Being open and honest about your addiction story is both a powerful and critical part of one’s recovery process. Although it can be difficult to open up to others and admit past failures, the act of verbalizing both the high and low points of your addiction and sobriety can have a tremendous impact on your recovery and also give hope to others seeking sobriety.
Opening up and revealing a significant part of your life can make you feel vulnerable and even sacred of potential rejection. These feelings can be daunting and exhilarating, knowing you beat your addiction and so can others. Helping others by sharing your addiction story can give you the added push and desire to continue to stay on course with sobriety.
How Sharing Your Addiction Story Helps Your Sobriety
Addiction greatly impacts specific parts of the brain that help control and manage an individual’s emotional healthy, impulse control, recollection of memories along with building of habits. According to Amphetamine Risks, sharing your addiction story has numerous benefits, some which are included in the following:
- Sense of freedom
- Reminder about mistakes
- Build strong relationships
- Builds self-confidence
Often times, even when looking back or reflecting on their past, recovering addicts feel intense moments of shame and embarrassment from their past mistakes. Thinking about one’s emotional distress could trigger both emotional issues as well as increase one’s cravings. However, exposing one’s recovery story in a supportive environment helps bring greed as well as positive emotional feedback from others. This sense of freedom can be both rewarding and exhilarating.
Verbalizing one’s addiction recovery story can help remind an addict of her past and how far she has come. This may help lower her risk of relapse and repeating the same mistakes. Although some may think that forgetting about the past is most beneficial for recovering addicts, it’s also important that they remember the mistakes they made that took them to the point where they sought help. When examined appropriately, an addict’s past can help her continue to make good choices and prevent her from making the same poor decisions as before. Overconfidence is often a contributing factor to relapse, but by sharing one’s story it can help addicts remember the steps they took to end their addiction.
Addiction often impacts relationships in extremely negative ways. This impact can cause recovering addicts to feel isolated and alone. Sharing one’s addiction struggles and sobriety triumphs early in a relationship can help others understand what is needed from them in order to maintain the relationship. This can help recovering addicts build strong relationships or even help repair old relationships by discussing the addiction and allowing everyone to voice how they felt during the addict’s addiction struggles.
Recovering addicts, especially in the early stages of recovery, often find themselves suffering with low self-esteem and low confidence. This can affect the daily choices they make as well as the individuals they choose to surround themselves with. These decisions ultimately have the ability to affect the addict’s sobriety as well as affect his or her chances of relapse tremendously. Remembering the road he took to get to the better life he is living now can be the reason he continues to make healthy choices.
Sharing your story can help inspire others in ways many addicts might never have thought possible. It just takes one person to care about another to have an effect, and by helping others find a way to achieve and maintain their sobriety not only helps them but helps you as well. Forming healthy relationships that do not revolve around drug use and that actually support healthy living can tremendously help an individual’s self esteem, emotional health and physical health. These effects are great enough to continue to inspire one to stay motivated and make healthy choices so that they continue to have these relationships.