Daily Life Skills

Addiction takes a grip on your life, denying you certain milestones, and causing you to miss out on many of life’s most important lessons. Emotional maturity is often stunted. Role models – parents, educators, coaches, and others lose authority and credibility in the eyes of the addict, they lose their ability to influence in positive and instructive ways. Essentially, addicts get older without “growing up”.

Diamond Tree Recovery helps patients navigate through life successfully by providing training in certain essential skills:

The Essentials

1. Accountability through goal setting
2. Financial responsibility
3. Health and wellness
4. Establishing healthy relationships
5. And much more

Accountability Through Goal Setting

Setting and achieving realistic goals requires discipline and accountability for our actions, both critical components to the maturing process. Through Diamond Tree’s Daily Life Skills patients are brought to see the importance of these concepts in a therapeutic setting and, more importantly, through day-to-day activities. Patients stick to a daily schedule, participate in household chores, help prepare meals, clean up, and hold one another accountable. This helps patients adopt healthy habits through hard work preparing them to progress into the next phase of recovery, the real world.

Through Daily Life Skills, patients learn:

1. Why it is so important to re-invent ourselves with intent through goal setting
2. How to stay focused and be more organized
3. How to use effective time management to eliminate overwhelming stress triggers
4. To explore their attitudes and beliefs about work and career, why they need to be changed, and how
5. To determine if they are waiting for somebody to take care of them, or if they are going to assert themselves

Financial Sobriety

Those recovering from addiction are typically grappling with their finances, having acquired significant debt, poor credit and legal problems. It is possible for them to emerge from the financial crisis resulting from their bad choices, their immaturity and a general lack of financial responsibility.

Daily Living Skills helps patients learn new attitudes and skills regarding money:

1. How to separate needs from wants
2. How to balance a checkbook
3. How to set and keep savings goals
4. What a healthy financial plan looks like
5. How to be responsible for money management
6. How to turn sound money management into our daily habits

Health and Wellness

Our mental, physical and spiritual well-being are all components of Health and Wellness. Long-term recovery is dependent on healthy habits. Daily Life Skills assists patients in their understanding of self-care, good hygiene, and other daily practices necessary for maintaining health and wellness and sustaining their recovery.

At Diamond Tree Recovery, our patients rebuild the skills they have neglected or have forgotten or had no knowledge of in the first place, such as:

1. Nutrition and healthy eating;
2. Cooking and meal preparation;
3. Household cleaning and property maintenance;
4. Personal hygiene and self-care practices;
5. Knowing your body; and the importance of physical fitness.

Relationship Management

A quick assessment of our patients reveals that often, they have severely damaged their personal relationships through their substance use. Maybe the have ignored those who were trying to help or blamed others for their drinking or use drugs. That victim mentality–that others are to blame–is a form of denial preventing them from self-awareness and assessing their own behavior.

Daily Living Skills helps patients with their families and partners to:

1. Grasp the importance of a healthy support system.
2. Expose enabling behaviors and replace them with healthy behaviors.
3. Identify and eliminate unrealistic expectations placed on other people in their lives.

As patients begin to understand that anger and resentment are products of their own fear. Once they realize their own role in their troubles, they begin to free themselves from the damaging practices that harmed themselves and others in their lives.