Many of us struggling with addiction and mental health issues have developed strong patterns of negative thinking, and as we work to heal, we realize that our thought patterns have a significant impact on our ability to recover. Our negative recurring thoughts become our beliefs, and they become instilled in our consciousness, affecting everything from how we feel about ourselves to how we operate in our lives. Some of the negative thought patterns we default to are pessimism, catastrophizing, and cynicism, and they often are rooted in fear – fear we will fail at our recovery, fear we don’t have the strength to get better, fear we won’t ever be happy. We have serious doubts about our ability to get well. We doubt ourselves and our capacity for healing and transformation. We assume the worst will happen and default to worst-case scenarios. We’re cynical about sobriety, about whether or not people can actually achieve recovery, and about our own abilities. How can our negative thinking impact our recovery?
Negative thinking over time becomes our belief system. If we continually think we’ll fail at our recovery, we come to believe our success is impossible. If we repetitively think we’re not strong enough to get better, we’ll start to believe that, and we’ll constantly chip away at our own sense of self, our inner strength and resilience. We will attract the outcomes in our lives that we don’t want because we’re manifesting from a place of fear rather than confidence and assuredness. Negative thinking depletes our ability to have hope and optimism as we do the hard work of healing ourselves. It depletes our faith, in ourselves, in other people, in our ability to get well. We’re not giving ourselves the support we need to keep going. Our recovery brings up all kinds of mental, emotional and physical challenges, and when we don’t have our own faith and support, we’re working against ourselves. We aren’t motivating and encouraging ourselves. We become unconsciously self-sabotaging.
Our thinking is a powerful element of who we are and a huge part of the energy we create within ourselves. The energy of fear and negativity we’re carrying impedes our ability to manifest the outcomes we want for ourselves and to achieve the recovery we’re striving towards. Our recovery work will have to include transforming our thought patterns so that we can create internal energy of faith, resilience and inner strength with which to commit to our sobriety.
Riverside Recovery understands all of the emotional challenges of addiction recovery and is here to support you. Call us today for more information: (800) 871-5440.