Category: Addiction Recovery

Solo sobriety isn’t unheard of, even if it’s a challenge. Often enough, people don’t need rehab, AA, group therapy or other recovery programs to get through their addiction issue – instead, they hold onto their own discipline and by sheer willpower, force their way through the early stages of the recovery, and follow through with a homemade system for keeping sober.

How people do it solo depends entirely on them – some use alternative activities to keep themselves busy and reduce stress when they feel the urge to drink or take anything. They might meditate or do yoga – or be more proactive, replacing addiction with sports. In other cases, some people develop an iron will and simply refuse to listen to any urges and temptations until they feel they’re safely out of the danger of relapsing.

There are a lot of ways to get to sobriety, and deciding to do it alone is just fine. However, many are skeptical about whether it’s really possible or feasible, especially in the long-term.

Possible, But Not Easy

Addiction recovery is never easy – if it were, then addiction itself wouldn’t be much of an issue. However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t a few degrees of difficulty between different recovery options. However, the difficulty isn’t just objective – much of it must do with what works best for you. That’s why it’s very difficult to suggest a single best option for anybody struggling with their addiction – it’s up to each one to find what works best for them, either through research and experimentation or luck.

Tackling addiction alone is one of the harder choices, simply because you’re going to have little support. You may have the verbal support of friends and family, but if your recovery is something you want to take on alone then be prepared for a rough road ahead. But most importantly, never be discouraged. It’s not uncommon to hear from people that recovering alone is a bad idea, or even impossible. Some people advocate so strongly for their version of recovery that they forget that others exist, or even discredit them. All that effectively does is spread fear among those trying hard to get better that if this doesn’t work for them, nothing will – an extremely damaging strategy in the long-term.

The truth is anything will work if it works, but the hard part is finding out if it does. No one can decide that for you.

Defining Your Solo Sobriety

Solo rehabilitation is basically defined by you. What do you consider solo? Are you looking for a way to recover without the intervention of professional help? Does that mean you’re willing to take a helping hand from friends and family when you look like you need it? Or are you walking this path entirely on your own, entirely adamant about taking your health into your own hands?

If you believe in the role will play in life, then getting sober on your own is perhaps the ultimate definition of the strength of will in addiction recovery. Some programs teach us that addiction is not something we can help – while it’s true that most people can’t control their descent into addiction, it doesn’t mean that it’s not for us to get better. Think of it this way – it’s not your fault someone pushed you face-first into the ground. But if you don’t get back up, then that’ll be on you.

Addressing Mental Health

If you’re prepared to tackle sobriety alone, then you must understand the biggest hindrance to many seeking to get off their addiction – a broken mental state. Regardless of if your addiction caused or fed any mental problems you might have, issues like anxiety and depression can tempt us to slip into extremely negative states – and make reaching for a cocktail, a pill or something else all too simple of a solution.

You must take care of your body and your mind if you want to get better, and that means being rigorous, and strict. Go on a proper healthy diet. Go on regular runs. Hit the gym. Join group activities like hiking and kayaking. Spend every minute working, either on yourself, or your career, until you’re happy – happy with who you are, and how far you’ve come.

You Can Always Seek Help

There’s really no such thing as committing so a single path of recovery and foregoing all other options. The objective truth is that on the journey to sobriety, all roads are lanes on a massive highway. You can choose to join group therapy, go to a sober living home, or seek out the help of a therapist to ease you through your recovery. Yu can go to rehab, or deal with the withdrawal on your own.

Regardless of what’s factually or statistically the best option, going with your gut is a wonderful way of figuring out your own path in the tricky and complicated world of addiction recovery. And even if you decide to deal with sobriety on your own, there’s no shame in reaching out and asking others for help in trying times. We all have our moments when it’s extremely tempting to just give up and give in, break the promises we’ve made to each other, and listen to that little voice in our heads making excuses for every misstep.

It’s true that in most cases, willpower doesn’t have much to do with whether you get addicted to a substance, physically and/or emotionally. But willpower is a massive factor in whether you’re going to master sobriety. This is partial because you’re battling yourself, and what you think you want, while at the same time facing the fact that you can’t just turn off the temptation to go back to the booze, the pills or the stuff when things get tough.

It’ll take time, for some more than for others, but eventually, you’d reach a point where your past with addiction truly lies behind you. And when you’ve reached that point, you’ll know that recovery is recovery. It doesn’t matter how you achieved yours, what matters is that you made it happen.

The group has always been emphasized in the recovery process, and for a good reason. Being in a group helps most people. It gives them the confidence to try new things. To lower their inhibitions and open up to new possibilities. To learn ways to cope emotionally. To learn to trust others again, and eventually learn to help others recover better.

