Achieving sober relationships can be a daunting task for persons with substance abuse challenges, mental health illnesses, and psychological challenges. Drug addiction negatively impacts the way you perceive the world and relate to other people.
People with drug addiction challenges need cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) to help them overcome their addictions, change their behaviors and live a better, sober life.
If you’ve had challenges with behavioral changes, mental illness, drugs, and substance abuse, and psychological challenges in SLC, Utah, you can always count on the outstanding behavioral therapy our Utah specialists have to offer.
How Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Can Help Build Sober Relationships
There are many ways cognitive behavioral therapy can help you attain sobriety and maintain sober relationships with your peers.
If you live in Northern Utah, here’s how CBT can help you overcome the lonely lifestyle and achieve healthier, sober relationships.
- Through Cognitive Rebuilding or Restructuring
Cognitive rebuilding or remodeling is all about looking at your mental health problems in a more profound manner, especially your harbor’s negative thoughts.
If you typically over-generalize but far too much emphasis on minor details or imagine the worst will happen, your daily habits will start shifting to the worst.
You’ll find it hard keeping and maintaining sober relationships with friends, family, and even spouses.
With the help of a cognitive-behavioral therapist, you will be able to identify your negative thought patterns by analyzing your thought process in specific situations.
Once you identify the negative thoughts that harm you the most, you can learn how to restructure those thoughts to more positive and rewarding thoughts.
- Through Graded Exposure
If you have psychological challenges, you may have trouble facing the things you fear the most.
While it may feel relieving to wipe the things you fear facing in a relationship under the carpet, the cumulative effect of doing so is far much worse.
Avoiding facing your fears on time will only lead to increased fear and anxiety, which affects your relationships.
Your cognitive behavioral therapist will systematically introduce you to your fears and how to face them effectively, so they no longer bother your peace.
Once you’ve tackled the lesser challenging fears, you can now channel your focus on the most challenging ones.
Based on the effective results patients have recorded using graded exposure therapy, it is ranked as one of the most effective psychological treatments.
You can rest assured that you can always walk out a better person with this approach, with the ability to handle more sober relationships.
- Through the Recognize-Avoid-and-Cope Technique
When someone gets deeply rooted in drug and substance abuse, they rarely realize the negative impacts of the drugs in their system until it’s too late. They also fail to understand how to come out of such predicaments.
CBT can help any drug addict and substance abuse patient to recover in several ways, including:
- Introducing them to self-help tools that will better their moods
- Help create a haven void of false beliefs and personal insecurities that always trigger drug abuse
- Teaching them effective communication skills so they can share their fears and insecurities freely
Through this therapy, patients can recognize triggers that push them into substance abuse and help them avoid such triggers.
Once they know how to avoid these triggers, they can learn how to cope with the new norm, develop better traits, and be a part of sober relationships.
- Through Mindfulness and Relaxation Technique
Mindfulness and relaxation techniques borrow a lot from Yoga and the Buddhism culture.
Mindfulness helps you disengage from obsessing or focusing on negative things and refocus your thoughts on things that happen in the present and matter most to building a healthy life.
When you visit your cognitive-behavioral therapist, they’ll more likely recommend the solution from the three mindfulness practices approach.
The first one is progressive muscle relaxation (PMR), where your therapist will guide you on systematically tense and releasing muscles for a relaxed feeling.
The second is mindfulness meditation, where all the focus is on clearing the mind to focus on the current happenings and thoughts in your mind. While you focus on the current thoughts, you can easily observe them and allow them to pass.
The last one is deep breathing. When you successively take in deep gasps of air and breathe them out, you easily fight anxiety and tension, and it helps you focus your mind on what’s important at the moment.
The aim of using relaxation and mindfulness techniques is to allow you to practice a new and different way of responding to distressing situations.
When your mind quietens, you gain a rare opportunity to think more critically and rationally. Your therapist should advise you on the type of resources you need to help you quieten your mind and focus.
- Through Thought Experiment
The thought experiment is the idea where your therapist advises you to allow your story to play out so you can experience the worst-case scenario fully.
In this thought experiment, you’ll have to imagine the outcome of your worst-case scenario and let it play out to a conclusion without influencing the outcome in any way.
With this experiment, your therapist is interested in letting you understand that even the worst things come and go as some things are entirely inevitable.
You will, therefore, stop fighting problems beyond your control with the understanding that they will come and pass, and things will be restored to normalcy after the storm.
If you have insecurities in relationships and fear you could lose someone in a relationship, this technique should help you work out a favorable solution.
You will know when to push for things to get better and when to sit aside and let things unfold as you hope for a better outcome.
After all, sober relationships demand that the parties involved allow each other some personal space for a more healthy and successful relationship.
- Through skills Training
Some of your mental health problems could be resulting from the feeling that you lack essential life skills to accomplish important tasks in life.
This kind of mindset makes you feel inefficient and unable to rank at per with others of the same skills and capabilities.
A cognitive behavior therapist will help you bridge the gap to face and achieve your goals and become a better version of yourself.
The therapist will focus on boosting your communication, assertiveness, and social skills training when helping with overall skills training.
You may have to undergo role-plays, modeling, or direct instruction forms of training to achieve the best skills set that will help boost your capabilities.
Armed with more skills and capabilities, it becomes easier to build and maintain sober relationships. Mostly, the feeling of incapacitation prevents many from pursuing healthy and beneficial relationships.
How Sober Relationships Improve Your Life
You will agree that you struggled with mental issues, drugs, and psychological disorders; nothing productive amounted to your life.
When you seek help and reform from these problems, your life starts transforming for the better.
Here are some of the ways maintaining sober relationships can help improve your overall well-being.
- You Get Closer to Family and Friends
The first set of people who’ll welcome the idea of your reformation are your family members and close friends.
When fully indulging in drugs and substance abuse, it becomes challenging to spend time with friends and family and maintain sober relationships.
Rebuilding closer relationships is one of the main reasons addicts seek reformation and go for sober relationships.
Once you have entered sobriety, you will always have an easy time reuniting with friends and family and engage in more fruitful endeavors.
- You Live a More Productive Life
This is, perhaps, the most priceless benefit of getting into sober relationships after a long struggle with drugs and mental health issues.
Addiction and mental health problems create a gap between you and your life since you use most of your time isolating yourself and majoring in insignificant life issues.
Building sober relationships helps you network with people who can help you build a career, improve your skills, and go out for impactful events like charities.
You can become more constructive and objective with your decisions and choose to work with people determined to see you grow and become a better person.
- You Become More Understanding
During your days of isolation and depression, it was easier to judge others and judge yourself more harshly.
With a sober mind and sober relationships, you can stop overemphasizing small problems that may threaten your great relationships.
You will easily understand that things never work as you could have wished and become less hard on yourself when a mistake happens.
Also, you’ll be in a position to help others who are yet to understand the techniques of maintaining sober relationships.
Get the Best CBT in Northern Utah for Sober Relationships
Most people go online and search for the best CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) near me without much success.
However, if you live in Northern Utah, you can always have the best behavioral service Northern Utah has to offer when you reach out to New Roads Behavioral Health in Utah.
Remember, building sober relationships begins with cooperating with the best therapists around you.