One of the emotional habits we fall into when struggling with addiction and mental illness is a tendency to give up responsibility for our feelings. We blame other people for how we feel. We blame our addictions, our depression, our anxiety and any other issue we might be dealing with for how we feel. We think our emotions are out of our hands and impossible to control. We don’t realize that we actually have much more power over our feelings than we think we do. At any moment we can change the course of our thoughts and direct them in more positive and uplifting ways, thereby changing how we feel exponentially. When we give up responsibility for our feelings, we’re actually doing ourselves a huge disservice.
Being unable to take responsibility for how we feel means we’re at the whim of any circumstance, situation or problem that might arise. Any argument can be the catalyst for uncontrollable fury and rage, that we can then claim was out of our hands. Any source of anxiety can become a panic attack we can’t calm ourselves down from. Anything that makes us sad can send us free-falling into another depression. We aren’t grounded or secure within ourselves, we aren’t centered in our truth, and we’re left vulnerable to any outside influence rather than being solid within ourselves.
Empower Yourself
We often don’t take responsibility for our emotions because we don’t realize that we have more power over them than we think we do. Sometimes we give up emotional responsibility and autonomy because we’re afraid to really deal with our emotions honestly, and we want to avoid having to feel them all together, so we try to push them onto anyone or anything else we possibly can. We scapegoat other people and situations. We don’t see the role we play in our own mental and emotional health. We don’t take steps to heal ourselves, to learn from our emotions, or to work with them. We allow them to work against us, in what can often be our subconscious tendencies toward self-destructiveness and self-sabotage.
Coming to the understanding that we have more responsibility for our emotions than we thought we did can be overwhelming. We might resist this new realization, because it means we have to do more work within ourselves to monitor, regulate and direct our emotions rather than blaming other people and circumstances for how we feel. It can feel like a lot of unwanted pressure and work to realize that if we’re feeling unhappy, or angry, or stressed out, it’s on us to process how we feel and then choose different thoughts and feelings accordingly. The emotional work we do is worth the effort, though, because with time we’re able to have much more control over our mental and emotional health, and the reward is in how much better we feel on a daily basis.
At The Guest House Ocala, we are uniquely equipped to help our guests heal from trauma-induced substance abuse, process addiction, anxiety and depression in a safe, comfortable and confidential setting. Call 855-483-7800 today for more information on our treatment programs.