Embarking on recovery can be alternately exciting and full of promise as well as frightening, confusing, and filled with potential pitfalls. Statistically speaking, early recovery is when most people have problems that may lead to relapse. That is, relapse rates are high in the first 90 days to 6 months. Knowing what to do ahead of time to protect against relapse is important. But strengthening your capabilities and working your recovery plan are every bit as critical. How can you put more mortar into your recovery foundation? Here are seven of the best things you can do for yourself in recovery:

1. No Major Life Changes in the First Year

Recovery experts caution that you shouldn’t make any drastic life changes during the first year of your recovery. This includes all the same kind of elements that are major stressors to anyone – but especially those in early recovery. Don’t enter into a new romantic relationship, get married, or file for divorce during this time. Stick it out in your old job, if you still have one. Hold on to your home or stay in the same residence. What’s the reason for this? Maybe you feel you’re strong enough to weather the tension and stress such major life moves entail, but you’re really not. Any little thing can send you over the edge – and back into using. Stability is one of the most important things for your early recovery. You need time to become practiced in employing your coping mechanisms, to get familiar with a healthier routine, to develop new and sober relationships, and to begin to map out the kind of future that fits with the vision you want for your new life in sobriety.

There will be plenty of time – the rest of your life, in fact – to make big changes. If you get pressure from others to move faster during the first year, tell them gently but emphatically that you need to work your recovery now. If they care about you and your recovery, they will understand. If they still pressure you, they’re either uncaring or uninformed about how critically important the first year is to those in recovery.

2. Get Into 12-Step Rooms

You’ve heard it already, but it bears repeating again and again: Get into the 12-step rooms and work the steps for your recovery. There’s no better support group that you can find – anywhere. The 12-step groups are fellowships of men and women who share a common desire – a commitment to maintaining sobriety and a willingness to help others do the same.

The fact of the matter is that you will desperately need people who can relate to you during the early part of your recovery. There will be times when the floor seems to fall out from under you and you panic that you won’t be able to resist the temptation to fall back on your using behavior. When problems and stresses mount up, relationships fall apart, money troubles multiply, or you’re dealing with legal or medical issues, it’s too easy to want to escape it all by numbing out with drugs, alcohol, or your former addictive behavior of choice.

Everyone in the 12-step rooms has been there before. They know what it’s like to wake up in the middle of the night in a panic, or go through the days filled with anxiety or depression. Countering the feeling of hopelessness and helplessness is something you have to do, but you can’t do it alone. Call on your 12-step sponsor – and getting a sponsor should be one of the first things you do when you start going to your regular 12-step meetings – to help you through the rough times. And, don’t kid yourself. There will be some very tough days ahead. Remember that your sponsor pledges to always be there for you. That means you can call on him or her whenever you feel you need help. It isn’t an imposition, and you’re not asking for anything other than what the sponsor has promised to do. After all, there may come a time when you will be in a position to be able to help someone else in early recovery – after you’ve been sober for at least one year and feel comfortable in your sobriety.

3. Build Structure into Your Life

Now that you’re no longer in active treatment, you may feel exhilarated about all the free and unstructured time on your hands. Don’t fall into this trap. It’s a sure-fire way to backslide into relapse. You actually need structure at this time, especially the first 90 days to 6 months. Why is structure so important? For one thing, you need to become fully practiced in using your newly-learned coping skills. For another, you need time to develop your support network. You also need the discipline of adhering to a regular schedule of 12-step meeting attendance, seeing your counselor or therapist, and working your steps to recovery.
Building structure into your life isn’t difficult. Start by making a daily and weekly schedule. At first, account for every hour of the day. That’s right, every hour. Keep a daily planner so that you can add or subtract or switch out components as necessary. Make sure to factor in leisure time as well as time for intellectual and spiritual development and time for taking care of your own physical well-being.

The beauty of having a structure for your daily life is that you always know what comes next. Having a plan means less anxiety over what you should be doing. There’s less downtime or idle moments when cravings can creep in and take over your thoughts. Not that such cravings won’t surface. They definitely will. But getting involved in the next thing on your to-do list will help you overcome those cravings, which will subside after a short time as you concentrate on other things.

