We all know how good it feels to laugh with friends or do something truly enjoyable with your family. Laughter reduces stress and when you are having fun, it’s easier to feel good about yourself and the people you are with.
When we think about recovery, we often think about all the hardships that people are going through. It’s true that recovery is one of the hardest things that people go through and it can cause a lot of stress and emotional turmoil. However, people can also have fun while in recovery.
Being in recovery isn’t just about learning how to stop using drugs or alcohol. It is an opportunity to have a fresh start at life and try new things. Many people in recovery associate alcohol and drugs with having fun and they might be worried that life, or they themselves, are not fun without using.
One of the important tasks of recovery is to help individuals redefine fun. Clinical experience has shown that when clients are under stress, they tend to glamorize their past use and think about it longingly. When individuals continue to refer to their using days as “fun,” they continue to downplay the negative consequences of substance use disorder. They start to think that recovery is hard work and addiction was fun. The cognitive challenge is to acknowledge that recovery is sometimes hard work, but addiction is even harder.
On Halloween, our clients dressed up and went trick or treating in our offices.
Stress is a strong trigger for relapse and during treatment, clients will learn how to cope with it effectively. One of the best ways to reduce stress is to have fun. Having fun can mean being physically active or making art, but you don’t always have to be doing something to have fun. Spending quality time with friends or family members can be just as enjoyable.
At The Haven, we try to provide our clients plenty of opportunities to have sober fun. The clients can go for hikes, play games, watch movies, and do arts and crafts as well as gardening and cooking. We also do seasonal activities, like painting pumpkins for Halloween and an easter egg hunt for Easter.
These sober fun activities are not covered by our core funding, but we provide them because we know how important it is to have fun while in recovery. You can help our clients to rediscover sober fun by making a monetary or in-kind donation. We’re happy to receive arts and crafts supplies, board games, and exercise games and DVDs. The monetary donations will be used for things like buying Halloween pumpkins or hiring a mariachi band for Día de los Muertos.
Please consider donating this holiday season to bring joy and happiness into our clients’ lives.
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