When we’re working to rejoin society and return to our former lives, there are some specific challenges we’re often confronted with. These can threaten to derail our progress and take us off course. Our goal in recovery is to stay clean and avoid relapse, and these challenges can test our resolve and our strength. What are some of the obstacles we face when reintegrating?
Perhaps the first that would come to mind for most of us is the prevalence of temptation around us. We’re bombarded with it on a daily basis within our culture with its fixation on drugs, alcohol and partying. We might encounter it in our homes and social circles if our family, friends or other loved ones aren’t sober. Even when we’ve removed all physical traces that might be tempting, internally we’re often still battling with temptation. We ache to feel the release we got from being high. We crave to forget our pain, our difficult thoughts, our memories. Addictive urges and compulsions don’t vanish when we’re in recovery. In fact, they’re one of our biggest tests.
Another obstacle is the toxicity in our lives that our addiction might have been numbing us from but which doesn’t get resolved simply because we’ve started the recovery process. A successful recovery means confronting all of the issues and conflicts in our lives, whether they’re internal or interpersonal. For many of us, they are both. We struggle with both inner turmoil and conflict with loved ones. They can both be painful. They are often what we were trying to escape through our addictive behaviors. When we are reintegrating back into our lives, this toxicity is still there, until we do the work to address it.
An invisible but powerful obstacle we can face in the recovery process when returning to our lives is our own emotional resistance. This often comes in the form of impatience. We feel a sense of urgency to return to normalcy in our lives. We feel desperate to return to what we knew as our lives, but so much has changed for us now that we can find ourselves having to rediscover and recreate ourselves. This takes time. It takes soul searching and self-reflection. It takes surrendering to the flow of life rather than resisting it or trying to rush it. It takes being as calm and patient with ourselves as we can while focusing on maintaining our sobriety.
The foundation of care you’ll receive here at Vista Taos will help empower you for a successful recovery and reintegration. Call (575) 613-4810 today for more information.
