Understanding Options For Aftercare Recommendations After Treatment

Hey, Cadre peeps, here we go. Chris Edrington here. We're going to go over a couple of, I think, really important points about the different kinds of level of care or next phase programs people are referred to after they leave treatment. So typically you finish your treatment experience month, three months, whatever it is, in primary residential treatment, and then your counselor or case manager or somebody in the treatment center makes a recommendation for what you should do next. For those of you who are brand new at this, that typically involves outpatient, which is essentially more treatment, but you just don't live there.

So you might go three or four times a week for three or 4 hours a day for several months, maybe six months, maybe three months, whatever, and it titrates down. You go four times, three times, two times until you're finished. It's basically more of the same context of primary treatment, but you only go during, you don't sleep there, you don't live there. Sometimes that's in the evening, so you can go immediately back to work and do the outpatient at night. A lot of times that comes along with sober living because you got to live somewhere and maybe you can't go back home.

Other parts of the recommendation will involve therapy, different kinds of therapy, like DBT and stuff like that, or certain kinds of therapists that maybe specialize in trauma. And typically, hopefully, I guess I should say maybe not typically, you're left, you're walking out of primary treatment with a recommendation, a clinical recommendation that says, we think as clinicians you need to do these things when you leave treatment. They're not necessarily continuations of what you were doing in treatment.

They're add ons, whatever, or maybe they are continuations. The point I want to make is the most important thing that you can do besides follow your clinical recommendations after treatment. I think that's always a good idea. It's a good place to start. Where are you going to do that? Where are you going to live while you do that? Are you going to go home and go to outpatient and therapy meetings? Are you going to live in the sober house, go to therapy, go to meetings, go to outpatient? Or are you going right back to work and you're going to live at home and you're going to do some of that stuff at night, on the weekends or whatever?

All of those contexts really, really matter. If you look at it like my engagement in that routine of showing up at my therapist, showing up at my outpatient, figuring out my meds and actually taking them appropriately, all of those things are big part of the medicine that you still need to take in early recovery and you've been advised to take by the professionals and you, excuse me, should take them. I think that has to go hand in hand with your access to the community. Where am I going to meet people that are in recovery?

Where am I going to find people who I can relate to that have a similar story of mine that might be really powerful influences on me that, wow, I didn't know that there were other people out there in that world that did what I did. And this is really encouraging to meet people who did exactly what I did. And they're sober and their lives are great, and holy s***, I don't have that stuff. I want to have that life. So these things are super important. You can meet those people at outpatient. You can meet those people at AA meetings.

You can't meet those people if you're sitting on your couch thinking about yourself. That doesn't happen. So really, this after care plan about after treatment should involve as many of the clinical recommendations as you were given by your counselors when you leave. But also what fills up the in between spaces is really also important. And I think the way to think of that is routine. When I get a new person, if I'm a sponsor or a new resident, what I'm really curious about is, what are you going to do with your time the next seven days?

Let's map that out. I'm going to go to my outpatient. I'm going to go to my therapy. I'm going to make sure I pick up my meds. I'm going to go to these three meetings a week. But in between all of that, I'm going to make relationships with people that I meet. You're going to meet people at meetings. You're going to have a whole nother set of friends that you met at the outpatient clinic, and you might meet, if you got a sponsor in aa, you'll then meet their friends. And so you create all these little nucleus, these little networks of people, right, that are all different, that may have never otherwise mixed.

And you get a chance to meet all of those people, somebody in that group, in those different, say, call them sort of silos. You're going to meet the best friends of your life that are going to change your life in recovery. They are going to change how you see this whole thing. So I think it's really, really crucial to talk to somebody about what is the prescribed routine. What do I. What am I, what am I advised to do? And then how can somebody help me to enhance that and fill in the gaps? So if we have like, say, just got a question on here, how can we turn on?

Okay, so I think the, I think the question is about living in a sober house and what are the parameters and what does the routine look like? Most sober house managers or the way that the house is run are not going to change the sort of the aftercare plan that you were given by your counselor when you left treatment. They're not going to alter it. They're going to give you a place to live and they're going to give you support while you're there. I think it's really crucial to understand those differences.

