Seeking treatment for a substance use disorder, whether drugs or alcohol, is one of the most important steps a person can take in attaining a life of recovery. At Women’s Recovery, we understand that the recovery journey is challenging, and everyone walks that path in their own way. That is why we offer a sober living program for women.
A women’s sober living program offers support and accountability to help you regain your independence and move forward with your life of sobriety. Alcohol (and drugs) can take away so much—relationships, professional opportunities, money, and time. A sober living program for women helps ensure that treatment and recovery are effective.
Recovery housing for women provided by Women’s Recovery offers many benefits. Breaking the cycle of addiction is possible, and a sober living program for women can help maintain that renewed sense of purpose and sobriety. Call 833.754.0554 to learn more about sober living for women.
Benefits of a Sober Living Program for Women
You Won’t Wake Up Hungover
Right now, you may not realize how debilitating your hangovers are. You may wake up groggy every day and feel exhausted before your feet even hit the ground. More likely than not, you’ve probably gotten so used to these feelings that you don’t even think of them as being unusual anymore. But when you choose to live as a sober woman, your mornings will take on a whole new feel. Just imagine it:
- No more throbbing headaches or overwhelming body aches all morning long.
- No more energy-draining fatigue and dizziness, which may make it nearly impossible to concentrate on even the simplest tasks.
- No more nausea, stomach pain, and overpowering thirst.
- No more increased sensitivity to light and sound, making you feel like your senses are under assault for hours at a time.
Beyond just avoiding the physical toxicity that a night of drinking can have on a body, living as a sober woman will also dramatically improve the quality and consistency of your sleep. Not only will you avoid the nasty symptoms of a hangover, but you’ll also reap the health benefits of a good night’s sleep.
You’ll Be in Control of Your Life
Addiction causes you to lose control of all aspects of your life. As a woman, you probably wear many hats. Being in control of your life helps you maintain your many responsibilities. Keeping track of obligations, preserving your composure in difficult situations, and finding the answers to problems are all necessary skills for a modern woman. When you’re not sober, that control starts to slip away.
That can have some severe consequences in your life:
- If you have kids, losing control of your life due to your addiction can adversely impact their well-being.
- You may lose respect at your workplace or drift apart from your partner. You could alienate friends and family members after saying something you don’t mean.
- If you have specific career goals or life aspirations, dependency and addiction can force you to put those ambitions on the back burner.
When you’re a sober woman, you can make appointments and keep them. You say what you mean and mean what you say. Your life becomes more predictable by choice, and you can honor your commitments. When it comes to the dreams and aspirations you’ve had for so long, now you have the self-discipline to achieve them. Being a sober woman leaves you feeling fulfilled, centered, and in control.
You’re Present for Special Moments
One of the most tragic parts of not being sober is losing out on precious moments in life. When you’re caught in the cycle of addiction, you won’t remember the details of important things that happen. Sadly, alcoholics tend to believe that their choice to drink doesn’t affect anyone else. They believe it’s something they choose to do, and whatever happens, they will have to deal with the consequences.
There are consequences for choosing to drink, and that choice has a considerable impact on other people—namely, family and children. The children of those struggling with alcohol or drug dependency and addiction face many challenges, including the following:
- Being unable to figure out what a normal life looks like. These children don’t have a good example to look up to from their childhoods. They don’t know what a traditional family relationship looks like and may have never experienced harmony at home. As they grow up, they may not know how to act or what to say to others, especially when dealing with other families.
- Having serious trust issues. If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. These children grow up in homes that are no strangers to lies, secrets, and denial. All of that was the norm, and it’s all they know. Because of their history of broken promises, they may not know how to trust someone in the future.
- Judging themselves. Children of alcoholics often grow up feeling inadequate. They may constantly compare themselves to others and feel they come up short in many areas. As adults, they may always see themselves as different from other people. They may have low self-worth and self-esteem. It’s not uncommon for them to become isolated or extremely socially awkward.
- Seeking approval from others. These children are always their own worst critics. They may judge themselves harshly because they don’t know how to give themselves a break. They often become people-pleasers. When someone isn’t happy with them, it crushes them. They may live in fear of criticism and avoid it at all costs.
- Suffering from anxiety and depression. When a child has an alcoholic parent, they may not know how to handle social situations, especially special occasions. They take themselves too seriously and are never really able to lighten up.
- Struggling with relationships. Intimate relationships may be extremely difficult for people with alcoholic parents. In addition to their trust issues, their lack of self-esteem may not allow them to open up to someone else. They may avoid getting close to another person because they fear emotional attachment.
- Being afraid of getting abandoned. Some children of alcoholics will find relationships, but they may not be healthy ones. These individuals are likely to hang on to toxic relationships because they don’t want to be alone. They may also worry about never finding someone again because they’ve been abandoned in the past.
Your Looks Improve Significantly
Being sober will bring life back to your body at a cellular level that will eventually shine through externally. If you’re addicted to alcohol, you’re in a constant state of dehydration which sucks the moisture from your largest organ, the skin. This causes your skin to look bland and muted. Alcohol also robs the skin of vitamin A, an antioxidant essential for skin renewal, as well as other antioxidants. Many of these antioxidants protect the skin from sun damage (the natural nemesis of smooth and beautiful skin), wrinkles, splotches, free radicals, and many maladies from harmful chemicals like cigarette smoke, which causes you to age far more quickly. But it isn’t just the skin that’s affected either.
