Recovery from Addiction: Rediscovering Yourself and Your Strengths | Recovery in the Pines
If you’re in recovery from addiction, you’re taking the first steps on the road to a new life. One of the things to address that lies at the root of where you find yourself now are the feelings that led you to your addiction or addictions. You may think it was the circumstances you were in at the time that started you on your path to addiction, but really, it was about how you felt about yourself in relation to those circumstances. Life is always about your relationships, and the primary one is your relationship with yourself.
Letting Go of Your Crutch
Fear of failure, the pressures of life, feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt, feeling rejected or misunderstood, a sense of overwhelming limitations, – whatever the basis, you reached for some illusory relief. Your “crutch of choice” has likely affected your health and relationships with your loved ones, your work and other major factors in your life. Recovery from addiction means freeing yourself from your self-destructive habits and thoughts and learning new life skills to replace your crutch. These life skills are real, and can truly help you to become the real you, the one that you may have lost sight of in the past or maybe even the one that you never really gave yourself a chance to discover.
Learning about Yourself
Once you have decided to take the first steps on the road to your recovery from addiction, you are embarking on a period of adjustment and new self-assessment. In amongst the therapies you will be given at an addiction treatment center, you will be encouraged to find your own strengths. This is a time to learn about who you really are, and who you can become. You may feel that your life is a train wreck, and there is nothing left worth having, but there is. Don’t let the choices of your past drain your energy moving forward. Find the goodness within yourself and build on that. Think about what you have been good at and what you would like to do with your life. Focus on developing your talents. Sometimes you don’t even need talent, just the desire to learn and develop skills you may not have known you had the ability to master. There are no limits other than the ones you place on yourself. You can change how you see yourself and feel about yourself. Focus first on your relationship with yourself, and then you can work on your relationship with the world.
Sifting through Your Life
When you are in an addiction treatment center you will be encouraged to change your life so that you can remain sober. Keep whatever is good and wholesome that might remain from your old life, and discard the rest. Start with a clean slate as much as you can. Let go of any baggage that holds you in a place that is negative, and start to build your life on firm foundations. Let go of negative habits and negative thoughts and replace them with positive ones. Embrace positive thinking, which may be new to you at first, and let the positive thoughts ease out the old thinking which has to make way for the new.
Strengthening Your Relationship with God
Now is an important time to think about your relationship with God, and how your faith in God can support and guide you. Whatever has happened, no matter how bad things got, God forgives you and continues to love you. It is time to learn to love yourself as God does … and forgive yourself as God does. Move on to your new life with hope and determination, knowing that your source of support is from God. God wants you to succeed, to become the best you that you can become and to share that with the world. God is always there for you, no matter what. Now is the time to learn to rely on God.
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Albert Black is the founder and CEO of Recovery in the Pines, the premier Christian-based, extended-care, addiction treatment center, located in Prescott, AZ, offering holistic wellness for drug and alcohol dependency.
For more information about Recovery in the Pines, go to its website at: http://recoveryinthepines.com/ or contact Albert Black by phone at: (928) 308-4311 or email at: albertblack@recoveryinthepines.com
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