Recovery Coaching – Insight Recovery Coaching

Recovery is Contagious – Catch it from your team!

Egbert — Fri, 03 Jun 2022 08:59:22 +0000

You catch Recovery from those you surround yourself with. So building up a team who are contagious is important. People who personify recovery with all that they are, say, breath, and do will mean you’re more likely to catch it!

If you don’t know people or resources that could part of your team, a Recovery Coach is a great place to start. Whether you engage a private coach, or connect with one at a Community Recovery Center, they can be a fantastic way to build a few connections quite quickly. Work with your coach to figure out who you want on your recovery team. You might think you don’t know, but trust your coach and your intuition to come up with some first team members. Addiction can be defined as a biopsychosocial phenomenon – so find people who are contagious in any or all three of those categories is important. For many, Recovery is also spiritual process. So finding contagious spiritual people may also serve your Recovery. Work with coach to see who might round out your team at any point in your Recovery. You can always make more additions, or trades later. And remember – not everyone has to be on your team forever. It’s OK to take whatever Recovery you need to catch from them and then find more Recovery from someone else.

Once you’ve made some first decisions about who you need on your Recovery Team, your coach can connect you, or empower you to make the connection yourself! You might want a medical team member who can help you with detoxing, working on a methadone based recovery plan, or dealing with an chronic problem that is causing you pain (like some overdue dental work, or a skin ulcer). You might need legal help, or a mental health coach. Maybe your finances are causing you suffering, or you need a new place to live. Maybe you’ve never meditated and want to try, or you need a gym, or an art group, or a yoga community. One great resource to finding more team members is a community support group. There’s a lot of differences between groups – such as between SMART Recovery & Dharma Recovery, or between different ‘chapters/flavours’ of the same group (12 STEP –AA or NA). Your Coach can help you understand the differences, and choose one to try – or maybe two! Its OK to catch Recovery from more than one Community.

In fact – catching Recovery from different sources is quite important. Because addiction is so strong and cunning, you will need to “catch recovery” repeatedly. Recovery team members who are at a similar stage of recovery often share the exact thing you need in your recovery, from the same point of understanding –and it can be highly contagious although it may not be as deep or last as long. People with technical expertise can provide longer lasting results though if we have not yet learned to trust, we might give up before it effective. People with their own deep recovery can provide a constant source of contagious Recovery – some of it is useful right away, and if we’re fortunate, we’ll come to understand more of it later and its like catching Recovery multiple times from one dose! And we need all of these different exposures to Recovery over and over – its contagious – but until we build up enough Recovery, the results don’t last long. And that’s why we have different team members!

So, to get the most recovery that you are able, in the way you need it, from people you trust, build a Recovery Team. Work together, not all team members will be in agreement all the time, so work with your Coach – You are the Captain and get to decide.

But what ever you do – go out there and get exposed!

FEELINGS – ’cause a stiff upper lip won’t help you in Recovery.’

Egbert — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 05:46:30 +0000

I don’t recall my parents talking about their feelings, but I certainly saw him express anger and her express disappointment.

Most little boys are told, “Don’t cry”, “Suck it up, be a man”, or “We don’t talk about that in this house”. And if no one taught you how to recognize the difference between hungry or horny, tired or rejected, how can you know what you need or what isn’t serving you? As much as you may have heard that “Your sponsor doesn’t want to hear your feelings”, or the meeting isn’t a play to figure out your feelings, it is VERY important work in recovery. In our addiction, our behaviours focussed on reward relief and escape. If we want to change our behaviours, we must recognize what feelings drive the behaviours. As Gabor Mate said, “Ask not why the addiction, ask why the pain.”

When working with clients about longer-term goals, I like to ask “How do you want to feel a year from now?” –

Typically I hear answers like:
I want to feel like everyone knows I’m here.
I want to feel like she respects my opinion.
I want to feel like my kids want to spend time with me

These are all statements about somebody else’s actions without acknowledgement of our own feelings or state of being. See the confusion? Even being able to use a feeling word in a sentence eludes many of us. I once suffered the same ignorance. I had to learn what I was feeling, I learned to label it, understand it, differentiate it. But how do I do this when I didn’t have the words?

And so I present to you a – a feelings wheel. Now, this was pretty overwhelming when I first saw it. There are different versions with subtle differences. Find one that resonates with you right now if this one doesn’t. You might find one that works now won’t be right for you later… One of the joys of being human – We change!

There are also lots of ways to “USE” a feelings wheel. Following a suggestion, I pulled it out of my pocket every hour and tried to complete the sentence: I feel __________ right now. Some people liked to start there day learning about one or two of the emotions and see if they came up for them. Others would end their day and try to find a word that matched. I found another tool was teen fiction – coming of age stories put words to feelings in simpler scenarios that helped me figure out what was going on.

At first, I just used the inner portion of the wheel – just 6 feelings. Really! I certainly wasn’t able to parse it down from sadness to shame or neglect. I had been using my addiction for so long that I had lost touch with who I was and what I was feeling. I had a hard time knowing if I was angry or hungry. Bored or lonely. Tired or sad. These were an early lesson in the fact that the body and mind are tied together. Trying to use only my addicted brain and never my heart was killing me.

