A variety of factors, including the shame of stigma, can convince you that you must recover alone. However, recovery is not a sole endeavor as humans are naturally social creatures that seek connection and belonging to thrive. Without support, you can lose sight of the meaning and purpose behind the work you have been doing to heal. When you exit treatment, it can feel like you have lost your structured support system. Understanding peer support services is important to your recovery process.
At Driftwood Recovery, we know that connection to a community of peers is vital to sustained recovery. Through connection, you can find the support needed to meet and overcome challenges in life and recovery. Peer support services are a source of guidance, compassion, support, and accountability to lead a courageous life in recovery. With a commitment to connection and community, our peer-driven alumni remind you that you are not alone in your recovery.
However, you may question why peer support is so valuable to sustaining recovery. Expanding your understanding of connection can provide insight into the importance of peer support services.
Peer Recovery Support: The Value of Peer Connection
According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), peer support includes activities and interactions between those with similar experiences and conditions. Whether you have experienced challenges with substance use disorder (SUD) or other mental health disorders, peer support can help you thrive. Mutually supportive relationships offer the opportunity to build skills and change unhealthy patterns. By sharing experiences, you and your peers can find connection, acceptance, understanding, guidance, and validation. You are empowered to achieve goals for a fulfilling and self-determined life.
Yet, how does the experiential nature of peer support enable and encourage maintaining recovery? Your relationships inform your sense of self and how you navigate the world. As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) states, positive social connectedness encourages you to feel supported, valued, and cared for. Therefore, peer support has a long history as a source of mutual support in treatment and recovery. However, peer support services are not solely built on sharing experiences.
What Are Peer Support Services?
Peer support services present services designed for and delivered by those in recovery. Many different adaptive-driven peer support services, from support types to services, can support whole-person healing. Listed below are some of the resources you can find in peer support services:
- Support types
- Emotional
- Empathy and care are found in individual interactions and support groups
- Fosters self-esteem and confidence
- Empathy and care are found in individual interactions and support groups
- Informational
- Insight and skills are gained from sharing knowledge or life and work skills
- Classes, training, seminars
- Insight and skills are gained from sharing knowledge or life and work skills
- Instrumental
- Access to referrals and services for tangible resources
- Housing, transportation, employment, food, clothing, healthcare
- Access to referrals and services for tangible resources
- Affiliation/Social
- Readily accessible spaces, groups, and activities
- Learning, social and recreational skills, community, and belonging through connection with others
- Readily accessible spaces, groups, and activities
- Emotional
- Peer support services
- Recovery centers
- Peer-led support groups
- Job training
- Health and social services
- Parenting classes
- Child care services
- Transportation services
- Sports leagues
- Volunteering
- Sober activities and events
- Peer mentoring
All peer support services can be valuable to healing the mind, body, and spirit. However, services like peer mentoring showcase the power of connection as a vital part of the recovery process.
Peer Support Services: Empowering Others With Peer Mentoring
As noted in Substance Abuse and Rehabilitation, peer mentorship is when individuals in long-term recovery provide support for those in early recovery. You can offer nonprofessional and nonclinical assistance through peer mentorship to help peers achieve sustained recovery. As a peer mentor, you walk alongside those in early recovery to help them develop a customizable plan and pathways to long-term recovery based on individual strengths, needs, and recovery goals.
At its core, peer mentoring embodies emotional, informational, instrumental, and social support to meet each person where they are on their recovery journey. Therefore, peer mentorship can be a source of reciprocal healing as it empowers you to help yourself and others. Whether mentorship is the right path for you or not, there are numerous ways you can empower yourself and others with peer support services.
Finding Ways to Engage in Peer Support Services
One of the many ways you can contribute to your healing is by paying it forward. Giving back to your community can support sustained recovery as it helps you change the way you see yourself, others, and the world. By giving back to your sober community and the wider community, you can rediscover your sense of self-worth, belonging, and purpose through connection. Listed below are some of the ways you can give back to your community by engaging in an alumni program:
- Donate your time to alumni
- Help set up for meetings
- Mentoring
- Become a sponsor
- Volunteer
- Homeless shelter
- Animal shelter
- Pantry
- Treatment center
- Library
- Museum
- Hospital
- Nursing home
- Local parks project
- Community cleanup
Engaging in peer support services speaks to the power of connection as a source for healing and long-term recovery. No one should be left alone to recover or to figure out how to reintegrate into everyday life. With an active alumni program, you can remind yourself and your peers that recovery is a community effort.
Learning How to Pay it Forward at Driftwood Recovery
At Driftwood Recovery, we believe a strong Alumni Family gives you the safe space and community to break the cycle of suffering. Through the sharing of experiences, compassion, respect, and support, strength and hope can be fostered. Together, in our peer-driven alumni network, you and your peers can find the guidance, encouragement, and accountability needed to pursue your life goals and be a productive member of society. A truly active and vibrant alumni program is about more than abstinence. Our strong alumni program is about building a foundation for connection with the self and others to thrive in recovery. With mutually supportive connections, you are not alone in building the courageous and purposeful life you deserve in long-term recovery.
People often feel like they must recover alone, but recovery is a process that is best supported by a community. Through interpersonal relationships, you can find connection, compassion, support, guidance, and accountability to lead a meaningful life in recovery. With a strong alumni program, you can access peer support services to find and foster connections with yourself and others. Moreover, engaging with alumni can empower you to not only heal yourself but support the healing of your peers. Whether you volunteer or become a mentor for peers in early recovery, giving back reinforces the value of connection for healing the mind, body, spirit, and community. Call Driftwood Recovery at (512) 759-8330 to learn how alumni can support you.
