Addiction recovery is often a brutal process that never seems to end but there is a link between your resilience and your sustained success in recovery. Building resilience is a crucial skill in navigating the unpredictable road of recovery. It empowers people to face setbacks and stressors with strength and determination. But how do you build resilience for long-term recovery? Explore these strategies that can help pave a path toward building resilience along the recovery journey.
Embrace a Growth Mindset in Recovery
Here’s the thing, resilience is rooted in a growth mindset. If you’re unsure of what a growth mindset is, it’s the belief that abilities and coping skills can be developed over time. It can help you view mistakes and obstacles as learning opportunities and things to grow from rather than things that happen to you. In recovery, this means understanding that setbacks are not permanent failures, but rather parts of the learning process. Every difficulty encountered is a chance to gain deeper insights into personal triggers and coping strategies, fostering adaptability and strength in the face of adversity.
Embracing a growth mindset also means nurturing problem-solving skills and perseverance. Instead of avoiding challenges, individuals learn to engage with them, assessing what can be done differently in the future. This approach builds a repertoire of effective strategies and insights, crucial for navigating the ups and downs of recovery. Believing in the potential for personal growth and improvement instills a sense of hope and determination, essential for building resilience and maintaining focus on long-term recovery goals.
Develop Stress Management Techniques
Stress is an inevitable part of life, especially in recovery. Developing effective stress management techniques is key to building resilience. Practices such as mindfulness, meditation, and regular physical activity can significantly reduce stress levels, enhancing your capacity to cope with recovery challenges. Additionally, in addiction therapy, you can lean on your therapist or counselor to help you integrate mindfulness, breathwork, and relaxation techniques into your life so you can utilize them as stressors arise.
Stress management doesn’t have a one-size-fits-all solution.
What works for one person in addiction recovery may not be as effective for someone else. That’s OK! Use this journey as an opportunity to explore stress management techniques and use the ones that work best for you.
Foster Self-Compassion in Addiction Recovery
When was the last time you cut yourself some slack when you messed up? Self-compassion is a critical aspect of building resilience – especially in recovery. It involves treating yourself the say way you’d treat a friend during a difficult time, a failure, a setback, or a negative self-realization. Does that mean you let yourself off the hook when you’ve hurt someone or let them down (including yourself)? No. It means you take accountability for it, apologize, and recognize that you’re human. Self-compassion gives you the opportunity to grow from negative experiences in a gentle way. It can also help you outline a new way of doing things because you’re more gentle on yourself.
In recovery, people often struggle with their feelings, especially guilt, self-blame, and shame. Self-compassion also helps you cut back on self-critism and develop a positive mindset. Those feelings of self-blame and self-criticsm are often linked with a higher likelihood of relapsing. Self-compassion teaches you to be more forgiving of yourself which develops into treating yourself with kindness. All of that can help increase your self-esteem because it will reduce your negative self-talk and self-perception. Forgiving yourself for past mistakes and learning from them can transform guilt and shame into powerful motivators for change.
Ask for Professional Help
You’re human and recovery isn’t a linear process. Whether you’re actively in a treatment program or you’re maintaining your recovery by attending meetings, at some point you might find you need professional help. Addiction therapy can be instrumental in building resilience because you’re working with a mental health professional who can help provide more tailored strategies that address specific challenges you’re facing.
Your recovery journey is going to have setbacks and bumps in the road.
It might feel like you take four steps forward and two steps backward, which can feel deflating and overwhelming. Seeking help from a therapist who specializes in addiction therapy can help you work through those challenges in a healthier way. As you overcome those challenges, you’re developing more resilience strategies that will help you for years to come.
Set Achievable Daily Goals
If you just thought “Oh no! Goal setting - blech!” - hear me out. Have you set a list of things you want to do in a single day? It can be a list you created for work or for reminders of things that need to get done like swapping a load of laundry. It feels really good when we cross items off that list, right? Approach your daily goals in the same way. While everyone should set goals for themselves, setting daily goals in recovery gives you something to focus on and look forward to. Plus, when you set small, achievable daily goals, you are building your self-esteem which helps you believe in your own capabilities.
Daily goals don’t have to be big - they should be small and simple like a daily 30-minute walk, going to a recovery meeting, or making yourself a healthy breakfast. The more often you achieve those goals, the higher your self-esteem grows. As you build confidence, you’re more likely to use your resilience to work through challenges as they come up because you believe in yourself.
What’s Your Next Step?You’ve made it this far, so where do you go next? Here’s the hard truth: you make choices every day and that’s no different when you’re in addiction recovery. Where you want to go next is entirely up to you. Most of these strategies are simple enough to implement on your own but they require you to take a giant leap into shifting your thinking. It starts with your mindset - are you going to have a positive growth mindset or a fixed mindset? That choice is yours and yours alone.
Building resilience in addiction recovery is not a linear process; it requires patience, effort, and a willingness to adapt. Just like everyone else, you’re going to have setbacks but how you deal with those challenges is a decision only you can make. But, by embracing these strategies, you can develop a robust framework to handle the highs and lows of their journey. Remember, the path to recovery is a marathon, not a sprint, and each step forward, no matter how small, is a testament to your strength and commitment. |
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