Sober friends are your greatest asset to achieving and sustaining sobriety. The problem is former habits die hard as do your bonds with former ties to alcohol. Our therapy procedures, practices, and treatment facility help you forge these vital bonds that will last a lifetime. Here’s everything you need to know about the key role sober friends play in helping you let go of addictive thoughts and habits.
Understanding the Importance of Sober Friendships
Your bonds in therapy and beyond are even more influential than alcoholic bonds if you allow them to be. These bonds you form in treatment set the tone for helping you thrive at every stage of therapy. These kinships, through strong support system implementation, motivation, encouragement, and fellowship, ensure you can overcome any addiction obstacle. For a more in-depth look at how these relationships in rehab, consult the vital information below.
How Sober Friends Improve Your Quality of Life?
Your peers make or break the quality of life you lead in so many regards. As the saying goes, one bad apple spoils the lot. Therefore, it’s important to make sure you keep your surroundings healthy. The following factors are just a few of the many ways sober influences improve your quality of life.
Sober Friends Mean a Sober Life
Simply put, sobriety doesn’t happen without surrounding yourself with the right influences. Whatever you allow into your heart and life is what you’re going to give off. Thus, if you allow alcoholic influences into your life, you’ll reap drinking habits. On the opposite side, if you allow sober and proactive influences in your life, you’ll reap sobriety and positivity. Our state-of-the-art group therapy programs can help guide you to the right bonds to guide you through your rehab.
Positive Influences Shape Your New Habits
Friends, both positive and negative shape the course of our lives whether we acknowledge it or not. These positive influences shape your new habits, hobbies, activities, and joys that separate you from your past life. These factors invigorate your better quality of life with a newfound sense of purpose and true belonging. In addition, these newly formed ties serve a vital role by ensuring your former habits aren’t released without being adequately replaced.
Sustainable Accountability
One of the primary attributes of any true friend involves sincere care for your well-being. This consideration is exhibited through your influences offering themselves as faithful accountability partners of your sobriety. These accountability partners are those you trust and open up to the most. Consequently, your accountability system will help you remain focused on sobriety no matter what life throws your way.
Your Friends Are Your Life Support System
When difficult life occurrences happen, alcohol addiction beckons one to drink into deeper depression. Thankfully, your sober friends provide the support and encouragement you need to keep pressing forward. This way, even when life happens, you can be reassured that you’re not alone and don’t need alcohol. These strong bonds further open your eyes to the better quality of life you have without alcohol in your life.
True Fulfillment
Relationships with sober individuals put the fulfillment of living free in sobriety into full context. The activities, joys, experiences, and life achievements come into full view and fruition when you surround yourself with the right influences. True friends in sobriety provide the full-spectrum fulfillment that alcohol and former influences never could.
What are Important Qualities to Look For in Sober Companionship?
When drinking consumes the majority of your social life, it can be difficult to know what traits to look out for in new friendships. Your therapist is your greatest guide in helping you pinpoint the following important friendship qualities you should cling to.
An Optimistic Countenance
The most important consistency in sobriety is positive reinforcement. Hence, an individual with a positive countenance and outlook on life is one of the most important qualities of your life and recovery. Be wary of an individual who is quick to see the negative side of things. A negative countenance could easily bring down your confidence in many regards, including rehab. Therefore, make sure all of your newly formed friendships share an optimistic perspective.
Common Life Goals
An age-old truth says, “You show me your friends, I’ll show you your future.” This simply means your future accomplishments are heavily influenced by your companions. Thus, your ambitions and motivations live or die by the influences you surround yourself with. That’s why you and your new friends should have aligning aspirations. More preferably, one of these common goals or expectations should involve a dedication to sober living.
A Good Attitude
A person with a good attitude produces good vibes of positivity, happiness, and contentment for others around them. Though this directly affects the first trait of a positive countenance, it is a separate entity in itself. One’s attitude often dictates several other character traits and sets the tone for how others around them feel. This important quality is vital, as having a bad attitude will stir nervousness, anxiety, and anger, among other negative emotions.
