This blog post is from Ocean Breeze Recovery, a resource that I am happy to partner with. Check them out.  https://oceanbreezerecovery.org/

When addiction strikes, to those that know, it soon becomes a battle, a fight to stay sober. The mind becomes a barren wasteland, where the damages from the battle can be seen. Each lost battle leaves behind with it another scar, sometimes in our own minds, other times as a physical presence.

In the time during the battle against addiction, the light at the end of the tunnel can seem obscure and unattainable as the path gets longer and arduous. But given the fight and the path to get there, it takes just one look online to see the millions of success stories already floating about. Living a life after recovery and into sobriety is not only attainable, but it is within our very grasp.

One needs to only look around several different online forums to know that there are plenty others out there having similar struggles. As always, it depends largely on the individual but the possibility is always there. Sometimes it might even be better to have a sort of guide through the process. Stepping outside the trenches of addiction requires work, perseverance, and mostly resiliency. It is hardly an easy path, but if taken in moderate doses, we can always reach it together.

As is the case with most issues that arise in life, to get to the under bearing of the problem in question, one needs to first understand what the problem is and how best to deal with it. All to often are there cases of individuals not truly understanding where to go after encountering and treating addiction which eventually leads them to dead ends and failures.

Getting Your Bearings

Once the step out of either rehab or treatment is taken, living a life of sobriety can seem easy at first. Too many times, whether with someone we know or even ourselves, we’ve seen those who traverse through treatment and at the very end, believe that all the hard work was behind them.

Sometimes these people believe that since treatment was over, every step forward is going to be easy and effortless. Unfortunately, in reality the facts show us that the opposite is true.

Once treatment or rehab is completed, the time immediately after becomes a sort of moment of truth for many addicts. Too many times addicts fall victims to their addictions because they falsely believed the hardship was over. Life after treatment must be treated with care just as when one begins treatment. Staying sober after treatment typically remains easy after the first month or two. However, it’s in the time after the initial completion of treatment where the danger really begins to set in. Along with complacency on the part of the addict, comes the all too common deluded vision of the future they mark for themselves.

On around the first two months after treatment or rehab, the realizations about the world once lived in typically begins to settle in. Seeing old friends and the old life one used to live sometimes sparks moods and feelings inside even the strongest of us that’ll urge us back to familiarity. Living in sobriety can sometimes seem that we have stepped outside our life and into a completely different life altogether. It’s also in living with sobriety that we begin to realize how fragile we actually are and how quickly we can fall into the grip of addiction. Living in sobriety means that those cravings and urges never truly get the best of us, but instead live on the horizon of our temptations.

Sobriety and a New Life

Once finally living the life we wanted for ourselves in sobriety begins, it automatically means we turn our back onto to the life from our past. Living a life in sobriety means that we have taken a completely new direction in our lives, which inevitably means that we must detach ourselves from the life before and face our new path we laid for ourselves.

Life in sobriety is a new life taint with reminders of a past. A past we know and decided to leave behind to which we must absolutely come to understand and ultimately accept. Even with the reminders of the past, this new life sobriety has given, is one that studies have shown, actually gets easier with age. The more one remains sober, the more likely they are to remain sober. Although this sounds backwards, the facts remain.

In addition to living a new life in sobriety, is another fact to remember.

Understanding Sobriety

Whether we’re on the path of sobriety or on our way there, understanding what sobriety even means is extremely important. By the word’s very nature, sobriety can be interpreted differently by several different people. It could mean a complete abstinence from all substances, or just a specific few. It can mean the controlling of all substances, or just a few. The key to finding out what the word actually means is to find out what type of person is saying it.

If we were to get started with the largest and most dominating addiction in the world, alcohol will most undoubtedly top the charts. Because of the aggressive nature of alcohol addiction, to remain sober to it, requires an absolute abstinence from it. Alcohol is one of those substances that once kicked, must not be engaged in again. Again, due to its aggressive nature it cannot be dabbled in again ever once kicked. The data alone says that the odds of an alcoholic falling victim once again to alcoholism after having dropped the addiction, if even simply tried, raises the odds nearly ten fold.

Of those who consume alcohol after being treated for alcoholism and relapse, it remains one of the highest likelihoods to lead to death due to alcohol withdrawal.

Living Life Sober

After getting acquainted and understudying the challenges of the life ahead of us, living life sober can be so much more than just life. In fact, those going through the process of recovery successfully, have shown to have happier and higher standard of living relative to those who actually never even battle addiction in the first place.

Also, another very common occurrence with those who live in sobriety is the picking up of several new hobbies. In living life sober, time free time tends to be one of the most expressed feelings to those polled. It seems that without addiction and remaining sober, individuals have much more time to conduct hobbies they’ve always wanted to, or even try things they probably never would have in the first place.