Recovery goes through peaks and valleys, growth periods and plateaus. If you are feeling stuck in your recovery, ask yourself these three questions.
- What are your values? When we aren’t living according to our values, it can really bring us down. Suppose you really value fairness, honesty, and transparency but you work for a company that scams people all the time. Our values play into every area of our lives because they are what matter to us. When we were drinking and using, we didn’t really abide by our values. Most often, we were blatantly denying our value system because, we weren’t valuing ourselves or our lives. In recovery, we’re living by a different story. We get uncomfortable when we aren’t living in alignment with our values because our lives have value now. We value our time, our mental health, our energy, and our experiences in life. If you examine your values closely and find that some areas of your life aren’t living up to those values, it is time for a change.
- What are you passionate about? Passion is defined as a “strong and barely controllable emotion”. We get really passionate about a lot of things- like how we can barely control our excitement to eat food when we are hungry. Passion applies to our recovery by inspiring us. For example, we have strong, strong emotions about being sober. We have learned we have to become passionate about our recovery in order to make it a living part of our lives. Passion returns to us in our recovery. We get to discover what it is we really care about, what turns our brain on and excites us- because it used to be drugs and alcohol. Some may call it a high expectation, but people in recovery know it is a symptom of a second chance at life. If you aren’t living passionately, it doesn’t feel like you’re living much at all.
- What are you doing to help others? A lot is given to us in our recovery. We pay to go to treatment, but we gain so much more than our money’s worth. We are given people’s time, energy, compassion, and knowledge. We gain from mentors and peers who have traveled the path of recovery before us. In an even bigger sense, we’ve been given a second chance at life. There’s no guarantee of survival in addiction. When we make it through to treatment and come out the other side in recovery, it is a remarkable accomplishment. We are encouraged to give back to others by offering them our experience, strength, and hope for making it out of addiction. If our lives are feeling less than inspiring it might be because we haven’t given back in a while. We need to be of service daily to help someone out in a way that helps them and helps our recovery.
When you change your story, you change your life. At Oceanfront Recovery, we are helping people change their story every day from the despair of addiction to the promise of recovery. For information on our residential treatment programs, call us today: 877.279.1777
