GETTING BACK TO THE BASICS OF ADDICTION RECOVERY

From time to time you may find that for one reason or another, you have lost focus on keeping your recovery your number one priority. It happens.

Once you realize that you have lost focus of your recovery the best thing you can do for yourself is to get back on track as quickly as possible. The quicker you do something about it, the easier it will be.

But what do you do? Where do you start? The answer: Get back the basics.

There were certain things that you did when you first entered into addiction recovery which kept your main focus on your sobriety. It could be that you are missing one or all of these things:

Start Talking - The sooner that you are open and honest with people about how you are losing focus on your recovery, the easier it will be to get back on track. Whatever form of sharing and identifying with others that you have chosen for yourself, you need to get back to that being a regular routine for yourself.

Start Reading - If you are anything like me, a huge part of your very early recovery involved you reading addiction recovery books. Re-reading these addiction recovery books is like giving yourself a refresher course on your addictive thinking patterns.

Keep A Journal - I blog now, but in the beginning I kept a very personal journal which I wrote in several times a day. I was brutally honest and I wrote down all of my feelings and fears as a way of examining how I was doing. Also as a way of expressing myself and getting it all out of my head.

Stay In The Day - taking things "one day at a time" had become a way of life for you in the beginning. This, however, can be really easy to lose sight of. Get back in the habit of staying in the day. Make your goal each day to do the best you can for that day. If you do this, you will never have regrets about things you didn't get done and you will never dread the future out of the fear of things you didn't get done in the past.

Reconnect With Your Spirituality - A lot of times when I notice that I've lost focus on my recovery, I find that it is my spirituality that goes first. Different people have different ways of getting back to their spiritual selves. Mine involves reading a certain book that puts things into perspective for me. Every time I read this book I am reminded all over again what it feels like to have spirituality in my life.
All of these things are what worked so well to get us where we are today in our recovery. It's not always easy to stay perfectly on track with all of these things that make up our recovery. It's very understandable, it takes a lot.

I feel that losing focus on your recovery can mean that you have veered off the road to recovery and are now headed down the path to relapse. As we have discussed before, relapse begins way before using any substance. I believe that losing focus of your recovery may be the very first relapse warning sign. That is why when we notice it, we must correct it.

When we realize that we are lacking in any area, we shouldn't get down on ourselves. We are human, therefore we are not perfect. We need to be understanding and offer encouragement to ourselves.


Taken from "What Winners Do"