What Do You Learn in Rehab and What Exactly Are the Recovery Tools

World Class Addiction Treatment

We give patients the therapeutic tools they need to stay abstinent and live fulfilled lives.

01721 546 263 Book Free Assessment

What You Can Expect to Learn in Rehab

When you realise that going to rehab is about more than becoming sober from alcohol or drugs, you will begin to understand its deeper purpose, to make the changes needed to give you a new way of living – a life renewed. Here we explore 10 tools and learnings that you will take away from your stay in rehab at Castle Craig.

Going to rehab gives you the opportunity to change your life and become open to learning new therapeutic tools. These new life skills can replace your dependence on substances with new ways of coping and dealing with life’s demands.

Recovery Skills and Tools

You do not have to do it perfectly or within a certain timeframe, but it’s vital that you give it your all and continue to improve on the skills you learn at Castle Craig. Doing so is essential to achieving long-term sobriety.

Why Did You Drink or Misuse Drugs?

Here at Castle Craig, we’ll work with you to help uncover any contributing factors behind your addiction. More important than our past is to understand our responses to our problems and to learn better responses for the future.

The way therapy works is to help you change your relationship with yourself, how you view the outside world, and your thought patterns. This involves a process of self-discovery, facing reality, and acceptance. Only then can you progress to addressing destructive thought patterns and behaviours so as to ultimately improve your relationship with yourself.

1. Help With Thoughts and Feelings

Challenging Unhelpful Thoughts

One of the therapies available at Castle Craig is CBT, cognitive behavioural therapy. CBT is very effective in managing your thoughts. It helps stop spiralling self-defeating thought patterns.

Example: “My boss criticised my work, he is going to fire me, I’m not good enough, I am going to lose my flat, I will be homeless, I can’t cope.”

This example demonstrates how thoughts, feelings, and behaviours are all interconnected. It follows that learning to change the way we think (“he is going to fire me..”) into a more positive thought, will change our feeling about it (“I’m not good enough”) which in turn will change the behaviour (“I might as well drink”).  Learning how to apply these techniques is one of the most important tools you will acquire.

There are numerous techniques that CBT can offer to help you gain an understanding of how your mind works and how one thought can spiral into a wave of negative feelings, emotions, and behaviours. A CBT session often begins with the question “What’s really happening here?”

Dealing With Intense Feelings

DBT Dialectical behaviour therapy, on the other hand, is similar to CBT but acts in a different way, to help manage intense feelings.  At rehab, we often hear patients say, “If you felt like me you would drink too.”  Therapies like DBT amongst others can help regulate emotions and allow space for pauses and more rational thoughts.

Back to top

2. Healing Trauma

Trauma is the Greek word for wound. PTSD is when trauma or wound has not been processed properly by the brain. The side effects of unhealed trauma are what can ultimately lead to substance misuse and addictions. The event fails to become a memory and remains an active event stored part in the conscious and part in the unconscious. EMDR helps the brain to process the event and heals the trauma.

At Castle Craig, we offer EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing), a therapy that facilitates the brain and nervous system to process unresolved trauma history.

3. Personalised Guidance

One-to-one therapy can help you explore issues in a way that is more detailed and focused than group therapy. The aim will be to establish a therapeutic relationship with the therapist, enabling you to open up and express your thoughts and feelings in a more profound way than is normally possible in a group setting.

You will be encouraged to agree on goals to work towards, over the course of your treatment. As you interact, the therapist will reflect back to you what he sees in your words, attitudes, and behaviours and you will work together on agreed areas for change. The therapist may give you assignments to complete and you will be free to ask questions.  It is important to understand that successful one-to-one therapy happens when the patient is fully committed to change and participates actively. Click here for more on therapy and what can you achieve.

4. Relationships/Connecting With Others

Rehab allows you to start building relationships again. When you arrive, you will be seen by a nurse and doctor, and you will be assigned a therapist.  Shortly after you arrive you will join a group of your peers – fellow rehab residents from a variety of backgrounds and these will be your greatest resource.