But some are skeptical of the effectiveness of group activities in recovery. While the twelve-step program and group therapy, in general, are by no means the only effective options for addiction recovery – it is, after all, an individual process and everyone must find their own rhythm – there is a lot of research to back up that recovering in a group is highly effective, and in select cases it’s more effective than solo treatment. Here’s why.

They’re Fun!

The simplest argument to make is that it’s just much more enjoyable to fight against addiction by meeting and getting to know others who are going through the same thing. You get to learn just how many different people can get into a life of addiction in different ways, you learn entirely new ways to put your own experiences into context. You meet interesting individuals with extremely interesting stories, and activities let you all come together and learn to rely on one another to accomplish goals – just like how you can rely on one another to motivate and inspire against addiction.

The reason this works the way it does is because we’re tribal beings. There is no doubting that the individual human being is complex and certainly capable of functioning independently, but we are still tribal beings that rely on families, communities, societies and civilizations. In an effectively-led group, our team-mentality kicks in, and we support one another and feel a certain kinship towards one another simply because that’s our instinct for survival.

In a more modern context, group activities and group therapy help us deal with our own personal issues because they give us a sense of purpose within the group, give us a sense of belonging, and let us explore and share a part of our life we could never explore with family and friends who haven’t gone through an addiction.

Groups Empower

That leads into the second point, which is that not only are groups fun, but they empower. Personal empowerment is a massive part of recovery. Addiction can make us feel powerless and stripped of our agency, made slaves to a substance or behavior. By building our self-confidence and self-esteem, and holding ourselves accountable to bigger and better things – by finding a purpose and feeling some pride in our accomplishments – we can slowly rebuild that sense of self, and that sense of agency.

In a group, among others who are going through recovery, we can each do our part and accomplish things together. In a group, we feel the whole weight and support of the group behind us when we endeavor to do things like stop drinking, quit smoking, or put down the gear permanently. And whenever temptation strikes, we remember our group, we remember the people whom we promised sobriety, and we remember that we’re all counting on one another to stay sober, to stay sharp.

People to Connect With

When you’re recovering from addiction, it’s hard to put your experiences into understandable terms with people who haven’t been through a similar experience. It can feel lonely, and the first few weeks into sobriety can be especially painful when alone as you’ll have no one to relate to and talk about the rapidly shifting moods you’re dealing with.

Addiction feeds off isolation – even those who choose to recover alone still look towards friends and family to help and to communicate with. If you can’t talk about how you feel and can’t effectively get all your thoughts off your chest, they’ll pile up into emotional plaque and create a problem – one that feeds the inner need to resort to addiction again.

In a group with other recovering addicts, you can listen to familiar stories and relate to emotional and painful experiences. You can focus on exploring how you really feel, and get a sense of relief by getting to the core of your emotional issues.

Helping Others Helps You

Research shows that it’s beneficial for the psyche to help others. By helping others, we become empowered because we feel useful – we receive gratitude and thanks for what we’ve done, and it helps validate that we are important, and we do matter. It also helps us move another step away from addiction because we no longer need it to see things in a better light and cope with depressing issues.

The reason we’re happy when we help others or give them something is because the act of unconditionally gifting one another things and doing things for each other is part of healthy social behavior – back when things were far scarcer than they are today, sharing was necessary to keep a community alive and healthy.

At the end of the day, there’s nothing wrong with deciding to deal with an addiction alone. Plenty of people do it, and it’s most definitely possible. In fact, due to the stigma of addiction, the cost of treatment and several other factors, it’s even been suggested that most recovered addicts did so all on their own.

The question isn’t what’s an ideal way to recover – it’s why being in a group can help most people recovery faster. But there are always exceptions: for example, there are some people who are unaffected by group mentality, who feel uncomfortable sharing anything with others, and who don’t consider social interaction with people they don’t have much in common with fun. For these people, group activities and group therapy might not be ideal.

But for most people, the truth is that recovering together is better. And it’s easy to do. All you must do is find the courage in you to seek out your local recovery group or sober living community, and take a day to explore your options. Talk to other recovering addicts. Learn more about their journey, their experiences. Compare different perspectives and find out how much your views on addiction are alike.

Before you know it, you might make some new friends and open to an entire world of possibilities in recovery you might never have considered.

People are social animals – we rely on each other for survival, romance, friendship, entertainment. We cling to our parents, develop non-familial bonds with others, and fall in love. It’s through cooperation that we form tribes, build and break civilizations, and advance.

