For many of us, a major block in our recovery is how closed off we are to healing. We don’t believe it’s possible for us. We think recovery is an impossible ideal that we can’t attain for ourselves. We might have seen everyone around us struggle with relapse, unable to maintain their sobriety for any length of time. We ourselves might have experienced relapse more than once, which has contributed to our feelings of defeat and despair. Many of us then shut down to the idea of recovery, and we resist it and avoid it. We push it away and reject it, believing that we don’t deserve happiness, believing that recovery is just too hard and that we don’t have what it takes to succeed. We close our hearts and minds to any tools, resources and people that might be able to help us. We stop being open-minded and optimistic about our recovery and our lives as a whole. How can we become more receptive to recovery?
Closing Ourselves Off to Healing By Practicing Negative Habits
When we shut down and close ourselves off, just as with any other thought pattern or emotional response, we’re practicing specific habits and perpetuating them by doing them repeatedly over time. In this case, we’re practicing thinking thoughts of defeat. We’re practicing allowing ourselves to feel disheartened. We’re practicing having a mentality that is pessimistic, cynical, negative and skeptical. We think in terms of worst-case scenarios, and we catastrophize. All of these patterns reinforce our addictions and mental health issues because they’re fueling our negative thinking, one of the most common elements in our challenges. When we think negatively, we’re living, feeling, operating and manifesting with an energy of negativity. This energy impacts everything in our lives, including our recovery. We’ve developed the habit of being closed off, negative and unreceptive to healing.
Consciously Developing New Habits to Open Ourselves to Recovery
To turn this around for ourselves, let’s practice new habits, of thinking positively, of being open-minded, and of allowing ourselves to feel our emotions fully without shutting down. This means allowing ourselves to feel defeated, disheartened and disappointed when we feel these emotions arise, but keeping our hearts open and connected to our emotions rather than blocking them off. It also means moving through our emotions rather than staying stuck in them, becoming incapacitated by them, unable to move forward. To help ourselves do this, we can actively practice thinking thoughts that are positive, optimistic and hopeful. We can proactively practice cultivating our feelings of joy and gratitude. We can repeat affirmations, write life mission statements and use visualizations as tools to help ourselves with this. We can consciously develop habits to be openhearted and receptive, to replace the habits we’ve been practicing that make us closed off to our healing.
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.
theguesthouseocala.com
3230 Northeast 55th Avenue Silver Springs, FL 34488