Surveying your life after addiction can be like witnessing the aftermath of a natural disaster. Your relationships with family and friends, finances, work, and everything else in your life may be in shambles. Where do you even begin to pick up the pieces and move forward? The very thought of it can be overwhelming. As with everything else in recovery, looking at things piece by piece, one day at a time, you can put your life back together again after addiction.
Prioritizing Your Recovery First
No matter how much destruction surrounds you in your life, no matter how badly you want to start putting everything back together again, your recovery is the most important thing in your life after addiction. Suppose you put your sobriety at risk by taking on too much stress during or immediately after treatment. In that case, you will relapse, and not only will your life be just as devastated, but you will also have lost your sobriety altogether.
If you lose your sobriety, you will lose the ability to function and the hope of putting your back pieces together again. Putting your recovery first is fundamental to being mentally and physically capable of rebuilding your life. Risking your sobriety defeats the purpose of getting healthy and becoming functional again.
Learning to Stand on Your Own Feet in Sobriety
Before you worry too much about solving all of your problems, you will need to learn to stand on your own feet in sobriety. You do not need to be perfect or have a specific amount of time sober, but you will need to be strong enough to manage some of the stressors you will have to face as you work to resolve the difficulties throughout your life.
During treatment, you can get support from the facility in scheduling or rescheduling court dates, filling out Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) paperwork for your job, and other immediate or time-sensitive issues. Other problems may seem pressing, but you can wait until you are prepared to face them after treatment when you are more grounded in your sobriety. Even then, you can seek support from family, friends, peers, your therapist, and others in your life to help as you unravel your troubles and put your life back together.
Prioritizing the Facets of Your Life
As you start to work on repairing your life, prioritizing everything can be difficult. Everything will seem urgent, and that can be overwhelming. Use your best judgment and get help from trusted others to prioritize in order of basic needs and time-sensitive issues to problems that can be resolved over time or are less pressing. While always putting your recovery first, you may wish to consider prioritizing your other needs similar to this list and adding as needed:
- Food, clothing, and shelter
- Income to provide necessities
- Legal issues such as court dates, parole officers, etc.
- Organizing finances and budget
- Finding work or education
- Focusing on repairing family relationships
- Mending relationships with friends, coworkers, etc.
Staying on Task With One Project at a Time
If you are determined to prioritize and resolve your problems, remember to stay focused and stick with one project at a time. Jumping around from project to project without completing tasks will continue the chaos and fail to solve your problems. Staying focused until each job is completed will ensure that you put the pieces of the puzzle back together again, even if it is only one at a time.
While it may seem frustrating to not be able to address everything all at once, there is merit to completing tasks and solving problems. Obviously, life will not always work perfectly, and you will inevitably end up juggling more than one task at the same time sometimes, but maintaining focus to follow through and complete tasks will help you get your life back on track.
Patience Pays Dividends
We all wish we had a fairy godmother with a magic wand at some point in our lives who could just cast a spell to make all of our problems disappear. If that were the case, though, then you probably never would have ended up in treatment for addiction in the first place. Actually, solving your problems takes time and patience.
You can put your life back together again after addiction with hard work and patience. The patience you have by taking your life back one day at a time, one project at a time, will pay dividends. You will have the satisfaction of doing the work to make it happen, and you will have the growth that occurs by going through the process.
Trying to put your life back together can seem overwhelming after the devastation that can occur in your life due to addiction. By putting your recovery first, then prioritizing your problems by urgency and necessity, you can complete tasks one at a time to put your life back together again one piece at a time. The Ho Tai Way – Recovery For Women is a residential treatment center for women with addiction and co-occurring mental health diagnoses. Our Costa Mesa, California facility is a peaceful refuge for healing. You can learn to begin your recovery process, become stable in your sobriety, and put your life back together. We offer trauma-informed treatment to help you feel safe in your treatment process. Our staff is compassionate and helpful as you learn to function in healthy ways again. Contact The Ho Tai Way at (714) 581-3974 today.