Here’s my explanation of feelings vs emotions: Emotions are the physical reaction of our body in response to chemicals produced in the brain as a consequence of a present situation/stimulus. Feelings are the side product of your brain perceiving an emotion and assigning a certain meaning to it. Confused yet? They’re related, one can cause the other (yup – goes both ways!) but recognizing feelings and changing them is a thinking activity that most of us can start fairly soon. I recognize that this is a little different than what we normally think of when we use terms like “emotional intelligence” or “control your emotions”.

The pathway to changing my feelings needed to move from addictive practices to healthy. My response to ‘negative feelings’ was to relieve or escape through using. When I did have a ‘good feeling’, my addicted brain would reward and reinforce it – often a feedback loop of using addiction to reward for using addiction. Learning to recognize my feelings, and acknowledge my own beliefs and experiences were creating them was profound for me. That and the distinction between emotions and feelings were things I wish I had learned before I was 45! It is an ongoing process, my journey on the path of wellness (recovery).

Future blog posts will include emotions, and how all emotions and feelings show up in the body and in the brain.

Egbert

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Recovery from Sexual Addiction: How a Coach Can Help

Egbert — Tue, 12 Oct 2021 11:35:31 +0000

Recovery Coaches support those dealing with substance abuse, alcohol, or other struggles such as sex addiction. Thus, coaches serve multiple roles when it comes to helping people with addiction.

What do coaches offer?

You may wonder what a recovery coach does. What exactly do they offer to you when you’re struggling? Coaches provide support for you in your healing process and do so in a structured way. Here are some specific examples of what a recovery coach offers, followed by more information about recovery coaches who focus specifically on sexual addiction.

Experience dealing with similar issues to what you’re facing

Perhaps most importantly, recovery coaches provide lived experience and insight. This means that when they’re helping others, it’s not from a place of theory. They’ve been through it just like you. Many coaches have crawled out from addiction, mental health struggles, traumas, and more. They provide support and experience as another person who’s been through it.

Empathy instead of judgment

Coaches aren’t there to judge or make you feel guilty for behaviours. You’ve probably done that enough to yourself. Instead, they will provide you with non-judgmental understanding and validation. Whatever you’ve done or been through, they may have well survived that themselves. If not, they’ve at least been through something similar.

Give you a sense of direction

When unwanted behaviours have taken over your life, it may seem like there’s no way out. However, even when you’re ready to tackle issues, you may not be able to see the direction or next steps needed. A recovery coach will come from a neutral, calmer place to help you see the way forward. They may help you identify what you do and don’t want in your life and where to start.

For example, you may need to change current patterns, take a break, change environments, or build different coping skills. This will depend on your unique situation, but a coach can help you sort this out. Possible areas of direction a coach may help you work through include:

What your life will look like without addiction
What obstacles can be removed
Your relationship goals
Where you want to be in a year, or five years
How do you see your career moving forward
Overall health and fitness goals

Encouragement to overcome your addiction

Recovery is difficult. Overcoming an addiction, in particular, is challenging. But during moments when you feel you’ve failed, can’t continue in recovery, or it’s just too hard, a coach can be there. They can listen, support you, and offer encouragement to keep going. Or, if you’ve felt you’ve relapsed, which is part of the process, they can help you get right back on track.

Ongoing training to help you consistently

In addition to being a peer with real experience, coaches also go through a training process. They learn about practical goal setting, obstacles, and changing habits. They can train you in this process as well. By modifying your patterns and perspectives, you can begin to move forward. It’s not just about overcoming your problems but about building the life you want.

Help keep you accountable

Accountability isn’t about shaming you or making you feel bad if you don’t meet your goals or make the changes you want. However, it’s difficult for many, if not most, people to stick to hard things without outside help. If you know you’ll be checking in with your coach to update them about your progress; you’re much more likely to stick to your goals.

Patients in recovery programs often credit recovery coaches as an essential part of treatment, providing them with the social support needed during the process. In one study at a substance abuse treatment program, patients noted that recovery coaches provided these elements:

Accessibility
Shared experience
Motivation to change
Connection to resources

Recovery Coaching for Sex Addiction

Some mentors serve a very specific role as recovery coaches for sexual addiction. These coaches offer all of the same support elements as other recovery specialists and have lived experience overcoming compulsive sexual behaviours. They can help with struggles such as:

Porn addiction
Excessive masturbation
Infidelity
Impulsive or anonymous sex
Love addiction
Fetish obsessions
Obsessive use of hookup apps
Any other unwanted sexual compulsions

These specialists can help you change the patterns of your sexual behaviours while replacing these with healthy coping skills. As a result, you can learn to overcome these problems and focus on the important things, like building a healthy, meaningful life.

If you’re interested in recovery coaching for sexual addiction, I can help. I’ve been where you are, and I became a coach to provide the same support that I needed to recover. To take the first step, set up a free 15-minute call to discuss your situation and how I can help. Schedule here to get started.