Real life is a part of life after drug or alcohol rehab. As a recovering drug addict, you’ve probably being working hard to get back to everyday living. Sometimes, you may wonder what you get in return for your frustration. Don’t worry, this feeling is normal. You may face some challenges, but getting through them is what will make your real life worth living in the weeks, months and years following alcohol or drug rehab.

Develop Healthy Routines

Your daily routines may seem boring and tedious at first. But as you get used to them, they will become your best friends. You can rely on them because you know what to expect. Even the little routines give your day a sort of gentle rhythm and security.

You’re going to have ups and downs each day. Some days or weeks will be better than others, but your routines carry you forward. They are the steady bedrock of your day.

Face Your Fantasy World

We all have a fantasy world we’d like to escape to. You wake up to a spotless home each morning. Supper is always made and your children are well-behaved. Your bank account is strong and you have a youthful glow about you every day.

Well, you may hit a few of those once in a while, but probably not all the time. If you spend a lot of time getting caught up in your “if only” fantasy you might have trouble facing the best parts of your actual real life.

You might be sweaty and ache all over, but you get to appreciate the splendor of finishing up a personal project. Maybe you planted a garden patch, fixed a crooked door, or bake a tasty dessert. You have that personal joy for yourself and to share with others. The deep satisfaction that comes from this experience is yours for the taking in real life, and much better than any fantasy in the long run.

Ease Into Real Life Again

You may have been able to juggle a lot before you entered rehab. Don’t fall into that trap now. You can do your multi-tasking later on. Now is the time to establish your foundation. You need to focus on keeping your stress levels manageable. And to do that, you need to keep things realistic and consistent.

Go to support meeting, get rest, eat well, get a little exercise, get a little social time, and go to work (if you work). Do the basics well for a while, and then you can start taking on more challenges.

Getting Back To Real Life After Rehab Treatment

It’s time to get back into real life. You can stay sober and start getting your life back one day at a time. Drug treatment and alcohol rehab are great for starting your sobriety. But at some point, you have to live well on your own. Remember to get some good routines going, beware of your escape fantasies, and take it easy on yourself.

Coping skills are essential for a woman in addiction recovery. Life is full of change and adjustment, and a good set of coping skills can keep you on track through it all. Here’s another set of critical skills you need to stay sober during recovery.

Keep Your Body and Mind Healthy

When your body doesn’t feel good, it’s tough for your mood to stay up. Bad sleep, a poor diet, and lots of stress can make you feel really run down. When this happens, you tend to feel irritable and impatient. This process can snowball if you don’t make some changes. You can easily start seeking the quick-fix comfort of drugs and alcohol when you feel like this.

Don’t set yourself up for relapse with unhealthy habits. Create a realistic daily schedule that allows for plenty of sleep. Make healthy food choices and get the junk food out of your house. If you need help figuring out your diet, call your drug rehab center, your doctor, or a friend who can teach you to cook. Make time every day for physical exercise. Exercise will help you feel stronger, boost your mood, and help your sleep.

Update Your Recovery Plan As Your Life Changes

Recovery plans are only good if they still make sense in your daily life. You are not going to be the same person between day one of your recovery and day 365. You’ll change one way or another, and your recovery plan needs to change with you.

As time passes, you may need more, less, or simply different kinds of support. When you update your recovery plan on a regular basis, you make sure your sobriety is always in forward motion.

Stay Connected With Other Women in Recovery

When you are in addiction recovery, a build-up of emotional distress can feel overwhelming. Women in recovery tend to isolate themselves when they are feeling an overload. Fear and uncertainty don’t have to shut you down. Resist the urge to hide from the world. Call just one person you trust to pull you out of it.

Get with your network of sober women and get the natural mood lift you need. These ladies have all had struggles during their recovery, and they will help you through yours. Someday, you’ll be the one who helps another woman through her tough times. Women in recovery are each other’s best supporters.

Getting Through Addiction Recovery

You can make it through the ups and down of addiction recovery. Keep yourself healthy, update your recovery plan, and always stay connected with other women in recovery. These essential coping skills can make the difference between relapse and sobriety.

Too often, alcohol and sex go hand in hand, whether you’re a college student on spring break or a professional woman having wine on a dinner date. Unfortunately, when alcohol addiction or alcoholism is in the equation, sex can take a morbid turn for both men and women. Diseases, unwanted pregnancies, planned pregnancies that end in miscarriage and the inability to get pregnant if you are trying are among the issues that women face when they struggle with alcoholism without treatment at an alcohol rehab facility.

Alcohol Addiction, Sex and Disease

You first heard it in grade school and afterschool specials: women who drink are more likely to have sex and regret it later than those who remain sober. Women who are addicted to alcohol are more likely than others to contract sexually transmitted diseases like Chlamydia, HPV, Hepatitis C, gonorrhea, and HIV. They are also more likely to experience unplanned pregnancies and those pregnancies, even if planned, can go dangerously awry if active alcoholism continues without treatment.

All of the sexually transmitted diseases listed above cannot only be life changing, they can all be passed to another partner before you even know you have it. Some of them are deadly; there is no cure for Hepatitis C or HIV at this time. Though it may seem easy enough to use protection, the fact is that when alcohol is a part of the equation, preventative measures are too often forgotten.

Alcoholism and Fertility

Unlike men, women don’t suffer as many reproductive issues while under the influence or actively an alcoholic. Women who are naturally reproductively challenged may have difficulties implanting a healthy pregnancy if they drink heavily and many have miscarriages early on if they drink a substantial amount on a daily basis, but in general, men will find that they are the ones who suffer from the greatest fertility issues due to alcoholism: reduced sperm count, reduced circulating testosterone, lower motility of remaining sperm and the chance of irreversible damage without abstinence attained through an evidence-based alcohol rehab program.

