Making the decision to get professional help can be one of the hardest things we’ll ever do but also one of the best things we can do for ourselves to improve our chances of recovery. Entering treatment requires a level of courage and self-awareness that can take us a long time to develop. Very often we resist seeking out help because we’re afraid. We’re scared of pushing ourselves out of our comfort zone. Even though our addictions wreak havoc on our lives, the patterns we’ve grown accustomed to can become familiar to us, and in a way comfortable, because that is all we’ve known, sometimes for years of our lives. We’re afraid of failing, of giving it our best try but relapsing and not being able to cope with sobriety. We fear the withdrawal process and all of the pain, discomfort and difficulty that can come with it. Making the important choice to enter treatment is one we can’t make until we’re truly ready. For some of us, that time comes once we’ve hit rock bottom and our lives have become unmanageable and unbearable. For others, we had family, friends or other loved ones intervene on our behalf, worried about how much more harm we might do ourselves. For some of us, treatment is court-ordered and we don’t have much of a choice. What we always have a choice in is how we will approach entering treatment. Will we have an open mind and have faith in the process? Will we be inspired by the countless others who have successfully recovered? Some of us will be so filled with fear, doubt, cynicism and pessimism that we sabotage our efforts and those of the people trying to help us. Choosing treatment and completing it successfully require that we put our full energy into the process, that we really get behind it, that we give it our best effort. Without doing so, we increase our chances of relapsing. Recovery is about intention. What are your intentions behind seeking treatment? Are you only doing it because someone in your life has given you an ultimatum and you don’t want to lose the relationship? Are you doing it because other people have told you that you should, but your heart isn’t in it? Any time we try to get help for someone else and not for ourselves, chances are we’re doing it for the wrong reasons. We’re afraid of being abandoned or rejected, and we’re trying to maintain the relationship. Again, we’re afraid of pushing ourselves out of our comfort zone, rather than being truly ready to make actionable changes in our lives. When we are ready, there are resources and people waiting to help us.
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