Ten Principles for Transformation in Recovery.

The ten principles listed below can be of assistance to a person who is in recovery.  While they are not to be confused as the actual work in recovery they will provide a frame or structure from which to do recovery.

1. To take complete ownership and responsibility for your life. Understand that you have created and chosen your life the way it is occurring. You are the cause of what you experience and your life.

2. Watch your word! Stay present to what you think and say. Choose to say positive things about yourself and others. What you think and say creates your experiences of how life will occur and be for you.

3. Practice your Self Affirmations and Possibilities everyday. Say your Self Affirmations and Possibilities in the morning, throughout the day and before bedtime.

4. What is your Intention? Plan your Intention each morning upon awakening and stay present to it throughout the day. What are you committed to today? What are you committed to now? What is it that you want to create in your life? What is it that you want to create now?

5. Develop your RECOVERY PLAN. Plan your work. Your RECOVERY PLAN is about your life. Your RECOVERY PLAN is about your Integrity. Integrity is the bottom line. Are you in integrity with your RECOVERY PLAN. Are you in Integrity with your life?

6. Develop your DAILY ACTION PLAN. Work your plan. Do it everyday! Your DAILY ACTION PLAN is about your commitment and integrity with respect to your RECOVERY PLAN. Your DAILY ACTION PLAN is about fulfilling on your intention and commitments. Your DAILY ACTION PLAN is about keeping your RECOVERY PLAN in existence!

7. Acknowledge yourself and others daily. Acknowledge the miracles in your life. Practice affirming that every moment of your life is a miracle.

8. Practice patience! Remember that you are doing the best you can. At the moment that we do we do the best we can. When you know more, you will do things differently. Do this in regards to others too.

9. Share with others what you are getting out of your recovery.

10. STAY HUNGRY FOR YOUR RECOVERY!

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The conversation of being inauthentic and recovery.

One of the goals of counseling is to help a person become authentic.  One of the goals is to help others see where they are being inauthentic in their lives, in one or more domains of their life.  The work of becoming authentic helps a person to get unblocked thereby allowing them to move forward with the things that they want to create.  Being authentic requires a person to give up the pretense of life and to let that which has been hidden to be revealed to others and in some cases, to the world.

For a person in recovery the process will be the same.  Many individuals in recovery live inside a way of being that uses pretending as one of the defense mechanisms.  Putting forth the image or perspective that things and themselves are a certain way, and hiding what is true from others, is how a person in active addiction moves through life.  Create pretense and repress the truth.  The counselor’s role here is to help a person shave that which has been hidden and to take full ownership of it.  It is only from this admission that the possibility for change and transformation can take place.

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