The Action Stage and Seeking Treatment For Addiction
At the action stage, the focus is on change, using the tools that the person has at their disposal. While the action stage can be stressful, proper attention at the preparation stage will make it a lot more bearable. For most people, the action stage is where they enter the detox or rehab center. These centers have trained professionals that will guide the patient on their road to recovery and give them the necessary support to overcome their addiction.
If a person isn’t inclined to quit altogether, the action stage focuses on helping them manage their behavior and cut down on the things that may impact their lives. In such cases, a person might look at alternative stress control methods.
The action stage doesn’t necessarily need to happen in one massive step. It’s more common for a person dealing with addiction to have the action stage happen in small, gradual phases. Depending on the depth of planning in the preparation stage, these steps can feel immense, giving the recovering person more impetus to complete their treatment.
Identifying and focusing on different, healthier ways of coping with stress is ideal for facing the action stage. Replacing undesirable behaviors with desirable ones is the most viable route to take to overcome addiction.
Maintenance Stage: How To Maintain Your Recovery
Maintenance is, as it says, a way of maintaining the change instituted in the action stage. The preparation stage sets the stage for the maintenance stage, as the recovering person has a solid set of goals that they want to accomplish. They will uphold the behaviors they developed during the action stage, typically reducing their intake of the addictive substance as much as possible. The maintenance stage may be one of the longest stages to go through, and it’s common for individuals to lose their drive to continue after some time.
Steady, constant progress is easy to see in the previous stages, but there’s less feedback that the process is working at this stage. At this stage, complacency sets in, making it even more challenging to continue.
Another element that impacts the maintenance stage is when the stresses of life catch up to a recovering person. When this happens, a person might slip and fall back into the old coping habits they’ve developed, causing their addictive behavior to retake hold. One of the methods that we use at Pathfinders helps by replacing the coping mechanism with different behavior. Alternative strategies can be crucial in keeping sober during the protracted maintenance stage.
The Relapse Stage: Relapse Prevention Best Practices
While the relapse stage is included in the transtheoretical model, some professionals prefer to leave it out. However, in doing so, the professional denies that a person might not be successful in their recovery the first time around. Recovery is filled with many small slips, and one of them shouldn’t mean the end of all the stages that went before it.
Maintenance is the goal, but this can sometimes be difficult to achieve since addictive behavior is hard to change. Recovery is different for everyone, but knowing what to do to prevent or recover from relapse is as essential to the model as any other stage mentioned. There’s no guaranteed way to avoid relapse, but the best way to deal with it is to accept that we all make mistakes. These mistakes are just a chance to refocus and recondition yourself on the road to recovery.
Pathfinders Recovery For Clients In Every Stage Of Addiction
Pathfinders Recovery Center is dedicated to seeing our clients succeed in their recovery goals. With a professional staff, a courteous environment, and individual focus on each of our patients, we believe in offering you the best in care. No matter which stage of change you’re in, we’re open to helping you. Give us a call today to plan out how to get from your current stage to the next one. We’ll be waiting to hear from you!