Empathy Archives - Enlightened Solutions

What Is Empathy and How Does It Help in Recovery?

Written by enlightened solutions on October 23, 2022. Posted in Addiction Recovery.

When you hear the word empathy, what do you think of? Do you think about being able to relate to someone else? Maybe you think of understanding or sensitivity. Perhaps you think about a lack of judgment. Empathy encompasses all of these things. It refers to the ability to relate to and comprehend how others may be feeling as a result of a situation or circumstance.

If you are struggling with addiction, giving and receiving empathy as you enter treatment and recovery is important. Empathy can sometimes be difficult. Often, situations, actions, and thoughts can be hard to understand from the outside. This is often the case when it comes to addiction.

It can be difficult for your loved ones to understand how you might be feeling if they have not experienced addiction themselves. In turn, it can be difficult for you to imagine how your loved ones might feel toward your substance abuse. Perspective-taking in this scenario is particularly difficult, as substance abuse alters how you think, behave, and feel.

Having empathy for others is a critical part of your recovery. In order to mend relationships with others and form new connections, it is essential to be empathetic to the way others may process and respond to your addiction and recovery.

Receiving empathy is equally important. Family members and loved ones are encouraged to join family programs and utilize other resources to learn more about addiction and engage in the healing process. Below are a few tips for giving and receiving empathy.

Listen to Others to Understand Their Perspective

Listening is perhaps one of the most crucial components when it comes to empathy. Having the ability to listen allows for better understanding and processing of information. As you begin the treatment process, it will be important for you to listen to the experiences of others in your therapy groups to understand their perspective. This applies to peers who are also going through treatment and to family members and loved ones who are supporting you.

As you begin the process of rebuilding relationships, you will need to have tough conversations with loved ones. It will be important for you to listen and try your best to understand how your addiction has affected them. Providing empathy to those you love can help repair and damage and allow you to move forward.

Avoid Judgement

As you enter treatment, the fear of judgment may be overwhelming. You might be afraid of what your family members and friends will think. Maybe they know about your addiction, or perhaps they don’t. Either way, seeking treatment delivers the message that you had a problem worthy of seeking help.

With the stigma associated with addiction, it can be easy to pass judgment. Empathy involves giving support and understanding without judgment. As difficult as this may be, it is important to promote healing for everyone involved.

Be Honest

Being honest about your experiences, feelings, actions, and thoughts can be challenging. This is especially the case if you have done or said things you regret as a result of substance abuse.

With addiction often comes a lot of mistrust and deceit. This is particularly the case with those we care about the most. In order to establish new norms in your relationships moving forward, honesty must be prioritized. Honest conversations are much more likely to evoke empathy. Being honest with your loved ones, and encouraging them to share their honest feelings with you, can help reduce tension and create understanding.

Give Respect

Part of giving and receiving empathy is maintaining respect. Conversations in recovery can be hard. You may hear things you don’t want to hear. You might say things to others that may be difficult for them to hear.

It is important to remain respectful in these situations. Let the other person speak, and do your best to listen and understand. Receive feedback willingly, and deliver information in a way that is direct but considerate.

Following the tips mentioned above can help you offer and receive empathy in treatment and recovery. Empathy is such an important element when it comes to healing from addiction and embarking on the journey of recovery. At Enlightened Solutions, we offer family groups, therapy, and other activities to promote empathy among our clients and their loved ones.

We make efforts to involve loved ones in the treatment experience so they can gain a better understanding of the process and what their family member is going through. This helps establish a supportive and empathetic foundation that will carry into recovery.

Being able to give and receive empathy is important in many situations. If you are struggling with substance abuse, empathy is critical for your recovery. Having empathy for your loved ones as they navigate trying to process and heal from the impacts of your addiction is crucial. Receiving empathy from your loved ones is equally important, as a good support network in recovery is imperative. Empathy can take work, and it is not always easy. A few tips for giving and receiving empathy include listening, avoiding judgment, being honest, and giving respect. At Enlightened Solutions, we try to instill and encourage these elements through our various programs and therapy groups. If you or someone you love is struggling with drug or alcohol addiction, we would love to help you heal and begin your journey to recovery. To learn more, call Enlightened Solutions today at (833) 801-LIVE.

How to Be More Conscientious When You Really Don’t Feel Like It

Written by enlightened solutions on April 29, 2020. Posted in Mental Health, wellness. Leave a Comment

Conscientiousness is one of the big five personality traits in the personality model most commonly used by psychologists. The five traits are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, which you can remember with the acronym OCEAN. While there is no single addictive personality, there is one pattern that’s more common among people with substance use issues: high neuroticism and low conscientiousness.

Why Bother?

What’s important about conscientiousness is that it appears to be a protective factor against substance use and addiction. Even people who score relatively high in neuroticism—which makes them especially vulnerable to mental health challenges like depression and anxiety—are less likely to have substance use issues if they also have high conscientiousness.

Conscientiousness is divided into six facets: competence, order, dutifulness, achievement striving, self-discipline, and deliberation. Highly conscientious people tend to be goal-oriented, responsible, organized, and hardworking. To people with moderate or low conscientiousness, these traits don’t sound the least bit appealing. They bring to mind a caricature of a tight-wound perfectionist, someone who is a slave to their own routine and, perhaps worst of all, completely devoid of imagination.

As with any trait, conscientiousness can be a bad thing when taken to an extreme, but if you struggle with substance use issues and commonly co-occurring issues, like a mood disorder, learning to be a bit more conscientious can do you a lot of good. Since it’s a personality trait, it will only change slowly and with persistent effort, so there’s little risk turning into a repressed conformist overnight. The following are a few suggestions for nurturing your inner Hermione Granger.

