When living with addiction and mental health issues, our own personal well-being can take a back burner to everything else in our lives. We allow our responsibilities and obligations to family, friends and work take precedent over our own self-care. We allow our addictions to become our number one priority. We neglect our spiritual practice. We abandon ourselves for everything else that we deem more important. We forget that our inner peace and stability are the foundation for our wellness, and that without them, everything else suffers. Our intuition is weakened. Our ability to handle stress is impaired. Our relationships become estranged. Our sense of self becomes damaged. We lose our confidence and our faith in ourselves. To heal from any life challenge, we have to make the conscious choice to prioritize ourselves and our well-being.

Making ourselves our priority means shedding the sense of guilt and obligation that we usually tie to the things and people in our lives. We can’t say “no” to people because of all the guilt we feel. We go along with things we don’t want to do because we feel too guilty to speak up for ourselves. We feel obligated to do favors for people and take on extra demands, even when we don’t feel able to. We feel personally responsible for other people’s happiness. If they are disappointed in us, we feel like a failure. We hold ourselves to impossible standards of perfection, and we try to live up to other people’s unrealistically high expectations for us.

Prioritizing our own health and happiness means becoming aware of all this emotional baggage we’re carrying around, that is weighing us down and making our lives more complicated and burdensome than they need to be. It means learning to be comfortable with the discomfort of letting people down. It means realizing that your most important obligation is to your own wellness, because when we feel whole and complete, we’re more aligned with our true selves. We’re better able to provide for others and give of ourselves when we’re coming from a place of alignment and stability. We have more energy to be what people need us to be, and we’re happy to do it. We’re able to be grateful and positive in our daily lives, because we’re not being burdened by the weight of trying to please people or live up to impossible expectations. We’re more accepting of who we are and where we are in our journey, knowing that we’re moving forward and making progress because we’ve finally decided to put ourselves first.

Let Bayview Recovery be the first stop on your challenging but beautiful journey towards recovery. Call 888-570-7154 today.