Let’s set the stage for a moment. You’ve been away from the area that you grew up in for quite a while now. You’ve left behind the good as well as the bad. You’ve left behind the bad influences, whether they were people, places, or things. You’ve spent this time period away making something of yourself. Building a new life, with new friends, and now you feel really good about yourself and you plan a trip home to see family. This is where recovering addicts fall into a deadly trap! Coming home should be an extremely happy time for us and our family but for some reasons it’s not. Let’s take a look into four main reasons why coming home, or back to where we were born and raised, can quickly cause a deadly relapse.
1. RETURNING TO OLD PLACES THAT TRIGGER-Let’s say that there was a certain drive-in movie theater that we used to always get high at but we hadn’t seen it in quite a while. Now, we end up driving past it in a very crucial and vulnerable moment which triggers our minds into wanting to use our drug of choice. Old places where we used to use drugs and alcohol can be very powerful and trigger us into relapse once we see these places again.
2. RETURNING TO FEELINGS OF HOPELESSNESS AND DESPAIR– Most of us have felt the feelings of hopelessness and despair during our days of being chained down psychologically to our hometown. Most of us feel that in order to reach our dreams and goals in life that we need to leave our home area. Most of us feel that it isn’t possible to achieve what we want to achieve in life if we stay in our hometowns. Returning to these psychological feelings of hopelessness and despair can quickly cause us to want to self-medicate and relapse on our drugs of choice.
3.RETURNING TO PEOPLE WHO HAVE NO AMBITION– Now, I don’t mean to offend people by saying this, but I’m just going to say it. It seems that most of those who never leave their hometown are usually those with low ambitions or no ambitions at all. They seem to just be living life day to day, instead of living life to the fullest with dreams and aspirations. Now, by returning to the company of these people that are not ambitious, can bring us down to the point where we re-acclimate ourselves to having no ambition either which opens us up to feelings of self worthlessness and opens the door to relapse. Now, there are very successful people that never leave their hometown, but in general, most of those who don’t have very low ambition and we need to not surround ourselves with people of low ambition.
4. RETURNING TO “THE LAND OF THE LOST”– OK, maybe you were hoping that we were going to discuss encounters with the Tyrannosaurus Rex or other dinosaurs, but we are going to discuss something much deeper. When you made a choice to leave town you were most likely running from all the things we have discussed, which brings me to the last section and that would be running from the land of the lost. How frustrating is it to constantly ask someone for advice only to be told “I don’t know”? Or how frustrating is it to be in a town where there doesn’t seem to be theaters, lunch spots, or places to shop. We call this the land of the lost and that is probably why you left your home area in the first place, to separate yourself from those who are lost. Most of us had to leave where we were born in raised to make something of ourselves and this post has tried to explain some of the reasons for this.
So what I am saying in this blog it is that you should not keep yourself from going back and enjoying where are you were born and raised to visit those who you love that are still there. However, for those of us that are recovering from drug addiction, we need to be on our guard at all costs against the negative forces in our home areas that will trigger us to pick up and use drugs and alcohol again.
