Aftercare: What Happens After Rehab?

There’s plenty of information available to help you find addiction treatment services, but what happens after you graduate from a drug or alcohol rehab program? You probably have a lot of questions about post-rehab life, including how you’re supposed to manage those first few days after leaving inpatient rehab and where to turn for support once you’re outside the safety of a treatment facility.

Life will certainly look and feel a lot different than it did when you were actively using drugs or alcohol, but with a solid aftercare plan in place, you’ll be able to successfully navigate your new world.

Continuing Your Recovery With an Aftercare Plan

After you complete a treatment program, the work isn’t done. In fact, the truth of the matter is that your real work begins after leaving rehab. Look at it this way; when you have a chronic medical condition, you have to continue monitoring your condition and attending to your overall health, right? Your recovery is no different.

Examples of a typical aftercare plan might include:

Working with a therapist during weekly counseling sessions
Attending forms of group therapy
Seeing a doctor or a clinic that specializes in addiction treatment
Going to a provider for injections of a medication to block the effects of addictive substances
Participating in holistic therapies (like biofeedback therapy) to help reduce stress and potential triggers

For aftercare plans to be successful, sometimes you might have to try a number of different therapies to find the ones that work best for you. Be sure to have patience with yourself and with the process.

Peer Support

After you complete a rehab program, you’ll be encouraged to participate in a 12-step group or an alternative recovery support group. These groups are where you’ll find a wealth of support from peers who have been in your situation. They can offer valuable life experience and recovery advice.

Your support group might be made up of friends, family members, sponsors, or a group of people you stay in touch with from inpatient rehab. And these are the people you’ll be able to lean on when life – and recovery – get stressful. Having peer support is an essential component of successful recovery.

Creating a New Routine Post-Rehab

While you were in rehab, you learned a lot of your old habits weren’t healthy – and you learned some of them were downright harmful to a life in recovery. If you fall back into those old habits of neglecting your health and your wellbeing, you can’t possibly be expected to maintain your sobriety.

A successful aftercare plan could include the following:

Eating balanced, nutritious meals
Exercising regularly
Getting adequate sleep
Practicing your favorite hobbies
Spending time with family and friends
Attending treatment sessions and recovery groups
Practicing self-care and stress management

Sobriety Milestones in Aftercare

After completing a rehab program and achieving certain amounts of time in recovery (known as recovery milestones), you’ll likely to experience the following:

30 Days

In the first 30 days after completing a rehab program:

Go to a few different types of support group meetings and get a feel for their process to help you decide which meetings would benefit you most.
Connect with at least one person that you know you can call if you ever feel triggered to use drugs or alcohol.
Every day, perform some kind of physical activity like walking, swimming, jogging, or yoga. Physical activity is a great way to increase the endorphins produced in your brain and improve overall health.

90 Days

By the time you’ve achieved 90 days of recovery:

Keep a daily journal to monitor your recovery process. Write down things that make recovery difficult for you, and highlight the things you did in order to overcome those problems and avoid relapse.
Continue meeting with your therapist or counselor and talk about setting some new recovery goals now that you have a stable footing in sobriety.

6 Months

Once you’ve achieved half a year of recovery:

Begin working on making amends and repairing the friendships and relationships that were damaged by addiction.
Start developing a plan to repair financial issues that were created by addiction. You might want to consider meeting with a financial advisor to establish health spending and saving habits.
If you’re having issues obtaining employment, consider attending local career fairs. They’re a great place to network with local employers or learn more about better employment opportunities.

1 Year

After a full year of recovery:

Consider public speaking engagements where you can share your personal story of recovery with people who are either struggling with addiction or just entering treatment.
With your recovery on solid ground, now you might want to sit down and write up a new set of long-term goals or even a five-year plan. Set goals for where you want to be in the future, and be sure to include both personal and professional goals.
Seek out ways you can keep yourself motivated to learn new skills and solidify your recovery. If you’ve always been interested in painting or music, consider taking classes to learn these skills. Broadening your horizons with healthy new skills is a great way to increase your self-worth.

Alumni Programs in Recovery

You might have completed an addiction treatment program, but that doesn’t mean your relationship with the facility has to end. This is where alumni programs come into play.

Alumni programs are offered by rehab centers and they are made available to anyone who completes one of their treatment programs. These unique programs allow you to stay in touch with many of the people working at the treatment center while also connecting with others who have completed the program. Alumni services are usually free of cost and offered to you for as long as you need or want to participate.

Benefits of alumni programs include:

Attending in-person meetings and special events
Offering a wealth of online support through social media groups and message boards
Additional opportunities to develop healthy friendships and support groups
Opportunities to participate in or help organize sober events on a regular basis

Aftercare Planning

Before you complete an addiction treatment program, you’ll have the opportunity to participate in the creation of your own aftercare plan. This generally means sitting down with your counselor, case manager, or therapist and talking through the creation of a post-treatment plan that’s unique to your own needs. For example, if you and your therapist decide that you could benefit from sober living, your aftercare plan will include resources for local sober housing options or the plan may include transitioning from the rehab facility to a sober living facility.

It’s worth mentioning that the specifics of your aftercare plan can change as your circumstances and needs change. However, the main goal of an aftercare plan is to keep or establish the recovery supports needed to maintain your sobriety and achieve long-term recovery.

Resources

Addiction: What to know about relapse. (n.d.). WebMD. Retrieved May 18, 2023, from https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/addiction/addiction-what-to-know-about-relapse
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (2008). What Is Substance Abuse Treatment? A Booklet for Families.