When you find yourself in a challenging situation, such as encountering a rude person in the grocery store, you choose how to react. You can choose to say something rude back, ignore them yet remain angry or hurt, or let go and move on from the experience. You learn these skills throughout life, but mainly in childhood.
Childhood development can be crucial to the life skills you have as an adult. However, when you have trauma that affects your development, it can impact your ability to develop certain life skills. Furthermore, addiction rehab provides endless opportunities for you to learn the life skills you may have dismissed during your childhood.
Adverse Childhood Experiences
People can experience physical, emotional, or psychological trauma throughout their lives. However, when you encounter trauma in childhood, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) refers to such experiences as adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). ACEs impact a child’s feelings of safety, stability, and bonding with their parent. These all impact how you develop into a functioning adult.
ACEs include experiences such as:
- Growing up in poverty
- Being exposed to physical, sexual, or emotional abuse
- Having a parent with substance use disorder (SUD) or mental health disorder
When you grow up with ACEs and your safety, stability, and relationship with your parent are disrupted or harmed, it inevitably affects how you learn and grow. Further, ACEs impact various life skills throughout adulthood, such as interpersonal skills, communication skills, and more.
Childhood Development and Life Skills
Your parent or guardian is crucial to you as a child. By providing stability and safety, parents can help their children develop vital life skills. This allows for a child to develop into a functioning adult.
The main areas of development for children are:
- Cognitive
- Language
- Social and emotional
- Physical
- Approaches to learning
For example, if a child had ACEs that affected their confidence or social and emotional learning, they may not be able to have appropriate social interactions with people. That child may grow up into an adult that cannot understand sarcasm or body language, further misunderstanding important aspects of communication. This can lead to hurt and confused feelings.
Additionally, exposure to ACEs and turbulent emotions can lead to substance abuse and the development of addiction.
Addiction Rehab
Since ACEs can lead to the development of SUD, processing your trauma is an important part of treatment. In addiction rehab, you will have the opportunity to safely cease your substance abuse as well as address and overcome the driving factors of your substance abuse, such as ACEs.
When you decide to get sober, rehab is a good option to help you through the early stages of recovery. A decent rehab will focus on creating a safe and supportive environment for you to heal.
At Lighthouse Recovery Texas, the top priority is our clients’ recovery. With the best-in-class staff that uses evidence-based approaches to treatment and therapy, you will learn to overcome your addiction and its effects. In our treatment programs, you will also learn essential life skills. This means that when you leave treatment, you can be equipped with skills and resources to create the sober life you envision for yourself.
How Can You Learn Life Skills in Addiction Rehab?
There are different levels of treatment that provide appropriate services to fit a client’s recovery needs. Not all levels of treatment offer the same programs and opportunities, just as not all people need the same help or lack the same skills.
As an adult, you have to manage your finances and emotions. In this case, budgeting can get extremely stressful. Working to manage associated emotions can become overwhelming. Whatever you are feeling, intense or negative emotions can lead to relapse. By learning life skills in addiction rehab, you can develop knowledge and resources to help you manage challenging emotions after treatment.
Treatment mainly focuses on therapy. Additionally, in our sober living program and Dallas intensive outpatient program (IOP) at Lighthouse Recovery, you will receive courses and guidance in evolving life skills that are necessary to survive. Between individual and group therapy, you attend classes and groups facilitated by staff and peers that help you develop skills such as managing finances, tasks, time, and stress. Some of these classes are educational, but some can be exciting, allowing you to learn skills from your recovery peers.
Why Life Skills Are Important
After treatment, you will likely run into different situations that trigger memories, thoughts, and cravings for substances. These situations can include not having enough rent money, having to interact with a rude co-worker, or struggling to handle children’s emotions and your own. Any one of these situations can cause you to feel out of control if you do not have the life skills to handle them.
By developing your toolbox of skills to survive, recovery becomes more manageable. Learning life skills fosters greater self-control, which can allow you to take hold of your life without substance use playing a factor. Managing your life with life skills will enable a more sustainable and successful recovery journey.
It can be confusing to traverse life. Being an adult comes with responsibilities, tasks, and emotions that feel uncontrollable or unaccomplishable at times. You may have to do things you have never done before, such as managing the cleanliness of an entire home or learning how to care for a child. At Lighthouse Recovery Texas, we understand that addiction can get in the way of learning life skills. It is nothing to be ashamed of if you did not grow up with these skills and knowledge. We want you to be comfortable healing and learning to be a successful adult. Contact us at (214) 396-0259 to hear more about the life skills you can learn when you attend addiction rehab.
