When we’re working to achieve sobriety and stay on track with our goals in recovery, we can find ourselves totally overwhelmed with all of the different emotions that arise, many of which we’re feeling for the first time. We’re experiencing brand new things, the clarity of sobriety and how scary that can be because it forces us to be honest with ourselves, the confusion and overwhelm of trying to juggle all the different things we’re trying to accomplish, the newfound vulnerability and fragility we feel from exposing ourselves after years of hiding and suppressing ourselves. With everything we’re trying to navigate and work through, we can find ourselves struggling to keep up with all of it. Can setting intentions facilitate our healing work and help us to stay sober?
When we set intentions, we’re committing to get totally clear with ourselves on what we want in our lives, what we want out of our recovery, and how we want to go about manifesting healing for ourselves. The process of setting intentions invites us to be as specific and detailed as possible. Sometimes our goals can feel so lofty and insurmountable that they scare and overwhelm us. We feel as though we’re trying to take on too much, and that if we’re not careful we’ll just fall backward and fail. This can cause us to feel paralyzed, to lose sight of our goals, and to feel so defeated we give up trying. When we set intentions, we break down our goals into smaller, easier, more manageable pieces. We establish daily habits and create routines for ourselves. We build new lifestyles and behavioral patterns around our intentions. We turn our energy inward, focusing on caring for ourselves as we map out each action step we want to accomplish. We focus on making small, incremental changes in our lives, rather than leaving ourselves vulnerable to the inner turmoil we can feel when we focus on too many of our larger goals all at once.
By setting intentions, we make our commitment to ourselves that much stronger, and we reinforce that commitment by revisiting our intentions regularly and consistently checking in with ourselves on our progress. Having goals is important, but without the intentions, we commit to fulfilling on a regular basis, our goals can slip out of our grasp and feel too big to reach. Our intentions allow us to break them down and live out our goals in ways that feel easier and more natural to us, in ways that resonate with us, make sense to us and add to our happiness and inner peace.
Your new life starts today. Let Riverside Recovery be your support system as you do the work to heal. Call (800) 871-5440 for more information on our addiction recovery treatment programs.