Drug & Alcohol Recovery & Travel

Today, we explain how travelling can strengthen your recovery, particularly if you’ve already attended an alcohol rehab. When you are new to your recovery, travelling is highly rewarding, but it may be challenging. In fact, because travelling is challenging, it serves to both test and strengthen your recovery. This is similar to the process where a muscle is strengthened due to weight training.

Whilst alcoholism and drug addiction weaken your worldview, travelling has the polar opposite effect because travelling is perhaps the most powerful way to strengthen your worldview.

If you attend a rehab centre, the therapist will attempt to broaden your view of yourself and the wider world. Thus, travelling really continues this work and allows you to take your recovery to the next level.

When you are addicted to drugs or alcohol, you are essentially being selfish. You probably thought you and your needs were the centres of the universe. When you go travelling, you begin to realise that you are essentially just a tiny dot on a huge planet populated by living creatures whose needs are just as important as your own.

Below, we outline some important reasons that justify travelling in order to strengthen your recovery. We also offer tips to ensure your trip abroad does not overly challenge your recovery.

Take steps to avoid triggers before you go

Before you even step on foreign soil, there are a number of precautions you can take to help you avoid addiction triggers. We recommend you contact the hotel you will be staying at and instruct them to physically remove the mini-bar from your room.

You should also research areas that are known for having a drinking culture. You can then avoid areas that have a build up of nightclubs, bars and pubs. You should definitely avoid these locations during the night.

Whilst travelling abroad is likely to spike your temptation to drink or take drugs, you need to take precautions to ensure this temptation is kept to a minimum. Being in recovery is about managing and coping with temptation. It’s not about burying yourself in bed and not living your life to the fullest.

Travelling to fuel self-discovery

When you travel, you get time to think. You probably won’t be working. Instead, you might be chilling out on the beach, walking in mountains or just spending the time to read a good book in the countryside. When you travel, you typically gain time to undergo reflection and self-discovery.

Self-discovery will bring clarity in order of where you presently sit within the world. You will be given time to think about where you have been, where you currently are and where you are going. You may conclude that you don’t like where you are going. You will then be able to plan out a path that will move you towards happiness.

One way to bottle your thoughts is to keep a travel journey. You can refer back to this journal to ensure you are taking action on the insights you discovered when travelling. We urge you to note down realisations that apply to your well-being in general, and not just your recovery. Remember, your recovery is strengthened by your overall wellbeing, no matter what form this takes.

Travelling abroad kills off many addiction triggers existing in your hometown

Whilst travelling abroad may expose you to new addiction triggers, it also serves to remove you from addiction triggers that exist in your hometown. You will be removed from people and places that expose you to temptation.

One negative emotion that may arise during your travels is isolation. This is particularly true if you travel alone. To combat isolation, take a smartphone, laptop computer or tablet with you so you may take advantage of cheap communication methods such as Snapchat, Facebook and Skype. These apps will allow you to stay in touch with your friends and family members so you do not feel alone and isolated whilst you travel.…

In this post, we discuss how to find 12 step meetings abroad. Hundreds of thousands of people rely on weekly 12-step meetings in order to improve and enrich their recovery.

If you are travelling to a new destination, you may feel uncomfortable with the fact that you are missing out on 12-step meetings.

By the time you have completed this post, you will no longer worry about missing out on 12-step meetings when you are abroad. Why? Because 95% of countries have an AA or NA presence. This is testimony to the fact that the 12-step process works no matter which culture, language or country it is manifested within.

Whilst going abroad is an essential way to work on your recovery, going abroad should not be about giving you an excuse to have a holiday away from your recovery. Also, going abroad may serve to weaken your recovery, particularly if you associated a holiday with drinking or taking drugs.

I particularly remember the story of a client who went on an ‘all-you-drink’ Nile cruise in Egypt, and this resulted in his relapse. Unfortunately, we don’t know of any 12-step meetings taking place on the Nile, and we wouldn’t recommend you embark on a holiday of this nature, particularly if you are new to recovery.

If you are new to recovery, you may even put off going abroad because you will miss your 12-step meetings. You may worry that you will expose yourself to addiction triggers you may have forgotten about, and you may worry that the excitement of being abroad will mean you forget about your recovery. You may also worry that you will disrupt your routine by attending 12-step meetings, so when you return home, you may not pick up where you left off.

Thankfully, 12-step meetings take place in literally every corner of the world.

You may wish to call the meeting organizers ahead of time to ensure the meeting is available in English.

If you are travelling to a country that’s not too far away, it may be worth asking members of your home AA meeting if they’ve attended meetings in the country you are travelling to. You can never beat first-hand experience, so please do ask members of your current group for their invaluable advice.…

In this post, we outline 6 reasons why to travel for people living their lives in recovery. We believe that if you are not actively travelling and broadening your worldview, you’re probably not getting the most out of your recovery.

Recovery itself is a journey in a figurative sense. You thus need to fill the recovery journey with real-life travels that server to enrich your outlook and your recovery simultaneously.