But the way we interact with each other is different on an individual level. Some people love to gain new connections, meet new people, bring people together, and love the feeling of a crowd. Others prefer to resign themselves to the comfort of being with a few close friends and are harder to get to truly know. They prefer quiet corners and simple nights.

These are the opposites on the spectrum of extroversion and introversion, a personality distinction first truly explored by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. Like most Jungian-derived concepts, today’s definition and understanding of extroversion and introversion aren’t totally reflective of what he meant, but the basis is the same – people exhibit different tendencies and personality traits that can be classified as extroverted, or introverted. Over time, we’ve come to better understand exactly what that means.

What Is Introversion?

Estimates for introversion are all over the Internet, but there are few reliable sources to pinpoint exactly how many people have introverted tendencies. Some researchers claim it’s an even split, with about half of all people leaning towards extroversion, and the other half towards introversion. Others claim that introversion is rarer.

Whichever it is, more modern thinking suggests that trying to classify people as introverted or extroverted is a little misguided – it’s more apt to say that behavior is clearly introverted or clearly extroverted and that people can exhibit a lot of both.

Introversion isn’t shyness, and neither does it refer to social anxiety. It’s possible that people with shy characteristics and/or social anxiety may be naturally introverted, but that doesn’t mean introversion causes or is directly linked to anxious thoughts and behavior.

Shyness is a clear discomfort with social interaction, due to ineptitude. Stronger forms of shyness dip into anxiety, where discomfort and awkwardness turn to fear and worry. Introversion, on the other hand, is simply a behavioral preference and doesn’t necessarily have to do with being awkward or incapable of mimicking extroverted behavior.

There are ways to test personality that take introversion into account, although most of these tests have debated validity and accuracy. The most common ones include:

• The Big Five Model
• The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
• The 16 Personality Factors
• The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

When you’re described as an introvert, it doesn’t mean that you behave almost solely in introverted terms. It simply means that most your social behavior is introverted, especially in relevance to the current context: group therapy.

Group therapy is an obviously social activity and a difficult one for quite a few introverted personalities. If you’re a very private person, then the idea of sharing your thoughts with others – or even indulging in their experiences – is discomforting. Clearly, addiction recovery can be discomforting – but it shouldn’t be a negative experience. If you’ve overcome the initial awkwardness of group therapy and still can’t get into it, then there are a few things you can do.

Making It Work for You!

The goal for anyone going to group therapy for their addiction is simple: you want to get better. And if you’re struggling with feeling comfortable in your group therapy setting, then the best course of action is to talk to the therapist or manager and make your request. There’s nothing wrong with not sharing anything you aren’t comfortable with in a group setting, and therapists know to respect the boundaries of their individual patients.

Of course, they aren’t mind-readers, either. In a group setting, therapists must cater to the group first, and the individual next – by sorting things out and discussing your therapeutic preferences, you can make group therapy a more permanent addition to your treatment path. Try this the next time you’re up for group therapy:

1. Talk to your therapist. A therapist’s job is to cater to their patients, and as one of them, discussing your issues with the therapy might help your therapist either better adjust their approach or refer you to something more helpful.
2. Listen to other people’s experiences. It can be hard for some introverts to listen in on what they consider other people’s private matters. But given time, you might find yourself getting closer to the people you’re in therapy with, building important bonds.
3. Opt out of group therapy in favor for other group activities. Group activities are a wonderful way to beat addiction and work on long-term sobriety – they allow for reflection, support, motivation, and the sharing of mutual experiences to better contextualize and understand your own mind and the nature of your addiction. However, if therapy isn’t for you, then something else – like a sport or a book club – might better suit you.

In time, you might feel the urge to share something. To talk about how you feel, to reveal what your experiences have taught you. Opening in group therapy isn’t just about helping others through your own words and thoughts, but it’s about chewing through your experiences and reliving – and reflecting – on how you’re changing during recovery. Addiction is a harsh beast, and overcoming it requires a lot of personal growth – acknowledging and exploring that growth in a group setting can solidify it and give you a much better self-awareness. It can also help you be a lot more honest and open with yourself, and help you shoot down negative thoughts and focus on the realistic, more positive thoughts that the road to recovery can produce.

Of course, not everyone has to go to group therapy or rely on it as a form of reflection. If you’re adamantly private, then going to therapy on your own or even finding reflection in meditation, mindfulness exercises, creative endeavors like painting and writing or physical activities like yoga may be more ideal.

It’s important to be able to think back and think over what you’re feeling. But how you choose to do that is entirely up to you – and it’s perfectly fine not to share your thoughts if you feel they’re no one else’s business.

If you or someone you know needs therapy or help managing the recovery process, contact us today to see how we can help: 877-394-8810