Coming home

There’s going to be a discharge summary of some kind. It’s basically getting discharged from a hospital: here are your prescriptions, here’s what you’re going to need to do, here’s where your follow-up appointments are.

Most of these programs are also going to have you make some sort of schedule for your first stretch home, before you leave. Take that part seriously; the section on free time below is why.

IOP stands for intensive outpatient program: an hour to a few hours, multiple days a week, for some period of time. It basically continues the program without the residential or partial hospitalization setting.

The tendency, when you step down, is almost a sigh of relief. I’ve got more freedom. The gap here is that all this extra freedom gets used for non-useful purposes.

We’ve been at treatment for anywhere from one to three months, and everyone else in our lives hasn’t. It’s challenging to reintegrate into life.

And here’s the thing: we don’t want to reintegrate into life. We want to live a new and better life, around maybe not all, but at least some of, the people we were around before. That takes a little getting used to.

Especially if you’re not immediately returning to work, you’ve got all this free time, and you’re still fairly fresh off of addictive behavior. If we don’t have something we’re occupying ourselves with, and we’re just left to our own thoughts, they’ll typically drift back, early on, to places we don’t need to be.

My sponsor always tells me the mind is a dangerous playground to be on alone. That’s often true, and it’s what the schedule your program has you make is for.

Whether IOP is in your recommendations, and how many days of it. What your discharge summary requires, and when. What your days look like before work starts again. And when the monitoring contract shows up, which is its own page.

Those genuinely vary. The strangeness of the first week home doesn’t vary much at all.