Speaking of structure, factor in the 90-in-90 rule. Attend 90 12-step meetings in 90 days. This is an excellent and built-in structural aid that will reap countless benefits as you strengthen your confidence in your recovery.

4. Find Some New Friends

Your circle of friends that are appropriate for your new sober lifestyle may have diminished in size. That’s generally what happens as you know you can’t be around the people, places, and things that precipitate using. The best antidote to the loneliness of early recovery is to make new friends.

Before you object that this is easier said than done, give it a try. You are already going to 12-step meetings. While it certainly isn’t mandatory that you become friends with fellow 12-steppers, it is bound to happen more often than not. So your 12-step meetings are one place where you can meet new people who may become your friends over time.

Another good way to find some new friends is to get involved in a recreational or leisure pursuit. Take up cross-country or downhill skiing or join a fly-fishing club. If you love books, join a book reading club. If you’re a writer, track down a writers’ club in your area and start attending meetings. If you have a desire to go back to school to finish or start a degree or learn a new skill, you’ll find ample opportunities for new acquaintances among your new classmates.

Making friends is also a good way to broaden your horizons. While you were immersed in your addiction, you probably limited your daily activities. Most likely, all you thought about was the next time you’d be able to use or searching out your drug of choice. Walking around in a drug-induced fog, or consumed by your addiction, you weren’t in a position to form positive and healthy relationships. Those friendships you did have, if they didn’t involve using, were probably few and far between. More than likely, they faded away as your behavior became more bizarre and drug-related.

Now is the time to change all that. Once you start getting out there and participating in healthy activities, you’ll find that people are both interesting and interested in you. Just take it slow and let friendships form naturally. Be open and positive, but don’t feel you need to unburden your entire life story to everyone you meet. We’re talking about friendships here, not psychotherapy.

5. Focus on Your Needs

It sounds a little selfish, doesn’t it? But it really isn’t. Now is when you need to focus on your own needs, as opposed to the needs of others. Your entire focus needs to be on your recovery. Finding out what you really want in your new life will take some careful self-analysis. During your addiction, you may not have thought much about what the future would be like. You may have been in such a downward spiral that you contemplated committing suicide to end your pain. Now that you’re in recovery, the future may seem like a scary place. You may need to discover or re-discover what’s really important to you in order to shape the direction your life in sobriety will take.

Going through your introspection means that you should cut yourself some slack. Avoid being self-critical or thinking that you should be farther along in your recovery than you are at this moment. Everyone’s path is different. There will be up days and down days, and times when you feel uncertain whether your decisions are motivated by the right intentions.

Let’s take a few examples of where your focus on needs may come into play. If you have lingering medical conditions caused or
exacerbated by your addiction, you need to focus on regaining your physical health. This entails taking any prescribed medications, eating well-balanced and regular meals, getting adequate sleep, and keeping your appointments with your doctors.
You may want to overlook your physical needs in your desire to move forward with your recovery, but the fact is that your body must be in good shape in order for you to maximize your recovery efforts. When you’re tired or stressed or physically ill, your resolve to maintain sobriety is jeopardized.

Another example of paying attention to your own needs involves setting aside the time required for your meeting attendance. Family members and friends, well-meaning though they may be, may want to capture your time for various activities. You need to inform them that you will be attending 12-step meetings (along with meetings with your counselor or therapist, doctors and other appointments) as a necessary and ongoing part of your recovery. This isn’t selfish. It’s critical to your successful recovery.
Criticism of you being self-absorbed should also be deflected. While you take your self-inventory of needs and work your steps in the program, you will be somewhat detached. You need to be. It’s hard work coming to grips with all these things. Many of the feelings and thoughts you will encounter will be disturbing and painful. You will need time to sort them out, and that means you need to focus on those needs first and foremost.

