Recovery Skills For Addiction (so you never have to live that nightmare again!)

In this video, we are going to cover the five most important skills for you to focus on during your first six months of recovery. That's five skills in six months. And I'm gonna put them in the order in which you should focus on them. For those of you don't know me, I'm Amber Hollingsworth, master addiction counselor and founder of Hope for Families Recovery Center. And it's our goal to make sure you have all the right information to beat addiction for good. So whether you're watching this video for yourself or because you're trying to help a loved one, make sure you're subscribed. We release information every week, and this is the same information that we tell our clients and our families every day at our treatment center. And I'm giving it to you right here for free. So the very first skill that I think that you need to focus on in your first six months of recovery, number one, is open. My goodness. The very first thing that you have got to wrap your head around is that you don't have all the answers. Hey, we deal with some pretty smart, pretty important, pretty successful people right here at Hope4Families, and they have all the answers in a lot of categories. I'm telling you. We deal with really good athletes, really smart business guys, really genius healthcare professionals. And they know a lot about what they know about. But when it comes to fighting addiction and alcoholism, you need to let go of the idea that you know best. And the reason is, is because addiction does not play by the normal universal rules and laws that everything else plays by. So decide who in your life that you trust. Whether that's your sponsor, your counselor, your treatment facility, your 12 step group, your recovery coach. Decide three or four people, five would even be better that you trust and decide. You know what? I'm going to listen to what they've got to say, and even if I think differently, I'm going to go with what they say. I used to have this good friend in rec and he got sober years ago, like back in the 80s, like back at the time where they used to actually have smoking meetings. Like they actually smoked inside the meetings. Can you imagine? I don't even know how you would breathe in there because everyone in recovery pretty much smokes cigarettes. And a little secret about this person, he came from like a pretty privileged family. So you can imagine he's a young guy, he's in the 80s, he's new, he's trying to get sober. He's going to these smoking meetings and guess what? His sponsor tells him he says your job is to clean the ashtrays out after every meeting. And you can imagine my friend was like, what who me? Clean the ashtrays out? Like, what does that have to do with recovery? He says the sponsor told him there is recovery at the bottom of those ashtrays. And you know what? His sponsor was right. You know why there's recovery at the bottom of those ashtrays? Because at the bottom of those ashtrays is humility, which is skill number two that I want you to focus on. Now my friend in the story, he couldn't have got to skill number two unless he was open minded enough to listen to his sponsor. So open mindedness will lead you to humility and V to me, they both sort of go hand in hand together. You know, during all that time you were actively using and drinking, you spent a lot of time building up these big walls, like giant thick, like 3 foot solid concrete walls of defense mechanisms. And those walls have absolutely got to come down. If you can show who you are in an authentic, humble and vulnerable way that is going to cause the people around you to connect to you. They're going to like. It is almost impossible not to like someone who's being authentic with you. And I won't go into it in this video because I've got some other videos on it, but the power and the healing that happens inside the context of your relationships, building meaningful relationships with people, that is biologically and spiritually the healing factor. And so the first step that you need to do to get those relationships in order is to learn to be vulnerable and humble. Shout out Brene Brown, we love you. At Hope for Families, once you're open minded enough to develop vulnerability and humility, you will then be able to develop the skill of honesty. Now this one is a stretch because in your active days of using and drinking, I guarantee you, you have somewhere along the lines lost the ability to be honest. Honest with yourself, honest with the people around you. In fact, most of my clients say, you know what? The first thing out my mouth is a lie. And I'll say, that's alright. It's almost automatic. It's like a reflex. When the doctor hits your knee, it just out before you can even think. And if you feel like that's you, you just find out you're lying. And sometimes it doesn't even matter. Like your family says, where did you eat lunch? And you ate at Taco Bell, but you say Burger King like it doesn't even matter. It's like an automatic reflex. If you find yourself doing that, just go right back around and say, you know what? I don't know why I said that. I just lied. That was ridiculous. I ate at Taco Bell. And when you get to the point that you can do that, you're actually going to be practicing skill number two, which is humility, along with skill number three, which is honesty. I hope you're beginning to be able to see that these skills actually build on top of each other. I want you to decide that no matter what, you are going to tell the truth. You're gonna have to let go of the consequences. You're gonna have to decide that you're not in control of the outcome anymore. It is just your job to be honest. And that's it. Now, I don't mean hurtful. I don't mean that you want to say things in a way that is hurtful to other people. I'm not talking about saying something like, oh, your haircut is ugly. That's not honesty. That's just being mean. You know what I'm talking about? So don't hide behind honesty as a reason to be mean. You know what I mean? Here. Stop trying to control everything and just decide that you're going to be honest. And when you couple honesty with humility and vulnerability, people will respond really well to that. But regardless of that, I want you to let go of that and you're just going to be honest for the sake of honesty. Which leads me to skill number four, which is distress tolerance. And the good news is, by the time that you get really good at being open minded, being humble and being honest, your distress tolerance ability is gonna go way up. Because along the way you're gonna learn that you can deal with difficult emotions. Feelings are temporary, they don't last forever. And I know when you're in the middle of them, it feels like you will always feel that way, but you won't. It's a temporary state. I don't care what it is, it is going to pass. And there is another solution to whatever it is other than drugs or alcohol, because I really can't think of anything that drugs and alcohol actually makes better. So learning to sit with uncomfortableness, learning to be okay when feeling not so great is going to be probably the most valuable skill that you can get. And you're going to get really good practice at this as you're being honest and humble and vulnerable. And all that leads right up to skill number five, which is patience. You know, this is kind of one of those rinse and repeat scenarios. And as you build one skill, it's going to build on and naturally lead to the next and to the next and to the next. And that last one is patience. Because you're going to practice those first four skills and then you're going to practice them some more and practice them some more. And if you will do what I'm telling you, you will get the results that you want. Now, people talk about the success rate of addiction treatment and the success rate of people beating addiction being really low. Well, guess what? That's not because we don't know what it takes to beat addiction. It's actually pretty clear. It's actually one of the clearest, easiest mental health problems to fix. The solution is clear. The problem is, is people don't want to do what it takes. And if you will do what I'm teaching you to do, you will stay sober, your life will get better, and you will ultimately get to the promises of recovery. Amber here interrupting your video to bring you a special bonus. You know, this happens to me all the time in the editing process. I'm watching back over the video and I'm thinking, oh, I should have said this or I should have said that. And this time when I was looking at this video, what noticed was these skills can come across as somewhat vague. And you might be thinking to yourself, okay, Amber, practice humility and honesty and open mindedness. But what does that mean on a practical level? And so, because these skills are so essential, I went ahead and typed up a practical guide where I give you some examples under each one of these skills on how to actually bring this into your real life. How do you practice humility? How do you get good at distress tolerance? How do you practice open mindedness? So I got it all typed up and ready for you. All you have to do is click the link in the description below and you can download that immediately for free.