What makes up a good recovery plan? Let's take a look:

1. Getting through stage one

First, you need a plan to get you through stage one recovery. This is the initial stage in recovery when you are detoxing from the drugs themselves and are looking to string together a few weeks of sobriety. You are transitioning from a life of drug and alcohol addiction into the shock of living without self medicating all of a sudden.

Some people need more help than others with this initial phase. Many will have to go to a medical facility to help them detox from the drugs or alcohol. Others will also need short term residential treatment in order to establish a firm footing in sobriety. This stage is not about living the rest of your life in sobriety. It's just about getting clean and sober and getting your bearings so that you can start thinking clearly again.

Many people struggle to get clean and sober and never find successful footing in this early stage of recovery. The solution for this is to step up your efforts and attack the problem with increasing force. This eventually means living in a long term treatment facility if nothing else will work.

2. Formulating a strategy

In this case, strategy means the same thing as philosophy. The AA philosophy can be summarized from the 12 steps as: "Find God, clean house, and help others." There are other philosophies out there that can guide people to success in recovery. The creative theory of recovery has 3 strategies that are quite powerful in their simplicity: "Caring for self, networking with others, and personal growth."

Each of these 3 strategies are broad and universal in that they can be applied to our day-to-day decisions. Caring for ourselves is important from a holistic standpoint in both short and long term sobriety. Networking with others can be especially critical for support in early recovery. And the push for personal growth is needed for a sense of accomplishment and the building of valuable self esteem that can be an insurance against relapse.

3. Transitioning to holistic living

In stage one recovery, the goal is only to string together a sufficient period of sobriety so that we can get our bearings, start thinking clearly, and start to work on transitioning to a holistic approach to recovery.

This holistic approach to recovery is about much more than just spiritual growth. Instead, it is a strategy of treating the whole person when considering addiction, and striving to make progress in a number of different areas, including physical, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual areas.

This becomes increasingly important as we progress in our recovery and accumulate more and more clean time. Tactics for staying clean become routine and automatic and the real enemy becomes complacency and a lack of holistic growth. That's when you know you need to push yourself to grow in new areas and start thinking outside of the traditional "recovery box." Exercise, quitting smoking, meditation, emotional balance, and educational pursuits can all be examples of holistic growth in recovery.

To the newcomer, these things might not seem to be relevant to staying off of the drugs and alcohol. But in long term sobriety, we can see clearly that a lack of growth in these and other areas can eventually lead to relapse.