Amber HollingsworthRecovery Conversation Simulator, Amber's Recovery Practice Lab · Interactive learning tool trained on Amber methodoloy

The Danger of Self-Blame in Addiction Recovery

20 Sept 2024 · 1 min

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0:45

A short talk by Amber Hollingsworth about how self-blame and harsh self-judgment in people with addiction make recovery feel unmanageable, increase feelings of powerlessness and shame, and push people back toward denial and substance use; the speaker also notes that expressing concern or remorse indicates movement from pre-contemplation to contemplation in change stages.

Chapters

If someone is so distressed and they're beating themselves up and they're telling themselves they're a horrible person, they've ruined everything, what it does is it almost makes it feel completely unmanageable. It makes it feel like it's too big, like they're not capable or competent to change. And so you feel stuck. You have that feeling of powerlessness, which only really makes you want to run and hide back under the anesthesia of whatever substance or addictive behavior that you're using. It just makes you want to stay in denial about it. If someone is talking to you at any level about it, it means that they have a sufficient enough amount of shame, guilt, remorse, regret, all that stuff to realize that they have a problem. So they're already showing you that they're coming out of pre contemplation into contemplation.