Strategies for Avoiding Triggers After Rehab

If you have recently gone through rehab, you most likely discussed your triggers with your counselor. If not, triggers are those people, places or situations that make you more likely to abuse drugs. For example, you may not feel much of a temptation to use drugs when you are spending time with your mother who does not use drugs. When you spend time with your cousin that does do drugs, on the other hand, you might find it difficult to resist temptation.

Identifying your triggers while you are in rehab is a relatively simple process. After all, all you need to do is analyze the situations or the people you are with when you abuse drugs. Although determining your triggers isn’t too difficult, learning how to avoid them can be tough.

Avoiding People That Your Rehab Determined to be Triggers

If you discovered through rehab that certain people are your triggers, it can be quite difficult to avoid these triggers. This is particularly true if the people that act as triggers are family members or other people that you care deeply about.

If you have determined through rehab that someone you care about is a trigger to your drug use, you might have to make a very painful decision to stay away from that person even though it hurts you inside. Alternatively, you can work toward helping that person get the help he or she needs so you can both be clean and start a new life together. Of course, convincing someone that does not want help to get help can be a difficult process. Therefore, it may take a great deal of effort on your part to get this person into a treatment program. If you are still in a fragile state yourself, it might not be a good idea for you to take on this challenge.

If your rehab counseling helped you determine that your people triggers are not people you care deeply about, it should be much easier to avoid these people. At the same time, it is easy to fall back into the trap of wanting to be “one of the gang” and giving into peer pressure. Therefore, it is best to simply avoid these people completely.

Avoiding Places That Your Rehab Determined to be Triggers

If your rehab helped teach you that certain places act as triggers for you, then you obviously need to stay away from these places. If your neighborhood in general serves as a trigger, you need to seriously reconsider moving so you do not fall into the same deadly cycle of drug abuse again.

For most people, however, the trigger is not so broad. Rather, the trigger may be going to bars and nightclubs. It may even be going to just one specific nightclub. If this is the case, be sure to avoid going to these places completely. Even if you feel as if you have your addiction completely under control and believe that you are strong enough to resist temptation, visiting these places is a bad idea. Or minds are set up to associate certain actions with certain stimuli. Going to one of these places can set that motion back into place and, before you know it, you are back to fighting your drug habit once more.

Avoiding Situations That Your Rehab Determined to be Triggers

Situations are among the most common triggers that people uncover while in rehab. Feeling stress is quite possibly the number one situation that causes people to turn to drugs. Life can be difficult at times and, in order to escape, drugs provide an outlet. For this reason, it is essential that you come up with other ways to cope with stress or with other emotions in order to prevent turning to drugs again.

While in rehab, you may have discussed some relaxation techniques. When in a stressful situation or when feeling overwhelmed, you need to employ these techniques. In order to quickly relax your body during a stressful situation, follow these steps:

· Make your clothing as loose as possible and find a comfortable position

· Tighten your toe muscles and hold that position for 10 seconds

· Relax your toes and take a moment to enjoy the tension release you experience
· Flex your foot muscles and hold that position for 10 seconds

· Relax your muscles and enjoy the release

· Slowly continue this process throughout your body, moving up to the legs, then to the abdomen, to the back, to the neck, and to the face

· Breathe deeply and slowly through this entire process

By releasing the tension in your body through this process, you will begin to feel more relaxed and less stressed. As a result, you will be less likely to feel the need to turn to drugs for help getting through a tough situation.

Visualization can also work wonders with handling stress. Every day, practice visualizing the release of all of your worries and cares. While resting in a quiet room or while listening to music of your choice, go through the same relaxation technique as before. When you get to your head, however, imagine putting all of your worries and stress into a balloon and letting it go. In your mind, watch your worries as they float away inside the balloon. If you do this on a regular basis, you will be able to access the image of the balloon right away when a stressful situation occurs. Stop for a moment and visualize it floating away in the balloon in order to bring your stress levels down.

Although you will likely discuss strategies for avoiding triggers and for dealing with triggers when you do encounter them while you are still in rehab, you should always be thinking of ways to cope with these situations. In that way, you will be as prepared as possible if one of these triggers should sneak up on you and you will know how to react in a way that will allow you to continue to remain drug free for the rest of your life.