So if it's, say, your son or your daughter and it's the first time and the counselor is saying, we want them to do this, this, this and this, and then suddenly you think, well, that means you can't work, right? That means you can't really come home for Christmas because it's a full schedule. Those things are realities that you need to understand before you leave treatment, that your schedule is going to really be full of stuff that you need to be doing for your recovery and that you need to do it.

I mean, this is really how you build the foundation in recovery. So I wouldn't overthink the recommendations. Some of the counselors at treatment are going to recommend a certain kind of outpatient. Maybe it's a more of a mental health outpatient. More of it. They have some specialized opioid addict outpatients now. They might give you special recommendations for a certain type of therapy. And you can go on to the, I think it's psychology today and different websites for therapists. It will list whether they have specialization in addiction and stuff.

You can find all kinds of options there once you've gotten a hold of that routine. This is my therapist. These are my friends, these are my meetings. It's really important to nail those down and say, these are the three meetings I go to one of them, you should never miss two of them. You should always be able to sort of go to different ones if you feel like it, if you just want to have a little bit of variety. But the consistency in showing up for that routine. I went to my meetings, I went to my outpatient, I showed up at my job.

I did my chore at the sober house. My routine feels like I'm in it. I'm doing it because you're not going to get the feedback from the routine unless you do it right. You can't come and complain about, I don't feel more sober. I don't feel more stable if you're just sitting at the house doing nothing because nothing comes from nothing. So if you get out there and build that initial routine, and then here's the key. You have a sponsor and a therapist in this process where you're talking about what it feels like to do these things and then you can tweak them, then you can say, yeah, this isn't really, this meeting's not really serving me.

I don't think this outpatient's great. I want to switch to another one. So do it and switch into a different one. But you have to do those things to get the back to the feedback, to have anything to use to assess your progress. You can't just, I don't feel better. I don't feel different. You got to do the stuff so it really matters. And you about showing up in early sobriety, like show up for the medicine, so to speak. When you get to a certain point where you want to make some shifts, great, different job, different meetings, different sponsor, even if you want, but keep those things that were working for you, because what's going to happen very quickly is your life is going to get bigger and more people are going to come into it, more opportunities, different jobs.

You're going to start sponsoring people. You might move and go to different meetings. It's difficult to rebuild the routine like that very quickly. And I think that get good at doing this routine so that you can duplicate it anywhere in case you move. Figure out how to navigate the sober community and where the pockets of love and medicine are in the community, so to speak. And then you can do that in any community. One of my favorite things to do when I'm traveling is just pick a random AA meeting.

It doesn't matter what kind of AA meeting it is. Big book study, speaker meeting, who cares? And just show up. You never know who you're going to see or what you're going to run into and sit in the back and listen and, you know, if you want to talk, talk. But it's such a cool thing to sit in a room with people you never met. And, you know, you have this common thread that runs through you about this thing is working for me and that's why I'm here, because really, you're sitting in a room with people who want to get better.

They want to get sober. That's who's living in sober houses for the most part. That's who's in meetings for the most part are people who want it. In treatment, there's a giant percentage of the people who do not want to be there, and let's be honest about that. And I think that positive energy of the people who are seeking it is infectious and really important. I needed those people that I was around in early recovery that wanted it. I borrowed their enthusiasm, I borrowed their confidence. I lived off of their momentum because I didn't have it and I didn't even know how to get it.

So I just followed them around, and slowly but surely, we all got better. So if you're a mom or a dad and you're planning this stuff for your kid, it's really, really helpful to reach out to somebody and get some education about what the different options are. If it's you and you're on your own and you got to pick all this stuff by yourself, find somebody that you know with five years or so of sobriety and call them up and ask them a bunch of questions about how the community thing works. Because the outpatient will run out.

It will be over in less than six months. The therapy might change, and pretty soon you're just in your sober life, and you're just doing your life, not using. And that's the point. We want. We want you to get to where this is about having a life and not about not using. We want you to engage in the world just like everybody else. So it comes quickly, and pretty soon you got a year or two in sobriety, and, man, it's just life. And you got a lot of stuff to figure out. And this will help set you up for that.

Build you a foundation where you can. It's rocket fuel. That's what it is. Building a foundation like this will fuel your life for the next however many years and stay sober and go have a great life. Because remember, it ain't about not using. It's about having a life. Go get one.