With your peers, you will, knowingly or unknowingly, practise new life skills – perhaps assertiveness, kindness, boundary setting, or even anger management. They will be able to offer support, friendship, and honest feedback on how they see you progressing. Your peer group is a powerful tool in helping you to change and to learn how to handle relationships.

In short, Castle Craig is a place of safety where everyone – patients, medical, therapeutic, and admin staff are all committed to a common goal of helping you achieve a lasting and contented recovery. As such it is a place where you can practise and prepare for going back to your daily life in the outside world – to a life without alcohol or drugs.

5. Build Healthy Relationships: Setting Boundaries

With the help of a therapist and your peer group,  you can begin to address any problematic relationships you may have with family members, friends, or partners and learn more healthy ways of dealing with others. This will prepare you for building and repairing damaged relationships outside of rehab.

I Have the Right to …

• Have my needs and feelings be as important as anyone else’s
• Experience and express my feelings, if I wish
• Make mistakes and admit those mistakes without feeling humiliated
• Be treated with dignity and respect in all my relationships
• Say “I don’t understand” “I don’t know” or “No” without feeling guilty
• Set boundaries on how I will be treated in relationships.

Learning to assert your rights respectfully through setting proper boundaries can help to keep you sober. It will improve your self-esteem, your self-acceptance and your feeling of belonging – all important components of a contented life.

6. Learn True Self-Care

Recovery thrives on a healthy and consistent level of self-care. Self-care goes beyond grooming and relaxing – in recovery, self-care includes mindfulness, meditation, creativity, a good diet, spirituality, time in nature, ensuring that you have enough sleep, exercise, setting boundaries.

7. Create and Establish a Healthy, Purposeful Routine

During your stay in rehab, you’ll discover that there is plenty to do to fill your day, whether it is therapy, workshops, meetings, activities, reflective assignments.

Rehab is a place where you can learn structure and routine, to give meaning to your life and purpose to your day.  This learning can then be reflected in your new life post-rehab.

Hopefully then, when you leave the facility, you will have initiated successful habits that will take you from strength to strength.

Establishing new healthy habits may be the most important thing you do. Recovery has to be built, it does not just happen. Above all, try to keep in mind that old advice: ‘Build your life around your recovery, not your recovery around your life’.

8. Relapse Prevention Tools

Relapse is a characteristic of the disease of addiction and you should not be disheartened if it should happen to you. Going back to basics after a relapse is sometimes what you need to get yourself back on track.

Rehab teaches you how to recognise your triggers to drink or take drugs, how to say “No”, how to be involved in a healthy recovery-orientated community and how to clear your mind of unhealthy thoughts.

9. The 12 Steps – Daily Strength 

Learning about the 12 Steps is an opportunity to learn a new set of principles to guide you through life. The principles of the 12 Steps help to grow a sense of spirituality and foster honesty in your life both during and after your time at Castle Craig. The steps serve as a navigation tool and a support system during difficult periods in your life, and for the rest of your life. Hopefully, when you leave Castle Craig, you will have initiated a number of the 12 Steps as part of your life and that will take you from strength to strength in your recovery.

The 12 Step programme at Castle Craig emphasises the importance of tackling challenges day-by-day (one day at a time) with a focus on the moment (the here and now). Daily strength and connection with others in recovery can be drawn from the Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous groups you attend in your local area or online.

10. Additional Holistic Tools and Techniques

In addition to the core recovery methods, you’ll learn various holistic tools and techniques to support your well-being such as mindfulness, meditation, and breathwork which help you relax and stay calm in stressful moments. You’ll also discover how to enjoy life at a slower, more mindful pace. These techniques are essential for managing cravings and addressing psychological dependence.

Don’t Be Afraid to Ask For Help

Your friends and family may have already seen you at your weakest. It’s time to show them your inner strength. Your stay in rehab is just the beginning.

At Castle Craig, we recognise that recovery is for life. If you think that these are the tools you need to help your recovery journey you can arrange a conversation with one of our admissions advisors today.