You are stronger than you think you are, but transitioning from a drug rehab facility to the real world can open some dark and dangerous doors. You find yourself in the same environment you left but with the added stress of trying to fight the urges and cravings of beginning to use drugs and alcohol again. Rather than undo all your hard work to get clean, here are five ways to help avoid a relapse.

Change Your Friend Circle

Often, the same friends you come home to are the ones who encouraged your drug or alcohol habit in the first place. While it might be hard to turn your back on them, changing your friend circle is often the best way to begin your clean and healthy lifestyle on the right foot. Those same temptations don’t surround you, nor are unsupportive friends there to tempt you back into a life of drugs and alcohol. Instead, surround yourself with friends and family who you know will encourage you to live your new, clean lifestyle.

Communicate with Your Support People

When you go to drug rehab, you’re typically assigned a support person, or people, to help you both while you’re in rehab and when you leave. If you find yourself struggling with everyday life without drugs, make sure you communicate these feelings with either your support people or your family. Don’t isolate yourself and hide how you’re feeling. The more people who know about your battles, the easier it is to stay on the right path.

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When you decide to make the courageous decision to book into a drug rehab facility, you will begin to learn a lot about who you are. Or, rather, who you were while you were consuming drugs or alcohol. Choosing to get clean is a big decision to make, and it unleashes some harsh realities about who you hurt and how you hurt them. Below you can find out how your addiction is, or was, affecting your family.

Broken Relationships

As a drug addict, you can often say or do anything if it means the result is getting your next fix. Therefore, you may find a number of your relationships with friends, families, and partners, are impacted or broken beyond ever fixing due to your problem. What many people struggle with is not being able to find the real you inside the drug-addicted version. Therefore, many people in your life often do decide that breaking all ties is the only way they can make it through.

Isolation

When you enter drug rehab, you will find yourself going through a period of feeling isolated, but it’s nothing to what your family most likely suffered for many months. With a family member who’s a drug addict, many family members find themselves battling with whether they should let people know. Out of embarrassment, shame, or fear, they may decide the best way forward is to keep it bottled up.

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