On your road to recovery, you will battle emotions and temptations that could lead you to use substances again—those receiving treatment for substance addiction experience at least one relapse during recovery. The good news is, understanding relapse helps you prevent it. This post will identify the signs of a relapse and highlight why it is important to know them while you’re deciding if you should seek treatment at Oceanfront Recovery.
What Is Relapse?
Relapse refers to a moment when someone recovering from addiction begins using substances again. While you are more likely to relapse at the early stages of recovery, it, unfortunately, remains a possibility throughout your sobriety. Aside from the threat relapsing poses to your recovery, a relapse can also be fatal to your health.
This is because the longer you abstain from using, the more your tolerance decreases. During a relapse, many people often go back to abusing substances in the dosage and amounts they used to take while at the peak of their addiction. This could lead to an overdose, which can cause harmful, severe symptoms, in some cases, even resulting in death.
What Are The Triggers, Stages, and Signs of a Relapse?
Some events or experiences can plant the thought of using in your mind. Common relapse triggers could be as simple as meeting someone you knew while using. Other triggers include social pressures, negative emotions, and exposure to substances.
Relapsing is often a slow, gradual process that happens in stages. These stages include emotional, mental, and, finally, physical relapse. During an emotional relapse, you are not yet considering substance abuse, but the emotions experienced here often act as precursors. Feelings like anxiety, mood swings, anger, and isolation, are some of the common signs. At this stage, some end up developing poor sleeping and eating habits.
The struggle between using and staying clean becomes more prominent during mental relapse. Here, your mind is actively thinking about using substances. This thinking could affect your decision making. Mental relapse is dominated by thoughts of the places, things, and people you used substances with. You might even glamorize your past addiction.
Transitioning from mental to physical relapse can be spontaneous. This is because it’s harder to stay clean once you actively start thinking about using it again. During a physical relapse, you are actively using substances, which affects your recovery and puts your health and life at risk.
How Important Is It to Know the Signs of a Relapse?
It is impossible to live in a world free of temptations. At various points, you will be exposed to environments that could threaten your sobriety. This is where knowing the signs of relapse comes in handy. It is also essential to have your family and close friends aware of those signs as well. Even though you should always monitor your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, having someone look out for you when you cannot be objective about your sobriety will help. The reasons why you need to know the triggers and signs of relapse include:
- Knowing relapse triggers helps you to be aware of what to avoid.
- Such information can be vital in developing and governing your routine.
- It enables you to stay vigilant in your sobriety.
- It helps you detect relapse in its early stage, seeking the appropriate help sooner.
Relapse Prevention at Oceanfront Recovery
You may not control the circumstances and events that come your way. However, you can control your response to those circumstances and find ways to support relapse prevention. Knowing the signs of a relapse allows you to manage your recovery when life gets too stressful. Fortunately, there are several treatment and therapy options readily available to you.
Some of them include:
- Family therapy program
- EMDR therapy program
- Dialectical behavior therapy
- Cognitive-behavioral therapy
At Oceanfront Recovery, we offer you the professional support you need to help you during your recovery as you identify signs of a relapse. Contact Oceanfront Recovery at 877.296.7477 to get more information about our addiction treatment programs.
