The Voices of Recovery

The rule is easy you have to make a choice to be positive. The reasons for your negative feelings has been wrapped up and hidden in the world of your addiction. So as you move forward this will get easier.

Likely the best part about being positive are the effects it has on you and everyone around you. That may seem cliche and sound silly, but you get back exactly what you put into this life. That rule never applies more than it does to the power of positive thinking. As you feel more positive, you will see and find more positive in your life.  It creates a domino effect in your life as those around you feel and become more positive.

The power of positivity is far reaching when it comes to building a new life in addiction recovery. Sustained focus on happiness helps people to live life to its fullest.

Let’s look at the perks of positivity.

• Positivity has been shown to boost the immune system, meaning your body will fight off infections better and you stay healthy longer.
• Positivity has been shown to actually reduce inflammation.
• When we are more positive we feel more energetic, thus we do more things we enjoy in life.
• When we are positive we are more likely to achieve our goals.
• When we are positive we are better equipped to deal with stress.
• Positive people attract positive people, this can create more positive relationships.
• Positivity can help you live longer, happier, and more fulfilled life.

These things are all important to understand in recovery because:

• Living and feeling more positive will reduce the risk of relapse on alcohol or other DOC.
• Positive mindset and energy will give you purpose and happiness in recovery.
• By being positive you attract positive this creates likeminded positive thinkers and feelers in your recovery support network.
• When you are in recovery and the challenges of the process step up, your positive feelings will help guard against overwhelming stress or despair.
• Maybe most beneficial this gives you a look at what life can feel like outside the world of drugs and alcohol, it can be the mortar in your brick by brick foundation of recovery.

Okay so living a happy and positive life is a choice and we can make it, but it often takes a conscious effort. Here are some tips for living happily & more positive.

• Look for the positive. I can tell you from experience that I have found ways to laugh and have fun at some seriously f-ed up situations. This helps remind me that the situation will get better and there is a light at the end of the tunnel. So consider this when you look at a tough situation. What is positive about the situation (sometimes you will really have to use your imagination)

Is there an opportunity in this situation to do somethings more positive? Instead of beating yourself up and looking at the mud you are in, figure out how to get out of the mud.

• Work on more positive relationships. This is another easy one for me, I surround myself with positive people close in my life, I don’t judge, but I make a choice to not engage with or stick around with negative people whenever possible. Most of the time in my circles I am the negative one, something I need to work on and pay attention to always.
• Slow it down. You notice when you are stressed and negative things seem to spiral and we make bad choices and snap decisions. Best advice, slow it all down. Enjoy the moment you are in, whether you are driving, eating, talking, showering, hey just recovering. Take your time in the process. We have been programmed since are early youth to always hurry, just take a breath for hell sake!
• Give back. Find service, nothing will make you feel better faster than doing good deeds for someone else. This is the best kept secret of all the passionate purveyors of positivity they give of their money, their time, and themselves often and with passion. This is a key in recovery that goes far beyond drugs and alcohol. Can’t figure out how to serve? Just be helpful, become an amazing listener, and spread Joy.
• Give yourself permission to be you. One of the hardest parts of anyone’s life is STEPPING INTO THE LIGHT OF WHO THEY REALLY ARE. So many of us have taken on the judgement of others or worn masks afraid of who we really are. The messages we tell ourselves shapes our fear and what we believe about who we are. Our gift and our blessing in recovery is the ability to shed the persona and become us. The men and women we once set out to be. Giving ourselves permission to be is a critical step in positive thinking.

The way that you think will impact the way you experience the world – and it will impact your recovery from addiction. Taking positive action to generate positivity will help get you there

Now with all these fancy words and a lot of hard work you might get through a few hours or even a day and you will be fine, but with-out shifting and permanently changing your thought process it will be short lived. For me the feeling of being and remaining positive are sometimes so foreign in nature that not being able to feel positive becomes like part of the break down. So let us use the resource Buddah’s Brain to walk through some solid practice. Please follow me to the next page.

