Critical Mistake That Prevents Most People From Long Term Recovery

You've heard the saying, pride cometh before the fall. Well, when it comes to addiction recovery, I'm going to change it up a little bit and say that self pity comes before the fall. Of course, there are a lot of things that lead to relapse, but the biggest and last domino to fall usually is some sort of self pity. It's because all the stressors and all the events can't really make us relapse unless we find some way to give ourselves permission or justify or rationalize it. And the most common way to do that is some sort of feeling sorry for yourself thinking. Which is why in addiction recovery, recovery is so important to learn how to identify and combat this kind of thinking. Now, there are a lot of reasons why you can slide into a victim mindset when you're in addiction. Over the course of all of those months and years of battling addiction, a lot of things happen that lead us in this direction. First and foremost, our brain chemistry is a mess. It's like an emotional roller coaster in there, and everything's out of balance. So pretty much everything that's happening to us is brought in through this filter of our brain chemicals, which usually negatively impacts how we view and see our situation. Now, that's on like a biochemical level, but on a psychological level, there's a whole lot more going on here. Like, our self esteem feels like crap when we're in active addiction. And so it becomes easy to just beat ourselves up. We can almost eventually we just start thinking that's just who we are. And we can even let ourselves feel so bad about ourselves that we give up and quit trying. We're not going to do that anymore. But you can probably recognize that mindset on top of all that, usually when you have an addiction, you have a lot of what we call unmanageability. And that's just like chaos and drama and life difficulty. Now, yes, everyone has some chaos and drama and life difficulty, but when you have an addiction, you have like a way disproportionate amount of this stuff. You guys know what I'm talking about. It feels like nothing works right. It can feel like the universe is plotting against you. And so a lot of things are going wrong when you have an addiction. Because it takes so much time and energy mentally to keep this addiction going. Things in your life start falling through the cracks. You start missing responsibilities. You're definitely not bringing your a game. And in whatever relationships you have in your life, some of those people are probably getting upset with you too. So if you think about it. Your brain chemistry is off, you don't like yourself, your relationships aren't great. You're like, you're not bringing your A game to life. And when all of that's happening and you're still in active addiction, you spend a lot of your mental resources defending your choices around your addiction. So the internal narrative becomes one of self pity and resentment and rationalization and justification. And when that goes on for so long, it becomes like an automatic thought process. Those kind of thoughts actually turn into habits that are hard to break. Now we know when we overcome an addiction, we have to break the habit of using or engaging in that addictive behavior. But you might not have realized that you actually have to break the habit of that negative thinking that's been going on a long time. And it's not just going to go away by itself. So when you catch yourself falling back into that victim mindset and negative thinking, I literally want you to minimize mentally call yourself out and recognize that you're falling back into an old pattern. Now there could be something realistically going on in your life that's stressing you out or causing problems or some kind of unmanageability. It's not so much that we want to deny the reality of things, but we want to avoid getting so far in the pit that we can't problem solve or find solutions. Because when we get to that point, that's when we decide to do what we know how to do to make things better. Because it's when we get to that point that we make the decision to pick up and use again. We feel like there's no other option options. We feel stuck, we feel stressed out. And then before long, we convince ourselves that it's the only way to feel better about the situation. Recovery requires a lot of humility and willingness. Now when we hear the word humility, we sort of automatically realize that to be humble means you don't think that you're better than anyone else. But did you know that to be humble also means that you don't think that you're any worse than anyone else? So we're going to look at our life situations through a lens of humility, which is going to block that self pity reflex. And the next thing you want to do is start figuring out what you want to do about whatever the problem or stressor is. Because now that we're not in the habit of running and hiding from these things, we have to get somewhat proactive about dealing with them. Now occasionally, whatever's going on in your life, you either can't deal with right now or you don't need to deal with right now. As in like it wouldn't be the best choice. There are times when you need to wait to deal with things until either you have the right solution or you're in the right frame of mind or logistically things line up that give you that opportunity. So you can't always deal with it like immediately, but you want to have some plans or options. So the first question you can ask yourself is, can this problem be dealt with and when should it be dealt with? Is this something that I just need to hang on because it's going to pass and it's going to go away and it's really not going to be an issue forever, it's like a one time thing, or is this an issue that's likely to keep coming back my way if I don't deal with it? If it's one that's going to keep coming your way, you do need some sort of action plan to deal with it. And it may even take some trial and error, some different ways of trying to deal with it. But since you're in recovery, you're going to have the mental and emotional room and resources to think through the situation differently. And just by the fact that you've gotten yourself out of this victim mindset and you're getting into problem solving mode, you're immediately going to feel better because you're going to feel more empowered and in control of the situation that you're in, which is going to give you that energy to move forward and figure out how to make the situation better. No more just laying down and giving into it, feeling sorry for ourselves and then going out to use or engage in our addictive behavior to self soothe. That's not an option anymore. We're going to move forward and the more we do that, the more competent we're going to feel. And when that next challenge happens, it's going to feel even less intimidating.