To Love From Recovery: 5 Tips for Success!

We will look to some of our strong recovery tools for answers to having a strong, successful love relationship.

Many very wise people have told us “If you can’t love yourself, you can’t love anyone else.” It is important to love yourself in order to have a successful recovery. When you start here and apply a few principles, you can make your relationship with yourself, your recovery, and with others work.

If you’re a people-pleaser, allow yourself to be abused by others, or become a victim, it is always at the cost of loving yourself. Unfortunately, this leads to becoming a victim in your recovery.

Five Trusted Tips for Success

Success, I believe, begins with filling your home/self with love. How does this all come together? Let’s take a look at five ways to get there:

Tip #1 Self-Love

Do you wake up every morning happy, proud, content, and excited to be you? If not, that challenge is the first order of business.

Look at the negative voices that get in the way. What are they saying? Are they old news? Do they have evidence? We have a process to rid you of these voices called accountability. It involves apologizing to yourself — or anyone you have “offended/wronged” — and then sincerely working to never repeat that behavior again. These cannot be empty word apologies, but rather sincere apologies requiring action. Once you have accomplished this for every negative voice, you must develop a rigorous plan to decline its presence.

One client who woke up every morning to negative chatter would shake its hand, give it 5 minutes, and then tell the chatter it was done for the day. Another client would wake up early and dance for an hour to stop the negative chatter. She would start her day at peace after dancing.

When you are in a love relationship, all the negative chatter about you or your partner is no longer allowed. All that “keeping score” is usually inaccurate with you thinking you came out on top. Stop it!

Tip #2 Patience

Slow down! Where are you going so fast? As in recovery, love takes time. Let’s take this journey one step at a time. I highly recommend getting an animal once you can take care of someone other than yourself. A dog, in particular, teaches us, unconditional love.

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