Moving Beyond the Pain
When we’ve relapsed, many of us tend to focus on the negatives – the embarrassment, shame, and disappointment we feel, how defeated we feel in our recovery, how lost, alone and empty we feel. We’ve had high expectations for ourselves, and we feel as though we’ve let ourselves down. We’re afraid to tell our loved ones and everyone who has been supporting us through our recovery because we don’t want to face the guilt we feel for disappointing them. While it’s healthy to allow ourselves to feel all of these emotions so that we can move through them, we don’t want to stay so focused on them that we can’t allow them to help us grow. We want to learn from this experience and use it in our expansion and evolution. When we beat ourselves up relentlessly with guilt and shame, when we allow our relapses to make us hate ourselves, we’re not growing and learning from the painful experience. We’re not using it to teach us how to prevent relapse in the future. We’re not allowing ourselves to gain anything from what we’ve been through.
Learning Relapse Prevention From Firsthand Experience
We could instead choose to learn from our relapses and use them to help us grow. Our experiences with relapse can help us to prepare for our next stage of recovery and for the next time we try to quit. They can help us to deepen our connection with our inner selves. They can help us prevent relapse the next time around. We close ourselves off to this heightened learning and strengthened connection when we believe ourselves to be shameful, destined for failure, and undeserving of success and happiness. Looking at our relapses helps us learn more about what our triggers are.
Examining Our Triggers, Stressors, and Sources of Temptation
What relationships, habits, patterns, life circumstances and daily stressors are triggering for us? What different things upset us, cause us anxiety and stress, and destabilize us? What things knock us off our center? What things tempt us to use – such as seeing loved ones using their drugs of choice, or keeping an emergency stash of our drug of choice in the house? We want to ask ourselves these questions and look at the answers closely and honestly, even if they’re hard to admit, even when our instincts are to shy away from them. This process of self-exploration brings us closer to ourselves. It helps us learn more about who we are, as individuals and as recovering addicts. It allows us to take everything we’ve experienced in our recovery and use it to our advantage in our relapse prevention down the line.
At The Guest House Ocala, we have personal recovery experience and over 12 years in the recovery industry. We have helped countless people recover, and we’re here to help you too. Call 855-483-7800 today for more information. theguesthouseocala.com3230 Northeast 55th Avenue Silver Springs, FL 34488