healthy self esteem and taking positive action every day.  This goes beyond traditional 12 step recovery and you will not hear about ideas like this in regular drug rehab centers.  Nevertheless, this is a huge key to long term success in addiction recovery, and any addict who has achieved long term sobriety can look back and see how they have created a positive new life for themselves through daily action.

2) Another tip for how to stay clean and sober is to get involved with helping others in their recovery.  Nothing could be more helpful and this is a principle that you will also find in traditional recovery–because it works so well.  Help others and you help yourself.

3) The key to achieving long term sobriety is in raising your own level of self esteem and finding real purpose in your life.  These two things can combine to protect you from the threat of relapse.  Anyone who is building self esteem and genuinely looks forward to living a sober life is not going to relapse.

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Tips for Recovery and Helping Alcoholics

by admin on February 8, 2010

It is not easy to overcome an addiction, so here are some tips to help you out with it.

First of all, if you are trying to help alcoholics, then you should do so by first getting yourself the proper help.  This means going to an organization called Al-anon and attending one of their meetings.  Many people are hesitant to do so and they may not see how this will directly help the struggling alcoholic in their life.  And they may be right to an extent, this might not directly help anyone to sober, not right away anyway.  But your own behavior and how you deal with an alcoholic can definitely have an impact on their path to surrender.  If you continue to enable someone, then they might not be moving any closer to making a decision.  You can learn more about this in Al-anon, so it is an excellent suggestion that you get to one of their meetings and share openly with the people there.

Some more tips for recovery would include the fact that you need to take extreme action in early recovery in order to be successful.  Most people who are trying to get clean and sober do not realize the level of dedication that they need to taking real action in early recovery.  They overestimate their own ability to change and they do not see how much work will be involved in making a huge change in themselves.  This makes it very likely for them to relapse and so the vast majority of people end up doing just that.  In order to avoid this fate, you have to dedicate your entire life and all of your available energy to recovery, at least for the first year or so at the bare minimum.  Real lasting change takes time and so you need to work hard in order to lock in a new pattern of living.

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