Of course, focusing on your needs doesn’t mean that you turn a blind eye to your loved ones and friends. Be with them and a part of activities as much as you can – as long as it doesn’t interfere with your recovery efforts. When you are with them, really be with them. Strive to put your full attention on family communication and interaction so that every moment you are with them counts. By being in the moment with your loved ones, they will be better able to accept the time when you are tending to your recovery needs.

6. Learn to Shrug Off Disappointments

One of the biggest lessons you need to learn is that everything is not a big deal. This sounds a little simplistic, but it’s really only a way to boil a concept down to easy-to-understand terms. One way to approach this is to take the long view. What will the importance be of whatever it is you’re worrying about now in 10 years? Will the fact that you didn’t get the house completely repainted in your designated timeframe matter then? Give yourself some leeway on projects and don’t get bogged down in minor disappointments.

Okay, sure you’ll feel deflated if you don’t get the promotion you feel you deserve. That’s more than a minor disappointment, but the same principle holds true for major ones. Take the long view. Maybe there’s a reason why it fell through. Try to identify the cause and work on the solution.

7. Build Resiliency

One of the best things you can do for yourself in recovery is to build your resilience. Resiliency is your ability to bounce back after setbacks, to shrug off disappointments, to take an alternate approach if needed, and to understand that recovery isn’t a straight-line process. Think about trees as an example of resiliency. Trees are able to bend during strong winds and return to upright position after the force passes. Without such a capability, they’d break apart or uproot. It’s the same with personal resiliency in recovery. Weathering the storm of major and minor challenges, self-rediscovery, and charting new goals requires a lot of resilience.

Your 12-step sponsor and other group members can be good resources for helping develop your resiliency. Listening to others talk about how they got through various struggles and challenges will not only motivate you but give you potential strategies to use in your own situation. Take whatever works and adapt it to your circumstance. If it doesn’t work as well as you’d like, modify it or discard it and try something new. This is resilience in action in recovery.

Remember that there is no end in the word recovery. You will be in recovery for the rest of your life. Recovery is a vital process, as important to your living as breathing. As you gain more time in recovery, however, you will become so practiced in your healthy and sober lifestyle that you will no longer worry about the recovery process. You won’t obsess over how long it takes or whether you’ll ever be done, as is common for newcomers. Instead, you will live every day in recovery. That’s a huge difference.

Bottom line: Living in recovery is the best outcome of all. It’s a celebration of life – your life – and a testament to your commitment.

Written by Guest Writer Suzanne K

Reflect for a moment on the first days and weeks of your early recovery. If you’re like most with a few years of recovery under your belt, you’ll likely recall some pretty frightening experiences, times when you felt that you just couldn’t go on, when the lure of the cravings was just too much to overcome. You were desperate for a lifeline – and you found it in your support network, most likely your 12-step sponsor and fellow group members. Besides your sponsor, you may have formed a friendship with someone who became, more or less, your mentor. Now, maybe it’s time for you to give back. Think about becoming a mentor to someone new to recovery.

Think of it as a Gift

Before you discount the idea as one that will require too much time on your part, give it a little consideration. Rather than regarding mentorship as a chore or a job, think of it as a gift, a way that you can give back in a manner that you have received from others. Remember the time that you called on your allies in your local Alcoholics Anonymous (or Narcotics Anonymous, or Cocaine Anonymous, or Gamblers Anonymous, and so on) group. You just needed someone to talk to that wouldn’t judge you or try to impose their will on you. Your group members – who may have become more than just acquaintances – helped you out by listening compassionately, offering encouragement and support, and, possibly a few suggestions that worked for them.
For many in early recovery, just the ability to have these kinds of conversations with others is a tremendous relief. The new-to-recovery individual can begin to realize that they aren’t going crazy, that what they’re feeling is perfectly normal, given their recent transition from treatment to being on their own again and striving to live a clean and sober life.

Others new to recovery weren’t able to benefit from residential treatment. They may have had to struggle with addiction on their own, or perhaps got clean by going to a detox center and then outpatient counseling. They look to 12-step groups to help provide support and anchor them to sober living more out of necessity than choice. But, still, each person that’s new to recovery needs help. No one can do it alone.

