Overcoming addiction is not easy. Addiction is something that, in many ways, requires a number of essential personality traits. When we are experiencing any form of addiction, it requires a lot of mental strength to build up our approach to recovery. People who are in recovery from addiction can suffer from a stigma that they are on the peripheries of society, or are not “mentally strong.”
Addiction can alter our personalities and make people become things they are not, which is why the process of recovering from addiction is something that should be heralded. Someone going through addiction recovery will, in time, display some of the greatest personality traits, including the following.
6 Essential Traits For Recovery From Addiction
Self-Discipline
Self-discipline requires understanding our limits, especially when it comes to willpower and tackling our temptations head-on. At the very beginning of recovery, it involves making the conscious decision to not use the substance, which is why it requires an extreme level of willpower that the average person may not be able to display.
Resourcefulness
For someone to maintain an addiction, they’ve got to be endlessly creative and resourceful. People who are extremely addicted to a substance have to learn how to feed their habits, which could mean thinking of new ways to get money or developing sneakier approaches to keeping their habits under wraps. When it comes to addiction recovery, an individual has displayed a huge amount of resourcefulness that they can use to their benefit and find creative ways to help them when they are feeling the pull of addiction. Being resourceful is crucial, especially in the notion of addiction treatment, because someone with a wide variety of skills and talents needs to understand that these resourceful approaches can be used for good, not just while recovering from addiction, but for many years afterward.
Courage
Anybody who has decided they need support has had to take the first step and admit they need help, which is an incredibly scary but admirable moment. The thought of giving up alcohol and drugs can be terrifying when someone is addicted. As a result, many people avoid the inevitable and put it off for months or years. It takes a lot of courage to decide that someone is going to get clean to create a better life for themselves. Addiction recovery demands someone to put in a lot of effort that an average person would be afraid to do. Therefore, dealing with the physical symptoms of withdrawal and actually deciding to push against so many physical and mental barriers creates a huge level of bravery in a person.
Perspective
Someone who is addicted to something has had a longer journey to travel because they haven’t just faced up to many home truths, but also have had to have the courage to face up to the people they’ve hurt along the way. This is something so many of us seldom do in our own lives because we aren’t faced with the need to rise to the challenges, which is why perspective is so crucial in recovering from addiction.
Gratitude
Being grateful for the little things in life is something we all hear about as being essential for our mental health, but if you want to know the definition of being grateful, speak to someone who has had to go through the addiction recovery process. They have been at their lowest, have needed to pick up the pieces of their life, and had to make amends for so much. To be truly grateful for something in life, you’ve got to experience what it’s like to be at your lowest. Many people who go through the addiction recovery process have had to understand that the little things in life are what can make it worthwhile.
Inspirational
People who overcome the most difficult challenges in life are, by their very definition, inspirational people. People who have been treated for addiction and come out the other side have learned some of the lessons that most people have not. Addiction is a subject matter that’s incredibly difficult to speak about because it can bring out the worst in people, which is why, when we see people who have come out the other side, they are the true definition of being inspiring. Those who have been at their lowest and have now clawed their way back through soul searching, overcoming physical withdrawal symptoms, but have also understood what they have achieved by coming this far are always going to inspire the rest of us.
