Amber Hollingsworth (Put the Shovel Down) explains why people with addictions often cannot self-soothe: they experience emotional roller-coasters and withdrawal, use substances as their primary (often sole) coping skill, accumulate extra life stressors as addiction disrupts relationships/work, and commonly struggle with shame and low self-esteem. She explains that coping and resilience tend to return once addiction is addressed (after an initially difficult stabilization period), offers a simple behavioral tip (deal with small problems promptly) and points viewers to a nightly recovery checklist and other resources in the video description.
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Not too awful. Long ago, one of our viewers asked me a really good question about why people with addictions, drug, alcohol or any addiction, really can't seem to self soothe. The truth of it is there are actually several reasons for this and I'm going to go over those in this video along with telling you how to fix that issue. For those of you who are new here, welcome to Put the Shovel Down. I'm Amber Hollingsworth and this YouTube channel is all about helping you understand the science and psychology of addiction so you can get your family and your life back on track. Get back out there and live the life that you want to live. I want you to know you are not powerless. You do not have to hit rock bottom. And there are many things you can do to help an addicted loved one. If you want to be back in control of your life, subscribe to this channel and I'll make sure you are always five steps ahead of addiction. And don't forget, hit the little bell if you want access to the bonus episodes. Okay, so the first reason people with addictions, drugs, alcohol or whatever, have trouble self soothing or coping with things, is because they're on an emotional roller coaster. They're alternating between feeling really great and feeling really terrible. And even when they're not feeling terrible, they're worried about feeling terrible. So they're constantly on this treadmill, are just trying to keep their head above water. And a lot of the time the person is in an actual withdrawal state. Now, when you're in withdrawal, you don't feel good, you're really sick. If you haven't experienced this before, then I want you to take just a minute here and think about the last time you felt really sick. Maybe you had the stomach flu, maybe you had strep throat, whatever it was, but you felt really terrible. Now in that moment when you're laying in bed and you just want the misery to stop, think about how well you coped with things. When your kids needed something, when your boss or your work was calling you, asking you for some kind of silly something, think about how you felt inside your head. I bet your emotional response just wasn't as great as it normally would be. Because when we're sick, when we don't feel good, when we're in distress, our coping naturally goes down because all of our emotional resources are just being put toward trying to kind of keep it together. So if you throw any little thing on top of that, it feels like completely overwhelming and it will put you over the edge. And even if you've never had an addiction. You should be able to relate to how difficult it is to cope with regular life stuff when you're really sick or really distressed. Now, another reason why people struggling with an addiction have such a hard time coping with things is because they've been using the addiction or the substance to pretty much cope with everything. It becomes your one and only coping skill. Kind of like all your eggs are in one basket sort of thing. And after a period of time when something bad happens, you just engage in the addictive behavior to fix it. When something great happens, you engage in the addictive behavior. When it's just a regular, everyday, you engage in the addictive behavior. And I like to say coping, it's like a muscle, like any other muscle you have, if you don't use it, you lose it. Essentially, you stop practicing all of your other coping skills and you rely solely on the addictive behavior or substance to help you manage and regulate emotions. Now, another reason why people that have addictions struggle to handle everyday stressors is because they have a lot of them, probably more than most. Because when you're struggling with an addiction, like I said before, you're on that treadmill and your whole life is revolved around that addictive behavior. And the longer it goes, the more of your other life stuff, like your regular life stuff, starts to fall through the cracks and your relationships fall apart and you're not doing as good at work and you're not keeping up with your schoolwork. And so you get dug into this hole that just gets bigger and bigger and bigger by the day. And, and ultimately you're just overwhelmed by all these stressors. You don't have the coping skills to deal with them and you probably feel sick most of the time. And another reason why people who have substance use disorders just don't have a lot of resiliency, that's our ability to overcome challenges, is because they really dislike themselves, have a really strong sense of shame, guilt, poor self esteem. A lot of times, even if they may act cocky or they act like they got it all together deep inside, they have all these secrets and they feel like they're a bad person even if other people don't know it. So that very low sense of self also contributes to the difficulty they have coping with situations. That's a lot of bad news, right? Well, the good news is, is that the ability to cope with situations, the ability to build resiliency, actually comes back fairly quickly once you start addressing the addiction. Now, I'm gonna be honest with you for the first few weeks, you're gonna be kind of a mess. Your brain chemicals are gonna be stabilizing and everything's gonna be difficult. And in those first couple of weeks, I usually ask family and friends just to give you a little extra grace period and not throw too much on you during those time, during that period where you're trying to get back on your feet because you're gonna be grumpy, you're gonna be irritable, and everything's gonna feel a lot harder. But once you get through that period of time, things start to get a little and you start to feel better about yourself, which then helps you to build that resiliency. And you start using those coping skills again and you start learning how to deal with those difficulties and you start digging out of that hole of problems that you've built. And slowly, step by step, you dig out of the hole of addiction. And in the end, when you beat addiction, you're going to actually have more resiliency than most people, more ability to cope than most people, because you're going to have to have built up such strong muscles to dig your way out of that hole. You're going to be even more equipped to deal with life stressors. So I know right now it feels hard, and if you, if you're not sober, but you're thinking about getting sober, it might even feel impossible. But I promise you, it's not. People do this every single day, and you can do it too. One of the very first, easiest steps you can take is not to add more problems to the pile every day. So start dealing with little things as they happen. I actually have this really cool nightly recovery checklist that's just a little PDF that gives you a list of questions to ask yourself every day that will help identify things that could be happening in your life that you need to deal with now while they're easy, so that things just don't build up on you. I like to say it's kind of like, you know, if you eat something and you wash your cup or you wash your glass or you put in the dishwasher right then keeps everything nice and clean. If you don't and you just pile it all up in the sink for days and days and days, and then you go in there and it and stuff's been piled in over two weeks, it's going to take you a long time to get through that nastiness and dishes and by then the mess is worse and there's grossness and the crud is like stuck on the dishes going to take you twice as long. That's why if you deal with it one at a time, life will be much easier. So I'll put a list to that nightly recovery checklist in the description below along with a link that gives you access to lots of other resources that might be helpful. And up next, I want you to watch this video because it's about how to start to improve those relationships which is another big piece to feeling better about yourself, to having more mastery over your own emotions and your environment and it will keep you on that road to recovery. I'd like to send a big heartfelt thanks to all of you who help support this channel. Your likes, shares and donations are helping us spread the message of recovery and without you this wouldn't be possible. Now this next video has been hand selected to go right along with this one and don't forget to check the description for additional resources.
