During drug and alcohol treatment, you will learn many tools. One of the most important is emotional resilience. Emotional resilience helps you strengthen your emotional responses to difficult or challenging situations. With the right tools and regular practices, you can cultivate this resilience, growing it like a muscle.
What is Resilience?
Resilience represents your ability to deal with difficult situations and challenges.
- Physical Resilience: This can be physical resilience, where you have a healthy body that’s able to withstand attacks from viruses and bacteria
- Emotional Resilience: This can be emotional resilience, where you have a healthy mind that is strong enough to withstand challenges, stress, and triggers
Cultivating resilience works very similarly to cultivating muscle strength. Physical resilience requires regular work to develop physical strength, balance, and coordination.
You also have to do regular work to develop your emotional resilience so that you are in good emotional health and are not overwhelmed or overcome by unexpected stresses and challenges in your life.
Why is Resilience Important During Relapse?
So why is cultivating resilience so important for people in recovery?
The first thirty days of your recovery are considered the hardest, and these will be times when you have to endure physical and emotional stress, strain, feelings of isolation, heightened depression or anxiety from your withdrawal, and other difficult situations.
Beyond the first thirty days, when you finish your treatment program, you will still have to deal with unexpected and new challenges or stress when transitioning back to your daily life. This might mean:
- Trying to find new friends instead of the old ones with whom you used to get high
- Moving into a new sober living facility
- Starting a new job
- Dealing with all of the pressures of rebuilding a new life after addiction
These different stages of recovery will invariably come with unexpected stress and triggers.
When you cultivate resilience, the stress or trigger that might have otherwise caused a relapse will not have as profound an emotional impact and, therefore, will not necessarily cause the same negative behaviors.
Cultivating Resilience for Recovery
So, how can you cultivate resilience in preparation for recovery?
Cognitive Distance
“I notice I’m having the thought…”
One way that you can build emotional resilience is to put distance between yourself and your immediate emotions.
When something triggers an emotional response like fear, anxiety, depression, or anger, that emotion only lasts a few seconds unless you feed it.
You don’t want to try to ignore your emotions or hide them away, but you don’t want to let them take complete control and overwhelm you.
One way to cultivate resilience for recovery is to put cognitive distance between yourself and your emotions. Instead of reacting to a notification that you didn’t get the new job you wanted with things like depression and an overwhelming fear about whether or not you will ever get a job, you say to yourself or think to yourself, “I notice I am having the thought that this is depressing, and I am fearful about getting a job in the future.”
Putting that phrase at the start distances you from the emotion, allowing you to process it in a healthy way instead of letting it overwhelm you.
Mindful Meditation
Meditation is another way to build resilience. Mindful meditation allows you to set time aside to sit with your emotions instead of trying to eat them away, drink them away, or numb them out with other activities.
As mentioned, you need to be aware of how you feel and how different stresses or events in life impact your feelings, but you don’t want to let them take complete control.
With mindful meditation, you can follow a guided meditation while you sit and acknowledge:
- How you feel
- Where in the body you feel things, like tension in the jaw or tightness across the chest
You can practice breathing exercises that allow you to release the physical tension brought about by emotional distress without completely ignoring your emotions.
CBT Exercises
Cognitive behavioral therapy exercises can go a long way toward helping to build emotional resilience as well.
There are many exercises you might practice in group or individual therapy, where you take a moment to sit with your emotions and build a plan of action for dealing with the issues causing those emotions.
This process starts with defining whether or not you can do anything about it. If you can, break down the steps for what you need to do next. If you can’t, let go of that emotion, knowing that it is outside of your control.
Getting Help at Casa Serena
When you participate in our women’s partial hospitalization program, our team will work with you during your individual and group therapy sessions to help expose you to tools for cultivating your emotional resilience regularly.
At Casa Serena, we provide a women’s only treatment center offering services for women by women. Women are at a higher risk of suffering certain traumas and emotional abuse, and cultivating resilience helps those women to process those traumas and develop stronger emotional states that protect them against future risks.
We aim to help all women in our programs cultivate the resilience they need to prevent relapse when things unexpectedly become challenging or stressful. You cannot control your exposure to stress or negative things, but you can control how you respond to them.
Reach out to our team today to start your rehab program, cultivating resilience for recovery.