Openly Honest Communicators
Open-ended, sometimes blunt, yet loving honesty is the foundational quality of every successful friendship, especially for a person recovering from alcohol. This means surrounding yourself with an individual who is as equally open about themselves and their emotions as well as your own. These honest communicators make you comfortable sharing everything about yourself without fear of judgment. Non coincidentally, these people you can trust are precisely the type of accountability partner you need to overcome any obstacle.
Strong Sobriety Habits
A good friend in rehab and beyond has stronger sobriety habits than you do. Your friend’s sober maturity can serve as a necessary crutch and guide to help you develop your sobriety foundation. This encourages you to establish systematic habits for sustaining a sober life through solid relapse prevention techniques.
High Confidence and Self-Esteem
Confidence is contagious, especially when a confident individual is one of your closest friends. That’s why it is important to have friends with high self-esteem and elevated confidence levels. Bear in mind, there is a big difference between confidence or personal esteem and a self-absorbed personality. Self-absorbed individuals, unlike highly confident individuals, exhibit no regard for others. Be sure to observe the stark distinctions between the two.
Where to Find Sober Influences?
Finding the right friendships in sobriety requires you to look in the right places. Allow these various atmospheres and places to guide you to the proper environments to find sobriety-promoting peers.
Group Therapy
The whole purpose of group therapy treatment is to develop positive ties. These group therapy friendships are often the bonds that stay with you for the rest of your life.
Support Meetings
Separate from group therapy, support meetings are meticulously geared to help you build up a solid support system. In correlation, the best friends you can make are the same people you meet in treatment support meetings.
Digital Communities
Online communities allow you to search for positive influences with filters specific to your needs. Our staff can supply you with personalized community listings specific to your friendship necessities.
At Home
Some of the best influences on sobriety are the ones closest to home. Your parents, siblings, or closest family friends are more than likely your greatest guide in transitioning into sober living.
How to Set Necessary Friendship Parameters in Recovery?
Your healthy friendships in rehab should also include healthy boundaries. Without boundaries, you’ll feel suffocated and seek to avoid contact with the most important bonds in your life. That said, here are some vital communicative methods to establish healthy parameters in your relationships.
Share Your Boundary Needs with One Another
Be open with your friends about your accountability needs and the boundaries surrounding these accountability methods. This way your friends are fully aware of how to approach their accountability role in your life without suffocating you. In turn, this allows you to be receptive to your accountability partner and structure. Contact us now to get professional guidance and support for friendship boundary implementation.
Follow Through
Once you establish one another’s boundaries regarding your sobriety friendships, it’s equally important to follow through with these boundary obligations. If you or your friends infringe upon them, it’s vital to make sure these are adhered to on both sides. Failure to do so will destroy these set parameters, inviting animosity and bitterness to creep in on your or their behalf.
Express Open Communication
It’s important not to bottle up your feelings regarding your need for personal space or other sobriety-related matters. Bottling up your thoughts in one area leads to keeping secrets in areas you should be open within recovery. It’s important to always voice your thoughts and concerns with your closest friends to encourage open-ended trust.
Acknowledge and Respect Differences of Opinion and Recovery Needs
Every person has a conflict of opinion on how they approach recovery. Just because some methods work for your rehab doesn’t mean it will work for them and vice-versa. That’s why it is vital to acknowledge and accept your friend’s need for different boundaries and approaches. Understand this by remembering how different your needs and boundaries differ from theirs.
Free by the Sea Can Help You Make Sober Friends in WA
Free by the Sea extends the most comprehensive recovery methods to help you secure independently sustainable sobriety. Our personalized treatment approach bears some of the highest efficacy rates in the country. You deserve the best alcohol rehab therapy you can find. We’re here to provide that and so much more. All that’s left to do is reach out to our exceptional recovery team now.
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