Offer your assistance to someone new in recovery by being a mentor. You’ll find that it’s more than a gift you offer that individual. You’ll also be giving yourself a great gift. At the point in your recovery when you find yourself able to give your time to others, that’s the greatest gift of all.

Find Someone with Whom You Can Relate

There are new people coming to meetings all the time. Who should you choose to mentor? How should you go about it? After all, you may not be ready to be a sponsor, but you do want to help in whatever way you can on a more limited basis. You can’t just go up to someone who’s just started coming to meetings and say you want to mentor them. How awkward is that? The new member is probably scared, distrustful, unsure about this whole meeting and sharing thing, and certainly not ready for such an approach.

Give it a little time. Going to meetings week after week, you’ll begin to see how new members are adapting or becoming a bit more comfortable with the 12-step group meeting format. Some will disappear after initial meetings, not finding it to their liking, going to another meeting, relapsing, or other reasons. But for those who do come back, they’re obviously committed to the whole concept, and you may find someone among them with whom you can relate.

It could be that you’re both the same age or work in the same industry. You could both have children the same age, or you may both be childless, single, divorced or married. Maybe you like the same hobbies or sports. There are any number of similarities or reasons why you could relate to this person.

Most of all, however, you can relate to their uncertainty, their pain, their struggles with cravings and urges, and all the challenges and obstacles facing someone new to recovery.

Offer to Help

Instead of saying you want to be a mentor – that may be a turnoff to some people – why not just offer to help them with a problem that they’ve identified? If they’ve opened up to the group in the smallest way about an inability to cope with financial mess or rebuilding trust with a loved one or finding a job after losing their previous one because of addiction, this may be your way in.

You could offer to help them create a resume (or polish one they already have), prepare for a job interview, do a job search using the Internet or a placement agency, or help them identify new fields, training opportunities, or other avenues to explore for employment.

When there’s one problem, there are usually many more. But the most pressing ones are the ones the newly-recovering individual needs help with the most. If you have the willingness and ability to help, this is your way to approach the individual, and one that is most likely to be accepted. If not, wait a while and perhaps approach the individual again. If he or she still is unreceptive, maybe it’s not a good fit. Look for another new member that may be able to accept your offer of assistance.

Share Your Successful Strategies

What is it that you found most helpful when you were new to recovery? Beyond the opportunity to listen to the experiences of others and to share your own when you felt able to open up, it was probably the strategies fellow group members found most effective in keeping their resolve to remain clean and sober.

Tips and techniques are always eagerly discussed among group members. What’s important to remember, however, is that what works for you may not work as well for someone else. Keep in mind that every person’s situation and life experiences are different. So, too, are the solutions that will prove most beneficial to them. The beauty of being a mentor to someone with whom you can relate is that you can offer your strategies and coping mechanisms as suggestions only. They may have worked for you for only a little while, or they may be some that you continue to utilize today. Maybe you could discuss with this person how you evolved your strategies. If you relapsed, how did you get back on track? How did you deal with insomnia, a loved one walking out, the loss of your children through a divorce, old friends who are users showing up? These are the nuts and bolts situations that those new to recovery need help with the most. No one will turn down an offer to share what worked – not if they’re reaching out for help. That’s why they come to the meetings.

Why not just share your strategies with the group at large? You could do that, of course, and probably do to some extent during the course of the meetings. But being a mentor to someone new to recovery is more personal, more in-depth. You could even meet or talk with the individual outside of the meetings. That makes the relationship more immediate and meaningful. Your opportunity to help the individual goes above and beyond the confines of the weekly 12-step meeting.

This doesn’t mean that you devote all your free time to the person. In fact, that’s not even recommended. There should be regularly-scheduled times for conversations or meetings, and nothing that infringes on either person’s life.

A Short-Term Commitment

When you decide to be a mentor to someone new to recovery, you’re not making a lifelong commitment. In essence, what you’re doing is making a short-term commitment, accepting an opportunity to assist another person to get on his or her feet, recovery-wise. The fact that you may become close friends is a bonus, and it doesn’t detract at all from the beginnings of the relationship where you serve as a mentor.

