Learn To Trust Yourself. An Important Part of Recovery.

Learn To Trust Yourself – Addiction robs the person who is using of many things. The addict can often pay for addiction with his or her life at times. Most will lose their pride, time, conscious, emotions, and trust if the addiction does spare their lives. While life and time cannot be regained, time, pride, and control over emotions can be with practice. When most people finally make the decision to move out of addiction and into recovery the hardest battle is learning to trust. This applies to trusting self and others. Each person may experience this in different ways and at different times during recovery. However, lack of trust will always come into play at some point.

First you must learn to trust yourself. This is no small task as your judgment skills while using are flawed by whatever substance you chose to put in your body. When you enter recovery you must learn to once again use your core values and trust your own judgment to start making better decisions. Sometimes we get caught up in the drama of life and circumstances and forget we are capable of making positive decisions for ourselves. This is something that must be overcome as part of recovery. You can rise to the challenge of trusting yourself and earning the trust of others. This is where core values come into the mix. Core values are those things that you believe as true. These are your fundamental beliefs about what is right or wrong. Addiction allows people to forget their core values and beliefs because the focus is always on the next hit or drink. Once in recovery these core values can be reestablished and used to further recovery and rehabilitation. To reestablish these values a list is often helpful. Write out ten to twenty things that you believe are fundamentally true and acceptable. Is honesty best and necessary? Is breaking the law something that is unacceptable for everyone? Write out what is true for you as a way to remind yourself of what you believed and adhered to prior to addiction.

As these fundamental or core values are accessed you will continue moving forward in recovery. As you move forward there will be daily decisions that need to be made and your core values will likely nudge you in a certain direction. These gut feelings are the things you should listen to when making a decision. You must learn to trust yourself. If you do choose incorrectly, then deal with the consequences without giving up.

As you learn to trust yourself, your core values you will gain strength and insight. To begin the process answer these three questions: What is important? What do you enjoy? And What frustrates you? The answers to these questions will be very personal and different for everyone, but they hold the key to staying in recovery, especially in the beginning. Knowing what is important to you will guide you through the rest of your life. Knowing what frustrates you will help offer insights into your triggers and help you know what to avoid or when to relax and unwind. Finally, knowing what you enjoy can allow you to understand how to unwind. This is all part of learning to trust yourself. Once you gain self trust you can rebuild trust with others. You have the ability to better yourself or become your own worst enemy, which will you choose?

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