Four Ways that Rehab Improves Your Coping Skills

Four Ways that Rehab Improves Your Coping SkillsAlcohol and substance abuse are often the results of poor coping skills. Individuals may learn these “skills” from parents, peers or their environment, or they may never develop healthy skills and discover the perceived benefits of substance use on their own.

Regardless of how or why individuals lack positive coping skills, these skills must be developed before individuals can say goodbye to drugs and maintain an addiction-free life. Rehab programs focus on identifying where coping skills are lacking and developing these missing strategies for managing everyday life.

Rehab Helps You Express Emotions

While your first reaction may be to use to manage feelings of stress, sadness or other powerful emotions, rehab teaches that there are better responses to negative thoughts. Expressing emotions, rather than masking them through drug use, provides real healing and stress reduction.

Rehab teaches patients to express emotions through creative outlets such as art or journaling, to channel emotions through healthy physical activity and to reach out to friends and professionals for help. Rehab helps individuals recognize when problems are too large to be managed alone, and teaches them how to ask for help with emotions.

Rehab Helps You Avoid Relapse Risk

Emotions aren’t the only drug use triggers. Environments, situations and individuals can also trigger or encourage your drug use. Rehab will help you identify these triggers so that you can avoid them whenever possible. When they are unavoidable, rehab will teach you how to recognize a risky situation and employ strategies to get through it without turning to drugs.

Rehab Teaches You How to Relax

Managing stress, emotions and high-risk situations comes down to learning how to relax. Rehab helps you get to know yourself and how you can find peace. It teaches powerful relaxing skills that will help you manage any life situation on your own. Stress management and relaxing skills help you find enjoyment in both the small and large aspects of life and leave you better equipped to handle recovery challenges.

Rehab Prevents a Lapse from Becoming a Relapse

Once you leave a rehab program, you will face the same social influences and drug use triggers that you did prior to treatment. While a lapse may occur after treatment, it doesn’t have to lead to a relapse. Rehab programs help patients to see that slips and mistakes are not utter and complete failures.

Relapse Prevention: Maintenance Strategies in the Treatment of Addictive Behaviors (2005) explains, “the individual who views a lapse as a learning experience is more likely to experiment with alternative coping strategies in the future, which may lead to more effective response to high-risk situations.” Rehab teaches patients to approach life’s mistakes as opportunities to learn, grow and move forward rather than give up and slide backward.

Benefit from Addiction Rehabilitation

If you or a loved one is ready to put an end to addiction, call our toll-free helpline today. Our admissions coordinators will help you find the rehab resources that provide coping skills and support for long-term addiction recovery. We are here 24 hours a day, and all calls are free and confidential.