No matter your situation, age, personality, or background, recovering from addiction is an often challenging, long-term process.
There will be moments you want to give up. There were will be times when waking up in the morning is the hardest thing you do.
So, the journey to moving on, letting go of your past, and forgiving yourself requires a lot of self-compassion and empathy.
However, fostering these two feelings for ourselves can be difficult.
Forgiving ourselves and learning to love the person we are takes a lot more work than we might realize, but doing so is important for changing habits and making a full recovery.
That’s why individualized, non-judgmental, and compassionate addiction care is far better for your long-term outcomes than standardized addiction treatment.
Empathy is an emotion that allows us to connect with one another by understanding someone else’s experience.
Sometimes mistaken for sympathy, empathy involves placing yourself into someone’s shoes and trying to see the world from their perspective.
As you can imagine, empathy is a powerful emotion for understanding others’ feelings, state of mind, and personal situations. And, is at the center of every effective mental health counselor, physician, and caregiver.
In fact, empathy is so important that a study from 2012 published in Psychology of Addictive Behaviors asserted that clients whose therapists had low empathy were much more likely to relapse or drop out of treatment completely.
On the inverse, clients whose therapists had high levels of empathy were associated with improved success rates.
The reason for this is that empathy centers on non-judgmental and reflective listening.
Empathetic counseling isn’t about simply throwing solutions at your problems, but is instead about working to understand the root cause of these problems. And then solving them together.
Through active listening and connection, empathy enables an addiction counselor to meet you where you are and begin helping you learn about yourself and how to approach the problems you’re faced with.
And, one of the very first steps in developing empathy for yourself is to both experience, as well as receive empathy and compassion from others.
When you’re recovering in a space and treatment plan that centers compassion, over time, you will start to build compassion for yourself, your future, and the people in your life.
While you might think otherwise, our brains are more inlined with our current, present life than it is with our future selves.
Even if we understand a behavior to be bad for our future selves, we still sometimes lean towards a “present bias”, which means we are less focused on long-term outcomes and more focused on immediate benefits.
Oddly enough, we can even associate our future selves as entirely different people than who we are right now. Even though we understand we are both our present and future.
However, developing compassion for yourself can make it easier to think about your future, your long-term goals, and help you reinforce the positive habits and mindset you want to build. As well as build willpower against actions that have negative consequences.
Of course, when you develop compassion for yourself and your future, you’re going to also be thinking of the people in your life who are there with you.
Strengthening our personal relationships and building deeper connections is only possible through self-compassion and empathy.
We believe that addiction is not a flaw in a person’s character, but instead a medical condition that should be treated with thoughtful care. We also believe addiction treatment should be accessible to everyone.
That’s why we offer individualized treatment plans and telehealth options.
