In addiction therapy, a “relapse” pertains to a reoccurrence of the addictive attitude after trying to recover. It is beneficial to address relapse during recovery actions specifically. Statistically speaking, most people making a healing effort will encounter relapse at some point. Without improvement preparation, cravings will necessarily lead to relapse. When a relapse happens, feelings of guilt and self-blame may only deteriorate the situation.
Relapse Prevention Therapy is a category of cognitive-behavioral therapy. RPT intends to prevent or limit relapses by enabling the therapy participant to predict circumstances that are likely to elicit a relapse. You can formulate strategies to cope with these high-risk circumstances in advance. This is termed a relapse prevention strategy. For example, therapy participants understand that distinct feelings are extensive triggers for relapse. Relapse prevention therapy educates therapy participants to be awakened to these categories of feelings and to have a strategy of action for coping with them.
Other situations that trigger relapse are environmental signals that provoke cravings. This might comprise people, places, or aspects correlated with the pleasurable emotions of addictive behavior. For example, some people who inoculate drugs discover the sight of blood can accelerate influential cravings. So can a flu vaccination or regular blood test. Relapse prevention therapy enables participants to specify possible environmental signals that might provoke craving. Then, they formulate a strategy for coping with these signals.
Relapse prevention treatment also educates participants to place relapse into an adequate perspective. When a recouping person has a relapse, they often interpret this as a letdown. A person can think that such a “failure” indicates their incapacity to recover. Of course, if someone thinks they are incapable of recovery, there is no point in trying. Established on this false conclusion, the recovering individual sees no choice but to return to their dependence in earnest.
RPT seeks to deter this misinterpretation by representing relapses as prolapses. In other phrases, relapses are reinterpreted as chances for improving and learning coping skills. This viewpoint serves to maintain relapses as time-limited and innocuous as possible.
Relapse Prevention Strategies include:
- Building understanding around the probable negative effects of experiencing high-risk problems and feelings that associate substance use with reasonable outcomes (i.e., it challenges favorable longings surrounding substance use).
- Assisting the patient to improve and expand their repertoire of coping abilities that address particular high-risk situations for relapse, whether those circumstances lead to drug use-related thoughts, emotions, or bodily impressions.
- Skills range from strategies to express with others when in a difficult situation to “urge surfing,” a procedure to help people cope with the intense cravings to consume the substance that arises during cravings.
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