When you decide to enter a professional alcohol and drug treatment program, you will begin a journey through four distinct stages of rehab recovery as you learn to develop a clean and sober lifestyle.
The four stages of rehab described here - treatment initiation, early abstinence, maintaining abstinence and advanced recovery - were developed by the National Institute on Drug Abuse for its "Principles of Drug Addiction Treatment: A Research Based Guide" resource for healthcare providers.
In this model, recovery is a lifelong process.
Treatment Initiation
When you reach out for help from a professional alcohol and drug rehab program, you begin the first stage of your recovery, treatment initiation. Whether you seek help voluntarily or are forced by circumstances to enter rehab, your recovery process will begin with you initiating professional treatment.In the early hours and days of your rehab you probably will have some ambivalent feelings about giving up your drug of choice permanently and you may think that your substance abuse problem is not as bad as others. Beware. Ambivalence and denial can be your worse enemies in the first days of your recovery.
Early Abstinence
Once you have made a commitment to continue treatment for your substance abuse problem, you will enter the second stage of rehab known as early abstinence. This can be the toughest stage to cope with because of many factors, including continued withdrawal symptoms, physical cravings, psychological dependence and a host of triggers that can tempt you into a relapse.It is during this early abstinence stage that your trained addiction counselor will begin to teach you the coping skills that you need to begin to lead a sober lifestyle. The tools that you learn to use now will help you throughout your recovery.
Maintaining Abstinence
After approximately 90 days of continual abstinence, you will move from the early abstinence stage of recovery to the third stage, maintaining abstinence. If you started in a residential treatment program, you will now move to the continuing or follow-up counseling phase of your rehab program on an outpatient basis.One focus of this stage of rehab is obviously to maintain abstinence by avoiding a relapse. You will learn the warning signs and the steps that can lead up to a relapse.