And, if that’s all the relationship is, that’s fine, too. The point is to offer assistance, freely and willingly, without looking for anything in return.

How will either of you know when the assistance is no longer required? That’s pretty easy to determine. When the person that’s new to recovery is able to remain clean and sober for 6 months or more, you can probably both consider that he or she has adapted well to recovery. Again, if you’ve become friends, then you have a different type of relationship that’s evolving. But, if the person gradually declines meetings, or you don’t have anything problematic to discuss any longer, it may be time to move on.
You could look for another person to mentor, if you’ve found the experience uplifting and gratifying. Or, you could wait until another opportunity presents itself that seems like a perfect fit.

No one said that you have to mentor. Mentoring should be something that you want to do. It isn’t something that you need to do.

Transitioning to Sponsor

Let’s say that you’ve been mentoring one or more individuals for a period of time and you’ve accumulated some pretty effective ways of helping other people deal with crises. This body of knowledge is something that you may want to do more with. One way to expand your assistance to others is to become a sponsor. As a sponsor, you’ll need to be more accessible to the person in need. It can be a little frightening and overpowering, if you let it. Generally speaking, sponsors have been clean and sober for at least 1-1/2 to 2 years before they’re ready to take on the responsibility of sponsorship.

Before you decide to go the next step, talk with your sponsor or other sponsors to get their take on what it’s been like for them. Discuss the worst situations they’ve had to deal with, and solutions for various types of crises. Role-play until you get to the point where you feel that you can handle the additional 24/7 responsibility. Remember, unlike a mentor, a sponsor needs to be available any time of the day or night to the person in need.

And, you can’t just one day decide that you’re a sponsor. Someone needs to approach you and ask you to sponsor them. If you’re not ready, you need to say so – but point them to someone who may be available and a good fit. If you think you’re ready, maybe you are.

Mentoring Helps Another to a Position of Strength

When you mentor someone new to recovery, what you’re really doing is helping them gain their footing along the path to successful recovery. When they first start out in recovery, they may be unsure, stumbling now and then or even relapsing. They need help to regain their strength, and t practice coping mechanisms they only started to learn about during treatment. Maybe they need to find a little humility to be able to ask for help from others – since trying to do recovery on their own doesn’t always meet with success.

Mentoring is a little like building a house. You don’t just start putting up the walls before you have a solid foundation. And after the walls, you need to attach the roof. Building a structure is all about taking it step-by-step, using the right tools and techniques, and keeping the ultimate goal in mind. The parallels to recovery are appropriate. Without solid support, recovery may fail. Without practice in coping skills, recovery may falter. Without encouragement, recovery may not be possible. But with solid support, coping skills and strategies for effective recovery, and ongoing encouragement from like-minded friends, recovery is more likely to be maintained.

Everyone Has Something to Give

There’s one last point about mentoring someone new to recovery. Maybe you think that you don’t have anything special to offer. You’re not a teacher, not skilled in crafts, not particularly outgoing or find it easy to make friends. Welcome to the rest of the world. Most of us are not spectacularly talented. We just get by with our particular interests and small talents or skills in this area or that. But that’s just as it should be. In fact, everyone has something to give. More than abilities and talents and skills, the capability to empathize and be willing to help is primary to being a mentor. So, never think that you may not have what it takes. You definitely do. And there are definitely those out there who are new to recovery that can benefit greatly from your willingness to put yourself out there to help.

Just Think About It

You don’t need to make a decision right now. There’s plenty of time for that. For now, just weigh and balance the idea of giving back by helping others new to recovery. Picture yourself being in the position of mentoring others. If it feels good, and it’s something that you decide you’d like to do, by all means, give it a try. Mentoring someone new to recovery may be just the right thing for you to do at this point in your own recovery. Even if you decide you’re not quite ready for that yet, it’s worth thinking about.

 I don’t know about you, but I find my iPhone to be utterly indispensable. I keep track of news throughout the day, manage my finances, and touch base with friends through chat.

Recently I became involved in developing an iPhone app to help people in recovery and I’d really love to get feedback from anyone here who has an iPhone and tries out the app.  

