Escaping Addiction: Find Strength Within Yourself

And I mean that even if you're talking about yourself, you don't need to tear yourself down anymore. Because I promise you, addiction has already done enough of that. What you need is you need to build yourself up enough to realize that you do have the strength to conquer this. This video is brought to you by.

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If you discover that you or someone that you care about has an addiction problem, one of your first instincts is going to be to try to figure out why and how this happened. You want to figure out, how did I get to this crummy situation? And in most cases, there are a lot of reasons that contribute to how someone gets in a situation like this. Many of those reasons may not be their fault. But spending too much time on this question can actually be very, very counterproductive. For one, you're spending all of your energy focusing on the problem and like, no energy focusing on the solution. And secondly, there's no way to really, for real know exactly what caused this situation. Now, of course, you can look back in anyone's life and find some bad things and some difficult things that could definitely contribute to this problem. But you know what might help you more is to look at yourself or your loved one and instead of digging for what's wrong, make the decision to look for what's right. I'm not saying that because I'm encouraging you to ignore the addiction. But what I am saying to you is I want you to look inside yourself, look inside your loved one and find those qualities or those experiences that give you the strength and the ability to conquer this problem. You really only need to focus on the problem long enough to determine that, yes, this is actually the problem. And then as soon as you figure that out, you need to start thinking about what is the solution. Now, there's a lot of people out there that have sort of an old school thinking about it. And that thinking is, well, we have to tear you down and then build you up. And that's the only way to get someone into recovery. But I disagree. You don't need to tear anybody with an addiction down. The addiction will definitely have taken care of that for you. And I mean that, even if you're talking about yourself, you don't need to tear yourself down anymore because I promise you, addiction has already done enough of that. What you need is you need to build yourself up enough to realize that you do have the strength to conquer this. So what I want to encourage you to do is I want you to look deep inside and find where your strengths are. Are you as stubborn as a mule? Hey, that's a good strength because you can be stubborn as mule and get out of this problem just the same way. You were stubborn and you got into it. Do you have that relentless, I won't give up kind of personality? You know that one, that, that same aspect that can push you towards relentlessly pursuing recovery? Are you a creative kind of person who can come up with unique creative solutions? Are you a brave person? The kind of person that when other people would get scared and run away, you're not scared and you push forward? Are you a person that has a lot of faith or positivity to help you get through the hard times? Or maybe you have a lot of empathy, which can actually help you have empathy for your own self and for the people around you that your addiction is also impacting. Maybe you're a hard worker. You're the kind of person who doesn't give up any of these traits. All of these traits are assets that you can use to get yourself out of this hole. These are called determining factors. It's these factors that determine the outcome for any given person trying to find recovery. Why do some people find recovery and other people don't? It doesn't take long to look around and see that people that get better oftentimes have addictions, maybe even worse than other people. So that's not the thing. You can see people get better who have been through the most horrible, awful, traumatic, terrible things and yet they still get better. The difference is all of those things that contributed to the problem, those are called contributing factors. And yes, those things contributed to how you got stuck in this crappy situation. But that does not determine your outcome. Your outcome is determined by what's inside of you. Contributing factors are external, determining factors are internal. And I guarantee you, you have a lot of these strengths inside of you. You just have to find them. This is what we do in our strength based coaching program. I really wish that more recovery programs would focus on what is going right. Not because we're ignoring what's going wrong, but because ignoring these assets and tools is silly, right? These are things that are right here that you've had all along that you can pick up and use at any point now. I'm not talking about like old school, starting out life, Stuart Smalley looking in the mirror and giving himself affirmations. You have to find real, true things about yourself. You have to look back and find where you did make it through difficult situations. These have to be real, honest things, because otherwise you won't believe them, which means you won't use these tools and it won't work. At the risk of sounding like I'm on the wizard of Oz, I want to say you have the power all along. Now let's find it. Let's access it. If you can't find it and you're struggling to find it, then I'll actually help you find it. We do this in our strength based coaching program. I'll put a link in the description below in case you need a little help with that. In the meantime, I've put together a collection of videos that's all about how to conquer an addiction. So I want you to watch this next. I'm going to put it right up here for you.