Practice Might Not Make Perfect But It Will Change Your Recovery

Recovery is a practice in which we continually progress. That is why we often say progress, not perfection.

MINIMIZE DISTRACTIONS FROM YOUR RECOVERY

What could distract you from staying clean and sober? It’s a little complicated. The truth is anything can distract you from your recovery. Recovery is about more than staying clean and sober. Recovery is about adhering to spiritual principles as a program of living and finding a way to build a healthy lifestyle which supports your ability to stay clean and sober. That being said, you will be able to discern more and more over time what is a distraction from your recovery. For example, you might have distractions like obsessions about work, codependency in relationships, greed about money, neediness for material wealth- all of these things are distractions on the surface. Recovery is an inside job. When you neglect the inside work you have to do in recovery you get distracted from your recovery. You forget that you’re inside you exists and needs to be nurtured, loved, as well as taken care of. Minimizing the distractions to your recovery doesn’t mean you have to only focus on your recovery all the time, because that isn’t sustainable. It does mean that you continue practicing noticing what does distract you for long periods of time and makes you feel shaky in your recovery.

TAKE TIME FOR SELF CARE

When talking about practicing a task, a sport, a hobby, or a challenge, you hear advice about the necessity of taking breaks. To some people’s dismay, humans aren’t machines. We can’t just keep going and going. One of the unseen causes of relapse is becoming too exhausted to self regulate because you don’t take enough time for self care. The secret to sustained energy and motivation is taking the breaks you need to care for yourself compassionately.

VISUALIZE YOUR RECOVERY IN THE FUTURE

In recovery, you hear sentiments like take it one day at a time a lot. These sentiments aren’t just quips and cliches used for brainwashing or mind numbing. Quite the opposite, they are meant to stimulate your mind to remember to keep it simple, another popularly used term. Sometimes, to stay motivated in your ongoing practice of recovery, you need to look a little into the future. You don’t have to take everything into consideration at once as that can cause a lot of anxiety. One of the terms used in recovery, fake it till you make it, applies. Imagine what your life, clean and sober in recovery, will look like next month- in three months, six months, maybe a year. If you can’t imagine how it will look, imagine how you would want it to look. What would the happiest, healed, clean and sober version of yourself look like? What would you be doing with your life?

Enlightened Recovery Solutions offers partial care programs for dual diagnosis to men and women seeking transformative recovery in their lives. With an integrative approach to treatment, our programs harmoniously fuse clinical, alternative, and holistic therapy. For information, call us today at 833-801-5483.