In this section, you will identify the people who can provide you with support and encouragement during challenging times. This may include family members, friends, support groups, or therapists. Additionally, you can list any resources or organizations that offer assistance, such as relapse prevention worksheets or relapse prevention therapy. Furthermore, a relapse prevention plan emphasizes the significance of building a strong support network. This network consists of individuals, such as friends, family members, or support groups, who provide understanding, encouragement, and accountability.
Identify Triggers
In addition to human support, it’s essential to be aware of available resources that can aid in relapse prevention. These resources may include books, online forums, apps, and other tools that provide education, guidance, and inspiration during difficult times. By utilizing these resources, individuals can enhance their relapse prevention plan and access valuable insights. Building a strong support system is a critical aspect of relapse prevention. Support can come from various sources, including friends, family, support groups, or professionals. These individuals can provide encouragement, guidance, and accountability throughout the recovery journey.
Understanding Relapse Prevention Plans
This plan might include asking your therapist for an emergency therapy session, visiting the emergency room, or enrolling in inpatient treatment again. Everyone will have different emotions that cause their substance use. Ask your therapist for additional guidance if you need help identifying these emotions. Recognizing these emotions can help you seek other therapy or a recovery meeting if necessary. This shows our immediate need to develop a diversion plan to deal with cravings. We go to a smoke-filled bar, or hang out with support group cynics, or phone a friend who berates anyone who exercises.
Crafting an Effective Relapse Prevention Plan
Start by listing potential triggers, such as specific places, people, or emotions that have led you to drink or use in the past. This helps you anticipate high-risk situations and develop effective coping strategies if you have no choice but to be in those situations. For instance, deep breathing, meditation, writing, reading a book, or even playing video games can be coping skills to include in your relapse prevention plan.
- At any moment, someone’s aggravating behavior or our own bad luck can set us off on an emotional spiral that threatens to derail our entire day.
- In a systematic review summarizing the results of 11 prospective studies, the identification of early risk of relapse in patients with schizophrenia ranged from 10% to 80% [11].
- (4) Identify the developed meanings and group them into theme clusters.
- To prevent a relapse, you will want to remove triggers, including places, people, or purchases that may bring about urges to use again.
- The plan offers a course of action for responding to triggers and cravings.
- With a relapse prevention plan, it is possible to acknowledge and act upon certain feelings and events, in turn avoiding a physical relapse (which is the stage when someone returns to drug or alcohol use).
- Another essential element of a relapse prevention plan is developing effective coping strategies.
- Expectancy theory has shown that when people expect to have fun, they usually do, and when they expect that something will not be fun, it usually isn’t [15].
- Warning signs are when thoughts of using change in character and become more insistent or increase in frequency.
- In your goals and motivation section, you should explore all the reasons that prompted you to stop, and what your goals are for staying clean.
If you or anyone you know is undergoing a severe health crisis, call a doctor or 911 immediately. While experts agree that recidivism is part of recovery and happens gradually, there are different explanations of its phases and warning signs. Because of the similarities between relapse symptoms and first-episode symptoms, some patients are able to determine whether they are developing a relapse. Patients with first-episode lacked knowledge related to disease relapse or even motivation to understand the disease. Since patients in the acute phase generally lack awareness about the disease, most patients with the first episode of the illness are found to be in an abnormal state by family members or people around them. We carried out a qualitative study using a descriptive phenomenological approach.
Relapse Prevention Plan: Techniques to Help You Stay on Track