However, alcoholic women are more likely to be unhealthy in general and therefore may find their fertility challenged as a result.

Alcoholism, Alcohol Rehab and Pregnancy

A woman’s pregnancy is greatly affected by the amount of alcohol she drinks, especially if she is physically addicted and regularly abusing the drug. Miscarriage is the first risk: women in their first two trimesters who continue to drink heavily will experience a greater risk of losing the baby. Children who survive the pregnancy of an alcoholic mother will have a low birth weight and may have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and be developmentally disabled both physically and mentally. Mothers who continue to drink heavily after their children’s birth and are unable to care for them as a result may have their children taken away from them.

Alcohol rehab is the only way to safely abstain from drinking, especially during a critical period like a pregnancy. At an alcohol addiction treatment center focused on women and their needs, you will find the resources necessary to not only stop drinking but remain clean and sober after you return home. Get more information about alcohol rehab for women today at The Orchid.

When you drink, the liver is the organ most involved in processing the substance. As a result, women who suffer from alcoholism or alcohol abuse tend to have liver problems in addition to addiction issues when they head to alcohol rehab. In some cases, liver disease is the wake-up call that lets alcoholic women know that their problem is serious enough to warrant alcohol addiction treatment.

Alcoholism and the Woman’s Liver

Physiologically, women tend to suffer the physical effects of alcoholism more quickly than do men. Even drinking less alcohol per pound of body weight than their male counterparts, women also more quickly develop alcoholism or alcohol addiction and the related health disorders like liver inflammation and liver disease.

Alcoholic Hepatitis

If you drink eight servings of beer (about 12 ounces) or the equivalent number of servings of wine and/ or liquor every day for eight months to a year, you will develop alcoholic hepatitis. Alcoholic hepatitis is an inflammation of the liver. Should you stop drinking immediately, you have a chance of reversing the condition or “clearing it” so that you no longer suffer the effects. Continue drinking at the same rate and you will develop cirrhosis of the liver.

Cirrhosis of the Liver

Cirrhosis of the liver is the second stage of liver problems for an alcoholic. When this issue develops, liver tissue is replaced with scar tissue, inhibiting the organ from processing anything effectively, including alcohol. Since alcohol is a toxin, this means that these toxins are not completely filtered out of the body and instead remain in the system, causing more damage.

Cirrhosis of the liver is deadly. It is one of the most common causes of death in the United States. The only way to survive it is to stop drinking completely and immediately and even then, a sustained recovery is not guaranteed: only about 67 percent of those with a diagnosis of cirrhosis of the liver will survive if they stop drinking. The rest develop liver disease and die as a result of the condition or a complication.

Diagnosing Alcohol Related Liver Inflammation, Cirrhosis of the Liver and Liver Disease

There are a few tests that doctor’s provide in order to give you a definitive diagnosis of liver related health problems. It starts with a basic examination and blood work followed by a needle biopsy of the liver. In general, though, it’s a clear path: alcoholism leads to liver failure and women, especially, should be concerned about the developments of liver inflammation and cirrhosis sooner rather than later.

Alcohol Treatment for Women

If you are a woman and you drink half a dozen alcoholic beverages or more per day, see your physician immediately for more information about liver disease and prevention. The best way to ensure that you don’t develop a full blown liver condition is to stop drinking, and the only effective way to do that is to enroll in an alcohol rehab like the program provided for women and by women at The Orchid. Call today for more information.

You know all you need to know about staying sober, and really - those people at meetings annoy you.  You don’t really need to keep going to those anymore since you’ve got it handled.  And why should you stop seeing your old friends?  They know you can handle it when they drink in front of you.  Your drinking wasn’t that much of a problem in the first place.  You could probably even drink one or two and it wouldn’t make any difference.  You know who that is in your mind speaking to you?  Arrogance, and he doesn’t care a bit about your sobriety.

Arrogance Doesn’t Care About You

You may not think you are arrogant about your drinking.  You’re smart, you have made some changes already - you just wish people would stop treating you like you are some kind of dimwit.  Well, stop and think about that for a moment.  When you tell a preteen to start cleaning their room and they yell, “I know!” with a mad look on their face, then they really didn’t know.  They just didn’t want to look like they caught off guard not doing what they were supposed to (which is keeping their room decent on an every day basis).

Arrogance Is A Personal Defense With Addiction

Arrogance is a common defense mechanism for someone who’s annoyed at being  expected to do something they don’t want to do (because it’s hard, boring, requires consistent effort).  That preteen is scoffing at authority, believing that they really know what’s their priorities are.  They would rather text their friends, loaf on the couch, and stay out late instead of doing family chores, keeping their room decent, and coming home on time.

That may not be a perfect analogy, but it does illustrate how arrogance is just an attitude.  Anyone can have arrogance about anything, even sobriety. When you haven’t been to a meeting or seen your sponsor for a long time, you might have some arrogance.  When you skipped your aftercare because you already “got everything” you needed from your alcohol or drug treatment, you might have some arrogance.  When you start convincing yourself that you may not even be an alcoholic, you might have some arrogance.  That arrogance can blind you so much that you feel “surprised” when you relapse and find yourself in another hole.  And that’s precisely what you want to avoid, why arrogance can lead you right down a path to relapse.

Let Go Of Arrogance Get Back On Track With Sobriety

You really may not want to admit that you really do need help staying sober.  Nobody really likes to realize that they don’t have much control over something within themselves.  That can be a scary thought.  But when you can face that thought with honesty and take the next step to get help, you can get through it.  Maybe you need to go back to an alcohol treatment aftercare session.  Perhaps you need to see your alcohol treatment counselor for a few individual sessions so you can get a clear vision for your sobriety again.  Reach out, get back on track, and let some of the arrogance go.

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