Recovery programs tend to focus heavily on triggers, coping skills, and support systems. This all matters and is critical to maintain sobriety. However, one area that is often overlooked, and one that is often at the core of a person’s ability to stay sober, is how a person feels about themselves when no one is watching.
Self-worth is not just a magical idea that lives between the pages of a self-help book. It’s the difference between viewing a relapse as a confirmation of all that’s wrong with you or as just a hiccup along an expected course. It’s what causes a person to treat themselves like an enemy or to forgive themselves like they would forgive a friend for messing up.
Why Self-Worth Becomes the Foundation
In a person battling an addiction, self-worth was likely stolen from them long before they ever picked up a drug or substance. It could have been a childhood filled with feeling like they never measured up, a childhood filled with trauma where they felt their needs never mattered, or it could be as simple as a developmentally-appropriate parent with limited capacity to show affection.
The addiction often arrives to fill that need, albeit temporarily. But then when it’s time for recovery, the core belief about self-worth remains. If you feel deep down that you’re not worthy of good things, sobriety feels like another burden to carry.
But when self-worth begins to take root and someone feels they deserve good things, the entire act of recovery feels different. It’s not an exercise in deprivation anymore; it’s an exercise in recovering something worth having again. For many, working with an addiction counseling service that deals with the issue of addiction, as well as self-worth issues, results in recovery outcomes that actually work because they have a proper foundation.
What Changes if You Value Yourself?
So what changes when someone going through recovery begins to realize their worth?
The first thing people experience is a change in how they deal with mistakes. Every recovering addict has a moment where they slip and fall, make a bad decision or just don’t measure up to their own expectations. Without self-worth, these events tend to become catastrophic. The voice inside your head turns nasty, and the only way to numb the pain feels like slipping back into the familiar embrace of your substance of choice.
When self-worth is in the mix, however, mistakes still hurt, but they do not obliterate. There’s room to process what happened, why it happened and learn without everything crashing down around your ears. Self-forgiveness is not letting yourself off the hook; it’s responding to yourself as you would want to respond to someone you care about who messed up.
Your relationships also get an upgrade. People who usually beat down their self-worth also allow themselves to be treated badly, stay in bad relationships with people who affirm their negative views of themselves and spend time around people who would call them out on their issues but won’t redeem them. However, when self-worth develops, boundaries get less selfish and more vital. People who couldn’t care less about you start leaving your life in droves while people who genuinely care about you have your back.
Better Choices All Around
This also translates into every other choice a person makes in recovery even if that choice does not relate to the addiction itself. Self-worth shows up in whether you choose to eat something good for you instead of skipping meals. It shows up in whether you choose to get a decent amount of sleep instead of running yourself into the ground. It shows up in whether you allow yourself to cancel plans, ask for help, or spend some time doing something you actually like instead of ‘finding’ something to do.
It may seem like these choices matter little in the grand scheme of things, but they actually help form a strong foundation upon which you can build. Every time you neglect your well-being by making choices that do not account for your well-being, it feeds the negative narrative that keeps you stuck in cycles of self-defeating behaviors. Every time you make choices that support you and tell you that you are worth taking care of, you build evidence to the contrary.
None of this means that every day is rainbows and unicorns and that the work to build self-worth is an upward curve where each day feels better than the last. Building self-worth does not follow a linear path and it does not work like a drug where every subsequent fix feels better than the last one. There will still be struggles along the way and seasons where the negative voices are louder. Having built a sense of self-worth however builds a floor that keeps you from falling back to the pit from which you came.
Moving Beyond Sobriety
After building a sense of self-worth, sobriety also becomes less of an end-goal and more a launching pad from which to build a life that feels good to live again. Recovery is no longer about what you’ve given up but what you get back. People get into all sorts of things they never thought possible after simply focusing on surviving each day without their substance of choice.
People go back to school and get new careers. They leave relationships that do not work and finally tend to those things they neglected for so long. They stop settling for “fine” where “fine” is anything but okay. They do not do this because they have become picky, but because they finally feel a sense of worthiness.
This is not about turning into someone different from the person you used to be or suddenly meeting all sorts of outlandish expectations. This is about treating yourself like a person who deserves to be happy; a person who deserves to heal and a person who deserves joy instead of just existing.
Recovery looks different when it is built on self-worth than when it is rooted in shame and guilt. It has far more substance than what people will achieve relying solely on willpower because it is not about white-knuckling your way through each day. The process does not entail a journey along easier or less taxing terrain, but it opens doors you never thought possible while going through the motions each day of your recovery.
Building self-worth may be the hardest thing you do in recovery but it may be the most necessary. Recovery from addiction is not linear and it may take you several tries before actually finding the path that works for you.