If you have been in a rehab center for substance abuse, there's a good chance that you have made some great strides towards your health and towards your recovery. However, if you leave the rehab and don't have a plan to prevent yourself from relapsing, your chances of doing so are much higher than they would be otherwise. Here are some tips for creating a relapse prevention plan after substance abuse rehabilitation.

1. Determine Your Living Situation

Your first step is to determine the most appropriate living situation. If your home is a safe, nonthreatening environment where you can get support and be held accountable, then you should try to go home as long as there are appropriate meetings in the area where you live and easy access to further care. Otherwise, you are going to need to find some other sort of housing arrangement.

Consider living in a sober-living house for at least a few months directly after rehab. This type of house will keep you out of exposure to drugs or alcohol, as well as give you a group of people to go to meetings with and to make sure that you actually attend the meetings. This is important and will help you stay on track to recovery. 

A final option is to see if your rehabilitation center has temporary, apartment-style living arrangements that will allow you to stay close to the doctors and therapists that you have been working with so that you can get outpatient treatment.

2. Set Up a Daily Schedule

Your next step is to sit down with your therapist and set up a daily schedule for the first month or two that you are out of rehab. This schedule should be filled out in minute detail for the first few weeks, including when you are going to shower and how long that is going to take, when you are going to sleep, what you're going to eat, and where you're going to go. Having a plan for what you're going to do when you leave the rehab center will help you feel much more confident about tackling recovery and will allow you to keep busy so that you don't relapse. 

3. Find Outpatient Treatment

If you are not going to live near the rehab to attend outpatient treatment there, make sure that you set up three or four appointments with another outpatient center before you even leave rehab so that you can transition directly from treatment to treatment. You don't want there to be any gaps.

For more information, talk to your substance abuse treatment professionals like Dr. Lewis A. Weber & Associates.