How do people make the decision to enter drug and alcohol addiction treatment? It’s an incredibly hard decision, one that means transforming your life to achieve a very different future. It’s never easy, but one thing is a critical force behind the entire process: hope.
At The Ranch at Dove Tree, our 60-day residential recovery track will include hope as one of several core themes we believe are critical to resilient recovery. During the week, we’ll talk about how hope gives you the ability to know that things can – and they will – get better.
Hope Is a Critical Part of Daily Life
Navigating today’s world is stressful for everyone. What you say, do, think, and experience can suddenly change, leaving you with fear, worry, and anxiety that’s hard to control, and it happens in just a moment. Yet, hope is a critical component to achieving goals, no matter the area. When we have it, we can:
- Create goals to steer life in the direction that is valuable and fitting to your goals and life expectations
- Work towards mental and physical well-being during difficult times
- Cope with stress even in the most difficult of times
By fostering a sense of hope, or a belief that any situation can improve, we create a way for our energy to focus on positive outcomes.
Think of hope as a buffer. It sits between you and the challenges you have, such as addiction and dependency, family difficulties, financial strife, and frustrating health battles. Hope doesn’t take away any of those challenges, but it does give you the tools you need to clear a path towards getting there. Hope is a catalyst for positive change because it promotes mental health growth and healing.
How Hope Plays a Role in Addiction Recovery
It’s easy for someone to say that you can “have hope” that things will get better. Putting those words into action is much more challenging. During treatment, you’ll learn a range of strategies for fostering a sense of hope.
A part of it comes from cognitive behavioral therapy. This type of talk therapy encourages you to change the way you think about situations. Instead of seeing nothing but the bad, we learn how to acknowledge the bad but then find some level of good in it. This is important because automatic thoughts, or those you have immediately after an experience, are reflexive. Without even realizing what’s happening, we interpret events and create a negative view. By changing this process, we can see the potential positive outcomes.
How You Can Incorporate Hope in Your Addiction Treatment Journey
Once you decide to enter drug and alcohol treatment in Lubbock, you are already fostering a sense of hope. Consider the following ways you can culture help during the treatment process.
Set Goals You Can Achieve
Create goals that are measurable and specific, but also realistic and achievable. They need to have a timeframe attached to them, too. By creating goals, you clear your mind to work towards them. You know where you are heading.
Hope in itself can support action. It gives you a sense of power and desire to strive to see improvement. Even by achieving small wins, those build up over time and encourage you to take on new challenges and bigger goals.
Focus on Gratitude
Another core component of the addiction recovery journey is focusing on gratitude. When you are grateful, you are spending more of your time thinking about the positive aspects of your day and life. Even if you can only make a list of 10 small things you are grateful for, you’ll create a sense of mental well-being by showing that gratitude. This can restore your ability to believe that things can be okay and even really good.
Practice Acceptance
There are things you cannot change. You could spend your time dwelling on those unmovable objects and let them define you. Or, you can acknowledge what they are, recognize the loss that comes from them, and then accept that this is the way it is. Then, you can put more of your time and effort into building a better future for yourself based on what you can change.
Engage in Holistic Practices
Supporting your mental and physical health through addiction recovery is also done through holistic therapy. For example, yoga helps you heal from addiction on a physical and spiritual level. We also encourage you to focus heavily on mediation and mindfulness. Holistic practices like these help you to focus on the positive energy in your life. That supports the ongoing nurturing of your mind and body.
Focus on Hope and Getting Help for Addiction
If you’ve spent a lot of time wondering “if” you can take the step towards healing or if it will even matter, give yourself a small slice of hope right now. By taking one step towards recovery by contacting The Ranch at Dove Tree, you’ll be creating an opportunity for hope in your future.