Focus on Specifics

First, it’s helpful to keep in mind that conscientiousness, more than any other personality trait, is linked to specific behaviors. That is, even if you are not a highly conscientious person, you can learn to behave more conscientiously in things that really matter to you. For example, the artist Chuck Close has famously said, “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.” If something matters to you, being more conscientious in your habits can help you do it better.

Start by identifying your priorities and focus on one or two specific behaviors that support those priorities. So, for example, maybe you want a better relationship with your kids but you frequently fail to follow through on your promises. Your specific focus for a while might be to do what you promise, no matter what. Look at the factors that prevent you from following through and come up with a plan to help you succeed. A therapist is often a huge asset in this process.

Structure Your Day

If you’re not very conscientious, it may be too much to ask to schedule every minute of your day Ben Franklin style. However, there are two concepts that can help you rein in the chaos: structure and priorities. First, decide what your priorities are and give them a definite time in your day. So, for example, you might decide your top priority is to attend a 12-Step meeting at 5 p.m. The rest of your activities go somewhere around that. We typically don’t get to more than three priorities in a day, so choose wisely.

Structure is also important because it helps automate healthy activities so you don’t have to expend thought or willpower on them. It may be a good idea to start by establishing a consistent bedtime and a consistent wake-up time. This ensures your hours of operation are more consistent from day-to-day and it also ensures you get enough sleep, which makes everything else easier. Once that part of your routine is in place, you can add a new element, perhaps exercising or studying at a certain time.

Follow the Two-Minute Rule

The two-minute rule is one of the most effective tactics against procrastination and letting things pile up in general. The rule is that if something will take less than two minutes to do, just do it now. Does the dishwasher need to be loaded? Just do it now. Does someone need a quick favor at work? Just do it now. You’ll be amazed how much more you get done and all those nagging little tasks won’t be taking up mental space.

Leverage Your Empathy

People who struggle with substance use and mental health issues typically have relatively low conscientiousness but they often have a high level of empathy and compassion. You can use this to your advantage when you’re trying to be more conscientious. After all, much of conscientiousness is really about being considerate and not just following arbitrary rules. For example, if you’re always late, put yourself in the place of the person who is waiting for you. If you have trouble following through on your promises, imagine what it’s like to have someone let you down. At work, don’t think about getting that raise; focus on helping out your coworkers. Social connection often motivates us when more abstract incentives fail.

Improving your conscientiousness is a bit of a catch-22: changing a personality trait takes persistent effort, but if you have low conscientiousness, persistent effort is especially challenging. In a way, just sticking to a plan is an exercise in conscientiousness in itself. A therapist can be a huge help in creating a plan and sticking to it, as can participating in group therapy or a 12-Step program. Entering a treatment program can be especially helpful since your time is more structured in addition to having group and individual therapy sessions.

At Enlightened Solutions, we know that a strong recovery from addiction is really about learning the skills to live a better life. Recovery should be an adventure in reaching your full potential. To learn more about our holistic treatment programs, call us at 833-801-LIVE.

Essential Life Skills For Lifelong Recovery

Written by enlightened solutions on February 8, 2017. Posted in Addiction, Family Recovery, Healthy Living, Mental Health, Recovery, Relationships, Sober Living. Leave a Comment

Empathy and Compassion: Living with compassion and empathy is not something many would call an essential life skill. However, in order to be a good human who does good things on earth, empathy and compassion is a must. We are tasked in recovery to always reach out our hands. As the saying in Alcoholics Anonymous goes, “love and tolerance is our code”. We are inherently self centered human beings. After developing an addiction, we tend to be even more selfish. Empathy and compassion are the ways in which we connect with others and step outside of ourselves in order to connect with someone else. Our relationships and connections with people are made deeper by practicing empathy and compassion.

Time management: Change is the only constant, it is said, and time is constantly changing. We only have so many waking hours in a day, days in a week, and so on. How we use our time is incredibly important because we’re either wasting it or making the most of it. Learning how to use a calendar, schedule appointments, prioritize activities, and make enough time for self-care in a day are essential life skills.
Asking for help: People who have had to make the decision to ask for help in finding treatment understand how life saving this life skill can be. We can’t possible know it all. In order to get things done, we often have to ask for help. Help you help yourself by feeling no shame when it comes to asking for assistance with something.
Active listening: We can go our entire lives without really listening to what someone has to say. From instructions to suggestions to someone’s expression of their needs, if we don’t actively and reflectively listen we miss out on what is being said.
Meditation: Taking time to quiet the mind is more than calming- it helps grow new brain muscle memory, reduces symptoms of stress, reduces intensity of mental health disorders, and radically improves health.
Financial Management: Some people never learn how to manage their money. Living in chronic debt or without any money can lead to stress and hardship which could eventually cause someone to relapse. Money comes and goes. Learning how to manage finances for the long term and the short term are essential for reducing stress and creating a sense of security.
Healthy Living: Eating organic, having a balanced diet, staying nutritionally well, and having basic cooking skills are all a part of healthy living. Your long term future depends on your physical health as much as it does your mental wellbeing.
Communication: communication is a part of everyday life >learning how to communicate honestly, tactfully, and articulately is helpful in every single area of life.

Enlightened Solutions believes that people entering recovery for an addiction are in need of developing or redeveloping essential life skills for life after treatment. If you or a loved one are ready to learn a new way of being, call us today for more information, 833-801-5483.

Tag: Empathy