Building Strength in Recovery Through Therapy
Drug and alcohol treatment helps you build a new strength in your recovery, allowing you to stay sober for a lifetime. Without resilience, long-term sobriety is almost impossible. The reality is that learning to fortify your character, even when you are tempted back to old habits, you are really learning how to adapt to the life that is now your future. Therapy can help you build in key areas, giving tools to navigate life with much more poise and composure, including:
Strengthening Life Skills
Resilience allows you to build stronger coping skills to deal with stress, triggers, and urges. As you learn to create new ways of doing life while sober. This might means engaging in healthy activities or leaning on your friends and family for support. You will begin to see just how much easier life can be when you are working through stress and challenges without substances. It’s as if you opened a box in the attic and discovered a tool kit that you never knew you had.
Creating Emotional Resilience
The healing process involves dealing with past trauma, old emotional wounds, and negative thought patterns that have been dragging you down. Emotional resilience is about being able to face and process those things and learning how to deal with your feelings in a healthier way, so you have the strength to move forward and take on whatever life throws your way. You will begin to see that facing what has happened to you doesn’t have to tear you apart, but can actually make you stronger.
Encouraging Flexibility
One of the positive side effects of building resilience as you work through recovery is that you begin dealing with changes and stressors in your life a lot more effectively. Resilience is about remaining flexible, being willing to change and adapt, and keeping a positive outlook even if your life is changing all around you. You find that learning to be flexible does not make you weak, but rather, it allows you to learn to flow with life without being dragged under.
Create Perseverance
Achieving long-term recovery from addiction is a lifelong journey, and resilience gives you both the strength and the determination you need to stay on that path. This strength will keep you moving toward your desires, so that you continue to have purpose, motivation, and drive as you gain momentum toward the life you truly desire. In many cases, you will realize that each small step you take is actually contributing to building something much greater than you ever imagined.
Building Support Networks
A strong sense of resilience also means that you are able to be brave enough to reach out to others and connect with them without fear of being rejected. Support networks, whether they are friends, family, peers, or professionals, can be a part of you moving passed addiction and staying strong in recovery.
Getting Back to God
It’s not just that you stay sober. Recovery is more than just putting one foot in front of the other. Recovery is the process of re-remembering who you were created to be. For many of us, that involves re-connecting with God in a real and meaningful way. Addiction has distanced you from your faith and your understanding of God. It has you believing you’re too far gone to return. In therapy, you will begin to imagine what it looks like to get back to God, without being judged. Slowly, as you are processing your recovery, you may notice that you are once again able to grow your faith in a loving God.
There are many ways that building resilience can help you in your recovery and therapy. When you learn and grow stronger through recovery, you are naturally creating a mindset that will help you to overcome challenges and work toward true and lasting sobriety. Ken will work with you to create a new life after addiction, one where you can have the freedom to choose who you become. If this seems like something that will be helpful to you, schedule a session on the calendar below. If you have any questions, please reach out, and I will help you decide if this would be a good fit for you.
