The Role of Forgiveness in Addiction Recovery
If you or someone close to you is struggling with addiction, it’s necessary to look at the role of forgiveness in addiction recovery. If you are just starting on your journey, it’s important to understand that addiction is often related to trauma, anger, or pain.
When individuals hold on to these feelings, they indulge in addictive substances to try and temporarily mask those feelings or find relief. Without forgiveness in addiction recovery, individuals are more likely to inflict unnecessary pain on themselves and others.
Forgiveness in Addiction Recovery
If you are in recovery or considering treatment for addiction, many of the individual and group therapy sessions you receive will start with an understanding of forgiveness, an assessment of the root causes of addiction or suffering, and coping strategies to forgive yourself and others.
The pain might still remain even after you have chosen to forgive someone else for the sake of your mental health, but you reap several benefits.
Restoring Relationships
When you forgive yourself and others, you learn how to repair relationships that may have been damaged because of addiction. Family therapy programs can help you work on feelings of mistrust, hopelessness, or anger in your personal relationships with partners or other close family members.
Boosting Self-Esteem
Forgiveness can boost your overall mental health. Forgiving someone doesn’t automatically fix your relationship with them. In some cases, you might have to leave the relationship where it is or cut ties. Nonetheless, self-forgiveness can help you redirect your energy to things that might be better for you, relationships that might help you instead of hurt you, and, in so doing, boost your mental health and your self-esteem.
Remove Anger
Choosing to avoid forgiveness in addiction recovery results in holding on to unnecessary anger and other negative feelings. Unresolved emotional trauma, resentment or a lack of forgiveness can affect conditions including:
- Depression
- Paranoia
- Panic attacks or anxiety
- High blood pressure
Addiction recovery doesn’t just focus on getting you clean. It focuses on helping you remove unwanted anger and recognizing the damage that this emotion can do. By continuing to avoid forgiveness and focusing on the anger or the pain, you provide the people or the circumstances that caused that pain more empowerment. Forgiveness in addiction recovery can do away with this harmful cycle.
LGBTQ Clients and Self-Forgiveness
Ritual Recovery helps our LGBTQ clients with the unique aspects of forgiveness in addiction recovery with special group therapy sessions and gender-specific programs.
Research indicates that clients in the LGBTQ community are more likely to struggle with stress, depression, and anxiety, particularly when they come out.
Self-esteem is very important in recovery. Self-esteem can impact:
- Personal views
- Mood
- Self-forgiveness
- Shame
In order to facilitate forgiveness in addiction recovery, LGBTQ services can provide clients with individual therapy that examines feelings of shame, how clients can forgive themselves, and, in doing so, how they can improve self-esteem.
Self-forgiveness is an essential path to self-esteem. When individuals are able to forgive themselves for their mistakes and forgive others, they can:
- Forgive people for anger or intolerance
- Forgive situations that involved discrimination
- Do away with feelings of shame
- Boost self-esteem
Discover How We Can Help You Take Steps Toward Forgiveness
At Ritual Recovery, clients can receive dual diagnosis treatment in Asheville for addiction and co-occurring mental health disorders. Using evidence-based practices, our teams provide holistic, individual treatment that involves family members and group therapy to aid forgiveness in addiction recovery.
Holistic care can provide coping mechanisms when you are struggling with feelings like shame or grief and working your way toward personal forgiveness. Clients at our trusted drug rehab in North Carolina might participate in things like:
- Art therapy
- Dance therapy
- Yoga
- Music therapy
- Stress management
- Meditation
- Adventure therapy
- Aromatherapy
- Recreation therapy
Forgiveness in addiction recovery is essential to breaking the habit of relapse and boosting your mental health and self-esteem. With the right programs, you can participate in services that help you focus on self-forgiveness and the forgiveness of others so that you can repair relationships and build a better future.If you are ready, call our team today to learn more about our North Carolina substance abuse treatment programs and to see how forgiveness can help you.