It’s pretty cool if I say so myself

I really thought about what I would have liked to have in early sobriety. Back then, we didn’t have the convenience of the Internet or cell phones.  These can be awesome tools in recovery – keeping you connected (keeping me from isolating).

So I thought this is what I’d want:

Reminders when I’m doing something that isn’t good for me

Easy way to keep track of my sober friends and sponsor

A way to store meetings and map them 

A way to watch my progress and see how I’m doing day by day

I didn’t think anyone needed another social networking app – I mean, I can barely keep up with Facebook, nevermind add another – but I did think that it would be nice if people could share the meetings they like with others in their area. I also thought it would be great if a sponsor could share meetings with a newcomer – while sitting right there in the meeting, instantly updating their phone will all the meetings they recommend.

I think I pretty much succeeded in getting these key elements in there, but I’d love to get feedback if you have ideas on how to make it better.

I know it will take a while for the meeting sharing to work – a lot of users have to sign up and be willing to share their meetings. But I think eventually this could be a really awesome aspect of the app.

So if you have an iPhone check it out – it’s free by the way – and let me know your thoughts!

You can read about it at http://ipromises.org and download it from there – or do it directly on your iPhone (go to Apps, search "iPromises" and it will come up as the iPromises Recovery Companion.

Hope you like it!

There are probably quite a few people here who have seen those late-night cable TV ads pawning the "cure" for addiction. The topic came up again today – someone asked me if I knews the folks who make this specious claim. Fortunately, I do not. I usually direct them to the LA Weekly story "Addiction:Buying the Cure at Passages Malibu" because I think it gives a pretty accurate perspective on this type of operation.  I particularly like this quote:

"The Prentisses are the Holocaust deniers of the addiction-recovery industry. They deny the existence of addiction. They deny the existence of alcoholism. They deny that it is a disease, or that it is incurable." (LA Weekly)

It is a lonely place to be indeed – defying all the research, science, and evidence to come up with your own miraculous cure.

But what does "cure" even mean?  I haven’t had a drink in close to 24 years. Am I cured?  Hell no.  I feel the addict in me to this day – that part that wants to fix things the easy way, and the easy way is usually not as easy as it seems. My recovery is about not letting the addict in me dictate my life and my decisions.

I don’t spend a lot of energy arguing with people who say alcoholism is not a disease – I have been doing research in this field for close to 10 years and I would be hard-pressed to changed my mind about it based on the evidence I’ve seen. However, for a lot of people these words – cure, disease – have different meanings and they get into an argument about semantics. Really, does my sobriety depend on linguistics exercises? Probably not.  I also find that people in recovery who bristle at the word "disease" tend to bristle at lots of things, and they seem to like taking the contrarian view. Bully to them if that keeps them sober.

In the end I think the damage done by this cure nonsense is that it appeals to a very specific type of addict – one who doesn’t want to believe they might actually have to "maintain" sobriety – they want the desire to just go away and never have to struggle or think about it again.  It gives them a false idea of what recovery is: an ongoing process, much of which is undoing the wreckage you’ve causes, then making sure you live your life in a way that doesn’t create a ton more of wreckage.

When I was out there drinking, my standards got pretty low.  I was happy to go home, open the bottle, drink until drunk, and fall asleep. What a life!  In sobriety, you raise the bar – you raise your standards.

I think it’s part of keeping a personal inventory to actually review my standards and see if anything needs an adjustment.  I’m not talking about standards like I only carry a Prada purse. I’m talking about standards related to how we treat others, how we allow ourselves to be treated, how we live and love.

It’s only natural in sobriety to raise your standards.  If you think of what your home environment was like when you were at the end of your drinking or drug use, it’s likely you dropped your standards to accommodate your addiction. Anything that interfered with drinking or using was a waste of time.  Maybe you took a crappy job so you wouldn’t have as much responsibility and could use only half your talents (or less). Maybe you got into lousy relationships with other addicts or abusive people because you didn’t think you deserved anything better.

How high have you raised the bar in sobriety?