Early recovery is perhaps the most testing time you will ever experience. Travelling during this period takes you away from your everyday environment and helps to develop new habits in ways that aren’t influenced by older habits that were often destructive.

Also, it’s important that we define ‘travel’ from the outset. Often, when you hear the word ‘travel’, visions of sitting on a beach in Seychelles may arise. Whilst this may entail travel, this isn’t really what we mean when we say travel.

Our definition of ‘travel’ includes any trip where you are removed from your everyday environment. This could mean driving to work using a different route or going to a local beauty spot that’s an hour’s drive away from your home. This definition of travel means travel is accessible to 99% of people who are able to jump on a bus or a train.

Travelling is about experiencing new people, new places and new cultures. If you can afford to travel abroad, we strongly recommend you do so. However, travelling within your own country is perfectly fine, and definitely worthwhile. After all, not many of us can reasonably travel abroad too often, so if you don’t travel within your own country, you will severely limit the number of opportunities when you can travel.

I have now been in recovery for nine years, and I must admit that my motorhome (or RV) has played a massive part in my recovery. 90% of trips I make in my motorhome are made within the United Kingdom where I live, although I have been known to travel in continental Europe once or twice a year.

I believe my motorhome has brought life to my recovery. If it wasn’t for my motorhome, I may have become bored with my recovery. This boredom may have resulted in relapse. So, in a way, my motorhome has contributed towards saving my life and certainly my relationship with my spouse.

Whilst attending AA meetings has helped my recovery, meetings are essentially academic or abstract experiences. Travel, on the other hand, is much more memorable and concrete. For maximum benefit, attend AA meetings but please make sure you are enriching your recovery with exercises that are more alive, such as travelling and taking part in sporting activities.

Without further ado, here are the five top reasons for travelling for people who are living their lives in recovery:

#1. Travel helps to keep your recovery on track

When you leave rehab, your recovery will be on solid grounds. Motivation to stop drinking alcohol or taking drugs will be high. However, this motivation may begin to wain if you do not actively work on your recovery.

Travelling is perhaps the most significant and memorable way to work on your recovery. Travelling will help to renew your motivation to work on your recovery and to cure your boredom that may otherwise threaten your recovery.

#2. Travelling broadens your horizons

Many people addicted to alcohol have an extremely narrow world-view that’s often devoid of rich cultural experiences. If you suffered from alcoholism, it may be a challenge to realise that there’s a world outside of your hometown.

When you undergo addiction treatment, therapists will help you to realise that there’s more to life than alcohol. You will begin to understand that there are activities that may not bring instantaneous gratification, but are nevertheless much more rewarding than alcohol in the long run.

Travelling will provide further evidence that there are many pleasures in this world that do not involve alcohol. Travelling will also serve to build on the good work started by a therapist at rehab clinics.

Travelling is perhaps the only activity that compels you to broaden your horizons. Travelling also offers you time so you may analyse your life whilst you also form new and empowering habits that serve to empower your recovery.

#3. Travel is educational and informs you about other cultures

When you travel, you can’t help but learn about different cultures and ways of life. When you travel, you will observe how people live their lives differently to your own. This cultural knowledge will serve to enrich your life perspective. You will observe how other people discover happiness, even if they are not able to access the same luxuries that are considered commodities in your home country.

When you travel, you will experience new tastes, new sites, new landscapes, new languages and new people. All this exposure to new stimuli serves to enrichen and broaden your perspective. This will motivate your recovery and push your cultural awareness to the limit. This process will generally make you a more positive and interesting person.

#4. You will collect items that remind you of your recovery

Whenever you visit a new country, you will probably purchase an item that will serve as a souvenir of your travels. Your passport will also be stamped by immigration officials upon arrival. These items serve to empower your recovery by reminding you of your travels.

#5. You will change your perspective on life

As we’ve mentioned several times in this blog, travelling will broaden your perspective on life. This broadened perspective will benefit you even once you’ve returned home. Your broadened perspective will help to improve the decisions you make and ensure you are more confident so you are able to tackle activities that you were before unable to do so due to psychological limitations.

When you enter life in recovery, clearly your current perspective on life will require improvement. Merely stopping your addiction isn’t enough. For many years, you’ve probably done very little to broaden your perspective. In fact, your alcoholism served to weaken your worldview.

Thus, if you don’t actively work on improving your perspective on life, you are much more likely to relapse. Since travelling is perhaps the easiest way to grow and improve your perspective, we feel this fact means travelling is a compulsory activity for anyone living in recovery.

Your perfective on the world is a major piece of your overall identity. Thus, if you wish to change your identity for the better, you need to expose yourself to new environments that stretch and enrichen your perspective.

Conclusion

If you are unsure if travel is right for your recovery, we strongly urge you to give it a try. Sometimes, it’s difficult to build up the confidence to travel. If this is the case, why not plan a trip with a fellow member of your local AA group.…