Depression is one of the most common mental health disorders globally. Further, depression is one of the leading co-occurring disorders with substance use disorder (SUD). According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), approximately 21.5 million adults in the U.S. have a co-occurring disorder. Therefore, addressing the challenges of co-occurring disorders in early recovery and building a foundation of social support is invaluable to maintaining recovery.
At Driftwood Recovery, we know fostering connection through social support is vital to building a strong foundation for sustained recovery. The relationships you foster with others and the community you build through social support help turn the insights you learned in treatment into action. Our commitment to connection and community through social support can be seen in our attachment treatment approach. Thus, with a strong alumni program, you can be empowered by compassion, understanding, and sharing guidance.
However, numerous challenges in early recovery can make it difficult to lean into and build your social support system. Early recovery alone can make you doubt your ability to maintain your recovery. Learning to navigate your newfound independence in recovery can convince you that you are alone. Further, challenges with depressive symptoms can impede your ability to lean into your social support network.
How do you engage in your social support network when depression weighs you down? Expanding your understanding of depression in early recovery and its impact on you can provide insight into the value of social support for healing.
Understanding Depression in Early Recovery
Depression in early recovery can be tied to preexisting challenges with depression. For example, you may have turned to self-medicating with substances as a maladaptive coping strategy to combat life stressors and trauma. Further, depression can also be present in early recovery due to features of treatment and recovery like detox and abstinence. As SAMHSA notes, depressive symptoms are common in early recovery and are often associated with withdrawal and addiction identity. Thus, the physical and emotional loss of substances can wreak havoc on your body and mind in the form of depression.
Some of the ways depression can impact your recovery include:
- Helplessness
- Hopelessness
- Sadness
- Decreased motivation
- No energy to reach out for social support
Not only does depression in early recovery increase your risk for relapse, but it also has a significant impact on your relationships.
Impact of Depression on Interpersonal Relationships
According to the Development and Psychopathology Journal, depressive symptoms and interpersonal relationships can impact parent-child, peer, and romantic partner relationships. Depression and your interpersonal relationships can act as either a predecessor or a consequence of a weak social support network. Thus, depression and or poor social support can create a negative cycle in which depression can impede social support, and poor social support can increase depressive symptoms. Listed below are some of the ways depression and poor social support can harm well-being and recovery:
- More likely to be withdrawn, respond negatively, and behave aggressively
- Increases relationship conflict
- Lack of energy to take an interest or participate in activities with loved ones
- Problematic interactions and relationships like verbal abuse and emotional neglect
- Increases depression
Further, depressive symptoms can disrupt your recovery as it leaves you feeling like maintaining your recovery is impossible. Therefore, understanding and building a social support system can be invaluable to early and lasting recovery.
Addressing the Value of Social Support for Depression
Social support considers the number of relationships you have and the function of those relationships, such as informational, instrumental, and emotional. Moreover, the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health defines social support as the resources you receive from social activities, which are broken into objective support and subjective support. Objective support includes material assistance and direct services. Meanwhile, subjective support is the emotional experience in which you feel respected, understood, and supported.
Listed below are some of the ways strong social support can reduce depression and support mental well-being:
- Improves adaptive coping
- Increases psychological resilience
- Supports a sense of belonging
- Helps sustain motivation
- Decreases loneliness and negative self-appraisal
The benefits of social support highlight the value of close interpersonal relationships in your life. Yet, how do you build social support and dismantle the consequences of depression in recovery? Humans are social creatures; from birth to the end of life, there is an innate need for connection and attachment with others. Your family plays a significant role in your development as they often offer shelter, support, and affection, among other things.
Building Social Support With Family Therapy
Your family can play a crucial role in well-being, which presents family therapy as a valuable tool for building social support across different networks of support. Some of the ways family therapy can help repair relationships and foster social support include:
- You will learn how to express your experiences to your loved ones
- Your loved ones will learn how to best support you and themselves
- Increase family cohesiveness
- Improve problem-solving skills
Looking at the ways family therapy can support building your social support network showcases connection as a path to sustained recovery.
Empowering Social Support in Recovery at Driftwood Recovery
At Driftwood Recovery, we know considering the entire family in recovery can give you the well-rounded social support you need to heal and restore balance in your life. With attachment at the core of our approach, we place great value on mutual support and community. Moreover, through our commitment to whole-person healing, you are reminded that recovery is not done in isolation but in the embrace of a strong and compassionate community. Thus, our peer-driven network is designed to support you and your loved ones throughout your recovery journey. No matter where you are on your recovery journey, in a vibrant alumni program, you can find the social support you need to lead the courageous life in recovery you deserve.
Early recovery can be exciting as you learn how to build an independent life in recovery. Yet, early recovery can also come with challenges like depressive symptoms, whether or not you experienced difficulties with co-occurring depression before treatment. Challenges with depression in recovery can increase your risk for relapse as it disrupts your ability to lean on your social support network to manage stressors. However, you can reduce depressive symptoms and foster interpersonal connection for healing with family therapy. At Driftwood Recovery, we are dedicated to providing a supportive, sober community in alumni where you and your loved ones can find the resources you need to reclaim your life. Call us at (512) 759-8330 to learn more today.