How To Love Yourself More In Recovery
For most people going through recovery, its a very painful time and often discovering feelings of fatigue and many raw emotions not yet dealt with before can feel wearisome and over whelming in the beginning. Sometimes its easy to forget that the real goal is not just to get sober, but to love yourself first, and respect yourself enough to want to get sober.
One of the best ways to learn to love yourself more through the process of recovery is to discover what makes you, YOU! Being in recovery itself often allows you the time and energy to do that as it often means that you’ve hit “rock bottom” and maybe don’t have a lot else going on accept your recovery activities. I like to take this initial period of recovery to ask folks to work of remembering or discovering what their unique qualities and talents are or what they imagine them to be and start working on those as well as any sober activities and assignments you are given by sponsors.
Eliminating self criticism is the second best place to create a space inside of yourself for love. Every time you catch yourself doing negative self talk, try to replace it with something positive about yourself. Before you know it you’ll be feeling down right balanced! How can you bring yourself down if you counter it with something fantastic about every time! Before you know it you wont have many voids where you feel empty enough to say something mean to yourself, you just wont believe yourself.
On that note, trust yourself. If you are happy, acknowledge those emotions, if your sad, feel those feelings and work through them. Let your feelings sink in so you can work them out! If you ignore your true feelings, they are going to go away, they will just come out another day. Knowing what your feelings are is also a guide for where your thoughts are. if your feelings are negative, your thoughts are negative. Thoughts can be changes and your feelings will follow.
Being kind and positive towards yourself is always a great way to use action to feel more love for yourself. For instance, praising yourself in front of the mirror before leaving the house is empowering. Sales people are taught this in sales courses throughout their careers to support themselves before standing before people daily who may give them negative feedback or tell them “No”. This helps to pump their self esteem before they even get a “No” so that if they do, it wont effect them detrimentally. Confidence must come from within to have persistence through outside conflict.
Spiritual growth is the answer to the least amount of conflict in your life. Growing spiritually involves connecting to your internal self which helps you to better understand others, which then grows compassion and allows you the ability to connect more deeply with others, which then ultimately is the cause of peace and fulfillment. If that isn’t growing your mind, nurturing and loving yourself, then I just don’t know what is!
Sobriety and self love are a one day at a time gift, and well worth it every day.
