Awareness Leads to Recovery

“No amount of self-improvement can make up

for any lack of self-acceptance.”

Robert Holden, Be Happy

   In his book, The Addictive Personality, Craig Nakken says “addiction on its most basic level, is an attempt to control and fulfill the desire for happiness.”  And indeed, every addict wants to end their great unhappiness. Problem is that few addicts are aware of their true source of unhappiness.

   We mistakenly think our misery is about many things, such as our inability to find Mr. or Ms. Right, or our inability to make things right between family members, or our inability to find that “right” job or “right” place to live.

   In truth, once we enter recovery, we are made aware that the source of our great unhappiness is US!

   Every addicts suffers from tremendous self-loathing. Many of us have long hated ourselves and we’ve taken every possible opportunity to demean ourselves. Our negative self-talk has weighed our souls down with worry and misery. And it has created a bottomless pit inside our souls; one we’ve tried hopelessly time and again to “fill up” with people, places, events and objects.

   There has been only one thing missing from our lives and our search for happiness— and that one thing has been US! We have spent a lifetime treating ourselves like we aren’t good enough for anything— including love. And so we have worked hard at depriving ourselves of the great self-love we have long needed. We have used unkind words and hateful behaviors against ourselves. Some of it is so ingrained that we aren’t even aware of how mean we have been to ourselves.

   Recovery begins with awareness. Today we are aware that we have been our own worst enemy. Today we are learning that we indeed engage in ugly self-talk and we are beginning to understand just how frequent and devastating it has been to our well-being.

   So our first task in recovery is to learn to accept and love ourselves exactly as we are. This means we must identify and be vigilantly aware of all negative self-talk, and we must work at replacing it with words of kindness toward ourselves.

   Addiction hasn’t been our primary problem. Our addictions have been symptoms of the much deeper problem of self-hatred. Success in recovery relies on success in practicing self-love. Those who master self-love, master their addictive behaviors.

   How? Well, the more we accept and love ourselves, the less emotional pain we are faced with each day, thus the happier we are. The happier we naturally are through self-love, the less we need to “act-out” in addictive ways.

   Our addictive behaviors have developed as a means of medicating away our bad feelings about ourselves. So the better we feel about ourselves, the less we need alcohol or drugs or shopping or chocolate or a gambling high to make us feel better. We are already “high” on self-acceptance and self-love.

   Recovery is the process of learning to love ourselves. But as Robert Holden says, no amount of recovery meetings or counseling or reading will benefit us if we are refusing to practice self-acceptance.

   Self-acceptance and self-love are the keys to healthy recovery— and eventually to being reasonably happy in this life on a daily basis.