Waypoint Recovery Center Blog

Recovery is a time of new beginnings. For many people, this includes rethinking past career choices to find a position that better fits their long-term recovery goals.

There’s No One-Size-Fits-All Answer When It Comes to Careers in Addiction Recovery

At Waypoint Recovery Center, we encourage our clients to think carefully about the type of employment that fits their individual skills, talents, and personal needs. There is no single “best” career that will work for everyone.

Some questions to ask yourself as you’re thinking about your professional future include:

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Emotion & Sobriety

It is common for people with substance use disorders to use drugs or alcohol as a way to avoid dealing with emotion. Thus, a crucial part of building the foundation for a successful recovery involves learning how to cope with your emotions in a healthier way.

Loneliness

Loneliness is a well-known relapse trigger in the early stages of recovery. Since people in recovery are advised to avoid contact with friends and family who are actively using addictive substances, they often have a much more limited social circle. For extroverts who thrive on social contact, this can lead to intense feelings of loneliness.

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Often, people with substance use disorders rely on drugs and alcohol to cope with unpleasant feelings like stress, sadness, or anger. In order to break the cycle of addiction, they need to learn healthy coping mechanisms. This is where dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) can help.

About Dialectical Behavioral Therapy

Dialectical behavior therapy is a form of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). As such, it incorporates cognitive restructuring—a process by which participants are taught to identify negative reactive thoughts (sometimes called cognitive distortions) and modify them to encourage healthier behaviors. This is accomplished using techniques such as decatastrophizing, disputing, and guided questioning.

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With so much of American culture centered around alcohol consumption, it’s not always easy to tell the difference between low-risk drinking and the signs of a more serious problem. The concept of gray area drinking, popularized by Jolene Park in a 2017 TED talk, may help you determine if your alcohol consumption deserves a closer look.

Defining Gray Area Drinking

The CDC defines moderate drinking as two drinks or less per day for men or one drink or less per day for women. Binge drinking is defined as consuming five or more drinks on an occasion for men or four or more drinks on an occasion for women—which is approximately the amount of alcohol required to bring an average-sized person’s blood alcohol concentration (BAC) to 0.08%.

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Stress Management in Recovery

No matter what, everyone deals with stress. Even people who’ve never had to deal with the specific challenges that come with a substance use disorder will eventually find themselves facing relationship problems, career difficulties, financial worries, or health concerns.

While stressful situations are an unavoidable part of life, you have the power to control how you respond. Instead of giving up, avoiding dealing with the problem, or turning to addictive substances for comfort, you can choose to face your stress in a healthy way as you continue to move forward in your recovery journey.

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Addiction doesn’t discriminate by age, gender, race, or socioeconomic status. People from all different walks of life can struggle with alcohol use disorders.

High-Functioning Alcoholics

People who are high-functioning alcoholics, sometimes referred to simply as a functional alcoholic, is someone who abuses alcohol but still manages to project an outside image of normalcy. They may have successful careers, maintain busy social lives, and be active in the community.

Because high-functioning alcoholics can still hide their internal struggles from the casual observer, people who are high-functioning alcoholics are often deeply in denial about the extent of their problem. Here, we take a look at some of the things that they may say to avoid confronting the truth.

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