Living with addiction and mental health issues, we are no strangers to feeling a lack of peace in our lives. We live with inner turmoil, mental and emotional pain, chaotic life circumstances, and dramatic relationships. We feel confused, overwhelmed, panicked and stressed out. We feel lost and alone, misunderstood, rejected and shunned. Any sense of peace we once felt now feels distant and foreign. We don’t know how we’ll ever get back to that place, or if it’s even possible. We often feel like we’re too far gone to ever be at peace again. We’ve done too much damage to ourselves, mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually. We’ve damaged our psyches, our souls, our reputations and our lives, and we’re afraid we’re far past the point of no return.

When we’re ready to recover, there are multiple layers to the work we’ll need to do. We’ll need to shed our self-sabotaging behaviors. We’ll want to explore why and how we became so self-destructive in the first place. We’ll want to make sure we’re abstaining from our drugs of choice. At every point in the recovery process, we are constantly making choices, to go backwards and fall back into our addictive patterns, or to move forward and make progress in our healing. We make choices every day, in our habits and routines, in our interactions with other people, in how we deal with ourselves. We can make the conscious choice to prioritize peace, and actually, our recovery depends on it. How can we prioritize peace at every turn?

We want to start communicating with ourselves more, getting more in touch with our inner thoughts and emotions. Very often we’re perpetuating patterns unconsciously, and we’re making decisions without even being conscious of them. We’re living on autopilot, going with the motions, doing whatever comes easiest to us in order to maintain our addictions. We want to become more conscious of our everyday actions. We want to get out of our unconscious patterns so that we can develop healthier, more conscious patterns for ourselves. We want to increase our self-awareness.

With every single thought, feeling, action and behavior, we can start to ask ourselves, “will this perpetuate my suffering, or will it contribute to creating peace?” We can begin to prioritize peace in everything we do. Making peace our conscious choice means we start examining ourselves more carefully and with more insight. We choose thoughts that serve us better. We learn to work with our emotions in healthier ways. We choose interactions that make us feel better in the long term. We become more selective with our relationships and experiences and choose the ones that are healthiest for us.

Working to recover requires some key shifts in our mentality. Making the conscious choice to prioritize peace is one of the most important mental and emotional shifts we can make for our recovery.

When you are ready to be at peace, contact Bayview Recovery at 888-570-7154for information on how we can support your recovery.