What Happens After Codeine Addiction Treatment?
After codeine addiction treatment, a person has many decisions to make about where they will live, if they will seek aftercare, and what changes they need to make to their lives in order to continue the work done in rehab.
Codeine Addiction Aftercare
Depending on your needs, you may decide that you wish to attend some sort of aftercare following your codeine addiction treatment. This can be a good way to take care of yourself, especially if you are not fully able to go back into your old life yet. If you do not have a strong support system, you may also choose to attend an aftercare program.
Some of the possibilities for aftercare are:
- A halfway house
- A sober living facility
- A support group or mutual-help group
One form of codeine addiction aftercare is group therapy.
According to the NLM, the biggest complication for opiate addiction treatment “is return to drug use.” Because relapse is so common and patients have not become accustomed to their much lower tolerances, “most opiate overdose deaths occur in people who have just withdrawn or detoxed.”
If you believe you might be leaving codeine treatment still in danger of relapse or at least without a strong support system, you could consider some sort of aftercare. Even if you do have a safe place to go and are able to stay with friends and family, you may want to attend a support group where you can talk to people who have been through similar situations, helping you feel less alone.
Codeine Addiction: Making Changes
According to the NIDA, “Research in the science of addiction and the treatment of substance use disorders has led to the development of evidence-based interventions that help people stop abusing drugs and resume productive lives.” After treatment, you will need to make many of the changes in your life which you would have likely discussed in your therapy sessions.
Obviously, the first step is making sure that there is no codeine or other opioid drug available to you in your home. You can call a friend before leaving treatment to arrange this. For some people, not many other changes will need to be made. However, most people have to make bigger changes to their former lives, as addictions can touch every part of your life and cause many things to become triggers for relapse.
Some people may need to cut friends out of their lives who are not supporters of their recovery. Also if you used to abuse codeine with someone and seeing that person makes you think about the drug, you should probably avoid them too. It is not your fault and you need to do what is best for you at this time.
Other changes people make after treatment commonly revolve around:
- Ways of having fun or spending leisure time
- Places they go or things they do which were once involved in their codeine abuse
- How they cope with stress instead of abusing codeine
- How they manage their issues caused by codeine abuse
After treatment, successful patients still don’t immediately go back to their old lives. Relapse can happen and it does not mean that the treatment has failed, but “treatment of chronic diseases involves changing deeply imbedded behaviors” which will be a large part of your new life after codeine addiction treatment.