From Chapter 6 (Buddah’s Brain) with commentary from a reader (me)

• It is important to cool, or eliminate your causes of suffering and to warm up the causes of your happiness. Intentions is a powerful way to do this, intentions involve strength applied to clear and appropriate goals, sustained over time. Most of the time our intentions take over and work in the background without our awareness. Keeping our intentions pure is part of a solid recovery strategy and will benefit us in ways we cannot even imagine.
• The key to pure intentions is to move our emotions towards the principle not the outcome. So if you are doing good for someone else, you need not be attached to how they receive it.
• Become aware of how you feel during these times and recognize where the feelings came from, this will give you power to begin calling these emotions up when you need or want to experience them, they also get added to the bank of emotions. It will also add to a measure of your confidence, giving you the ability to trust your own emotions as you move further in recovery.

Listen this is a pretty loose and liberal translation of the Buddha’s Brain teaching, the book goes deep into the Neuroscience behind the emotions feelings and behaviors. So if you want to know more, read the book.

The basics fundamentals of positive emotions once again start with you. I would however like to point out that it is a practice, something you will need to work on every day. Knowing the stuff I have shared and using any part of it will not help rainbows shoot out of your ass.  Although it may increase the chances. The fastest way to a positive outlook is to stay in the moment. Don’t worry about the past cause you cannot change it, don’t worry about the future it is not here yet, and just focus on right now today because you have that in the palm of your hand.

The Chris and Shane method, an overly ridiculous game that ended up changing both of our experiences at Alpine.

I have told the story before about how Shane and I would get out of or avoid doing our chores. It started to make us look a bit lazy and it started to effect the house. So we were being bitched at by the house mother and her assistant resident house mother. We decided we needed to help. This did not sit well with either of us. The “real” house mother made a suggestion that we try to make the best of it, and frankly we set out to punish her for the suggestion, so as we did our chores we started making all these ridiculously over the top statements about how great it was, how much we loved doing chores, and how we appreciated the chance to service. We went on and on and on.  So when we were done and finally had a little time we discussed what happened. See while we were pissed off and angry when we started we were laughing and having a great time, along with most of the other residence by the time it was over. This was pretty wild to experience and we started a little social experiment to see how far this would go.  It actually become a fundamental part of the process for us, and we leaned on it countless times after that day. The process was really simple. Take whatever the situation you are in and make it positive, then turn it up to crazy positive.

So it is not just;

“great to be in rehab”

It is;

“unbelievable to be in this amazing rehab nestled in the armpit of beautiful Alpine Utah on such an amazing and beautiful day”

Not just;

“we are happy to be helping”

But;

“we are so thrilled to be lending our abilities to the amazing people we are in this amazing rehab with, seeing how amazingly quick the work goes when we are a team, this is awesome.”

Not only;

“we are blessed to be going to a meeting”

But more like;

“This rehab van is the most amazing vehicle, it holds all of us safely and play the best most moving music, we are close to our friends with a super capable driver, headed to the best meeting in the area for the place and the time, I cannot wait to get there and listen and share and this is just so unbelievably fantastic.”

Hopefully you get the idea, anyway we took what we had seen and learned and felt and broke it down in Buddah’s Brain. See it turns out when you verbalize your positive emotions your brain actually jumps on board along with your confused ego and starts making everything you are going on about as true as possible. This is really the most overtly easy thing you could ever do, and in all the times we have done it we have not seen it fail. The key is to never let the sarcasm come in, you have to fight your hardest to be as sincere as possible. Yes sometimes it will be a fight, like riding around in a freaking rehab van, but you can do this, and doing it in your head is not enough. Your brain has to form the words so your ego and the egos around you can marry up to them.

Being positive is worth it, look at all the benefits I have listed and all the ways it can help, negativity is the byproduct of fear and stress, if you cannot get past it then you need to work on it.  See your way to let this be the shifting point in your recovery. Yeah this shit is hard, who cares, because you can do hard things.