When you’re under the influence, you’re likely to have bloodshot eyes from the low-quality sleep you’re getting. You’re more puffy and bloated than ever, and your hair becomes dull or greasy – either way, it’s not a great look. Embracing a life of sobriety can do wonders for your waistline. There are a whopping 150 calories in a regular beer, 100 calories in a dry wine, and 60 calories a piece for each shot of 100-proof liquor. To put those numbers into perspective, just three glasses of wine a night is the equivalent of eating two extra slices of cheese pizza. And when that becomes a nightly habit, those extra calories can really start to add up.
When breaking the cycle of addiction, you’ll slowly begin to see the positive benefits of sobriety on your appearance. Your hair becomes shiny again. You lose the bloating in your face and body, and your bloodshot eyes become pearly white. The longer you stay sober, the more your body will heal itself.
Your Life Becomes Meaningful
Many addicts can attest that they once led meaningful lives before the addiction. A sober living program for women can help you maintain sobriety and find more meaning in your life. You’ll be stronger for your sobriety and will find a new type of inspiration to draw upon. Recovery encourages you to find new meaning in your life. A treatment program like that at Women’s Recovery will connect you with people who can help you rediscover your life’s purpose again. You may have walked away from many things you once loved or abandoned important goals. Some of the meaningful choices sobriety offers include the following:
- Get your GED or start working on a college degree
- Open up a business of your own
- Get married and start a family
- Begin volunteering with an organization that you believe in
- Spend more time with people you love
- Become more involved in your church
No matter what you want to do, you can accomplish it with the proper support and tools. Sober living for women offers the chance to recapture what you used to love about life, setting some goals, and working on achieving them.
You Touch Upon Your Emotions
When you’re constantly drinking, you become numb to your emotions. Maybe, that’s what you wanted in the first place. It’s a well-known fact that an addiction to alcohol is often traced back to a need to numb negative emotions. The problem is, as you block out the bad feelings, you also block the good. The repressed emotions are still in you and affect you every time a certain trigger sets it off. At this point, your emotions may be all over the place. Drinking may calm you down, but the truth is that its effects don’t last forever, and you are still losing the ability to experience and regulate emotions properly.
Emotional instability associated with addiction often includes depression, anxiety, or another mental illness in disguise. No one wants to hear that they have a mental illness, but unless it is treated, the symptoms will persist. Many alcoholics suffer from what professionals refer to as co-occurring disorders. Women, in particular, are prone to self-medicating when their emotions seem beyond their control. Dual diagnosis treatment will treat both the addiction and the underlying mental health issues.
Your Health Improves
There are a lot of aspects of your health that go downhill when you’re not sober. You may feel lethargic and have no energy. Your sleeping and eating habits may be terrible, and you may not have the capacity to deal with negative feelings. Your body is telling you that you’re poisoning it, and it’s had enough.
When you’re sober, you will get a better quality of sleep and wake up feeling rejuvenated. Since your judgment will also be better when you’re sober, your eating habits will improve so that you won’t experience the discomfort of constipation or diarrhea. Your energy levels will rise, so you’ll want to get involved in fun things again. This means you may feel more up to participating in physical activities, including hitting the gym or hiking with friends. Your heart, mood, and waistline will benefit from increased exercise or physical activity.
As you get more active, your mental health will improve as well. Unchecked alcoholism can often lead to or aggravate mental illnesses like depression, anxiety, or other mood disorders. The bottom line is this: when it comes to your health, the message is clear—sober is better.
Rekindling Relationships
Once you’re sober, one of your essential steps to full recovery is to rekindle relationships. During your addiction, you probably made some errors in judgment because you weren’t clear or coherent. When you begin to reach out to people, you may be pleasantly surprised at how much compassion your friends and family have for you. We all need each other, and this part of being sober will allow you to see how loved and supported you truly are.
If you want to repair strained or broken relationships, you must approach them cautiously. Remember, you may have severely hurt some people with your behaviors and actions. It would be best to acknowledge that you may have done extensive damage. Some people may not be keen on opening those old wounds, and you need to respect their feelings. Having said that, there are some steps you can take to repair relationships that are important to you.
- Reach out to the people you want to reconnect with. Don’t wait for them to make the first move, even if you believe they were in the wrong. It’s up to you to extend the olive branch to them.
- Be honest and ask them for forgiveness. The fact that you have a problem with another person means that you were in the wrong somewhere along the line. They may expect you to make excuses or deny that you were at fault. Be honest about what you were going through. Apologize for what happened and ask them to forgive you. You may be surprised to see their willingness to do just that.
- Put the past in the past. Once you have asked for forgiveness—whether it was granted to you or not—put that event behind you. You need to move forward knowing that you are now making better decisions.
- Stay in contact with them. Your reconciliation is not a one-time thing. You must keep up your end of the relationship for it to work. It may take some time before they believe that you really have changed. By calling them or texting them regularly, they can see the change themselves.
Some strained or broken relationships may never be repaired and perhaps should not be rekindled if the person would put undue pressure or temptation on you to return to your old ways of drinking. A sober living program for women will introduce you to a robust support network of women who understand what you are going through. These women may well become your new best friends.
Contact Women’s Recovery to Learn More About Sober Living for Women
Sobriety will change everything in your life as you discover who you really are. The right kind of treatment can help you with withdrawal symptoms, teach you coping skills to deal with triggers, and a sober living program for women can provide continued support to help you maintain recovery and prevent relapse.
Women’s Recovery is an outpatient drug and alcohol addiction treatment center in Denver. We are dedicated to helping each woman who walks through our door get the help that they need. We offer 100% customized addiction treatment programs and plans for all types of addictions, and our addiction experts are always available to answer any questions or concerns that you may have. Our goal desire is to help you get sober.
Contact us at 833.754.0554 or reach out online to get started with treatment today. It will be a challenge, but it’s one that you will not have to face on your own.
