By Sandy Baker
What Next?
You’ve worked through detox and residential treatment. You feel stronger than you’ve ever felt, but the question still nags at you: are you really ready to go back home? Is home even the right place for you?
Addiction treatment is a life-changing experience. Even with a supportive family and a “good” life at home, you may not feel ready to handle the challenges that lie ahead. If that’s the case, consider how transitional living can help you.
Here at The Ranch at Dove Tree, our team can help you to select the transitional living solutions that may be a positive second step for you. The following questions will help you decide whether transitional living might work for you.
Are You Ready for the Responsibilities at Home?
You struggled to manage work, school, and home life while you were addicted. You may be unsure of your ability to move forward now that you have a clear head and a sober outlook. You want to be able to do well, but you’re worried about taking on all of those responsibilities right away. For those who have children, debts, and perhaps even legal concerns, it may not be easy to just go back home. You need help re-establishing yourself within that life again.
If you can identify with these concerns, consider transitional living. It can help you step back into your responsibilities at a slower pace to ensure you can handle them well.
What Will You Do with Free Time?
For men and women facing addiction recovery, free time can be terrifying. If you have nothing to do but think, you may find yourself thinking about using. You may also find yourself overwhelmed with trying to fill your time with valuable things to do. What should you do if you don’t have to work? Where should you go if you have a day off? Filling that time is different for a person with an addiction. It’s too easy to find yourself falling into a depression that will lead you back towards drug use.
A transitional living facility creates a more structured living environment. You are given tasks to complete. You take care of your responsibilities, but you also learn how to manage downtime in a beneficial and constructive manner. You may even have time to try new hobbies or develop skills that will fuel your commitment to recovery.
What Is Your Support Structure Like at Home?
Addiction can be straining for families. You may feel as though going back home isn’t ideal simply because those relationships are not the same. That’s true: your relationships will never be the same. If you choose to keep those relationships, you’ll have to work on them. Depending on how troubled and tense your home relationships are, diving fully back into them after treatment may not be ideal.
On the other hand, you may have decided to cut off old relationships completely or not have a supportive home to return to. In that case, you need support. Your peers in transitional living will understand what’s happened to you. They won’t judge or scold you. They may become lifelong friends who can be a support network for you after you return home.
Transitional Living Isn’t the End Destination
In each of these situations, it may be beneficial to move towards transitional living. Spending a few weeks in a transitional living environment may give you the extra time you need to prepare yourself for returning to the larger world. You won’t stay in transitional living forever, not will you fully recover there. But you’ll feel ready to go back home or create a new home for yourself.
If you are thinking about what transitional living can do for you, contact our alcohol and drug treatment program in Lubbock, TX to learn more about our gender-specific transitional living homes and all of the services and amenities we offer to help you ground your recovery in healthy habits and support networks. Find out how we can help you to take the next step forward.
