People will often tell you while attending inpatient treatment not to take on too much too fast in your early recovery. I tend to disagree with that. What I will say, is in the beginning, take on and take in ALL of the areas of the program that you can. Take on those service commitments, take on your step work, take on the coffee dates and the hangouts. Say yes to things. Once you feel solid in your recovery and your life, take on the rest of the world. Here is why: There is nothing more dangerous to your program, other than just not working one, than becoming bored in recovery. In line with HALT Have you heard about the acronym “HALT”? It stands for: Hungry Angry Lonely Tired It is often thrown around in rehab and in the early days, but the idea behind it is that when you are feeling squirrelly or irritable, check those areas first. If you are like me, you will consider picking fights with police when you are hangry. Low blood sugar? Beats me, but you can bet your bottom dollar that my fiance carries around snacks with him to protect himself against my hanger fits. The other ones all make just as much sense, and can easily be resolved. But what about the silent assassin? The one that got most of us in trouble even before we started drinking and getting high? That assassin is boredom. The Different Types of Boredom When I speak of boredom in recovery, I want to make it very clear that there are multiple layers of boredom here....
Have you experienced those moments in your recovery where it feels like everything is going wrong? On the other hand, have you experienced moments where it feels like you are exactly where you are supposed to be? In all of these moments of recovery, the ups, and the downs, there should be one constant carried throughout, gratitude. At the beginning for me, gratitude felt like just another word that reminded me of weird family holidays, akin to faith, trust, and God. I understood what other people meant when they said it, but I couldn’t remember the last time I had actually felt or experienced a deep sense of gratitude myself. So how does one go about practicing gratitude in recovery? What does it mean to you, how do you bring it into your daily life? First of All, What is Gratitude? I’m going to do it, I’m going to bring up Brene Brown. She is, at the very least, a behavioral analysis who has been studying guilt, shame, trauma, and joy in human lives. She has done a lot of research into people who have experienced severe traumatic events ranging from being in a war, losing a child or loved one, victims of genocide, to addicts and alcoholics. A common thread that she discovered was present throughout all of her study participants, was that they all remained grateful for what they had, what they lost, and what they have now. The dictionary definition for gratitude is, “the quality of being thankful; readiness to show appreciation for and to return kindness.” In the early days of our recovery, it can be...
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