Addiction Sobriety Comes Down To Personal Responsibility
Saturday, May 29th, 2010Like many parts of life, anything worth doing is often challenging. In other words, don’t expect worthwhile activities in life to be a cake walk. You have to put forth some effort to really make things work. The same is true for drug or alcohol addiction recovery. To get the true benefits of change, you need to sweat a little bit first.
Personal Responsibility Means Doing The Hard Work
As human beings we can get pretty lazy sometimes. We get stuck in a funk, we manage to avoid responsibility, and then we don’t want to face it anymore. This is totally normal and something even the most ambitious person faces from time to time. Unfortunately, a person going through drug or alcohol addiction recovery may feel a bigger sting from this reality.
They have spent a good deal of time using drugs and alcohol to avoid reality and create a self-protective viewpoint of the world. They believe that they have everything under control, but reality would say otherwise. To be fair, many if not most alcoholics and drug addicts have had some pretty rough things going on in their life. Divorced parents, addicted parents, abuse and neglect, trauma – any of these things can feel emotionally overwhelming and oppressive to face truthfully. Whether they meant it or not at first, they ended up using drugs and alcohol to take the sting out of their daily lives. Eventually, the addiction stuck and they ended up creating more problems instead of making things better.
Personal Responsibility Is A Choice
It comes down to a choice – giving in to the normal feelings of not wanting to do hard work, or facing the challenge and taking a step forward. Like I said, this struggle is a normal human process. Anyone who faces a job they don’t like (but really need) faces this. Anyone with a baby getting up in the night (when the parent really wants to stay in bed) faces this. Anyone who wants a better life for themselves but isn’t sure how (and is a little scared to make change) faces this. A drug addict or alcoholic cannot escape this reality. The progress they make in their recovery comes down to personal responsibility.
Accepting Your Personal Responsibility With Addiction Recovery
Drug treatment is a great thing. Drug rehab programs can teach people in recovery so many coping skills, so many ways to challenge their addiction thinking, so many ways to deal with cravings. But what drug rehab cannot do is make a person take personal responsibility. Only the person in recovery can do that. Challenging? Yes. Difficult and sometimes looking hopeless? Absolutely. But then again, most things that very worthwhile, like a sober lifestyle, are worth a little sweat and personal responsibility.
photo credit: Donald Macleod









