Women can quickly lose themselves at different times throughout their lives. We lose ourselves in relationships, we lose ourselves as mothers, and we can lose ourselves in our careers. During addiction, it is especially easy to lose your entire identity. You ignore your core values and do things you would never otherwise dream of doing. When you are finally ready to seek treatment, you may not even be a ghost of your former self. How can women in addiction find self-awareness?
Why You Lose Yourself in Addiction
Women who are in active addiction can lose track of a lot of things. You lose track of your desires, your feelings, your motivations, your character, and everything else that makes you uniquely you. Do you even recognize the face staring back at you when you look in the mirror?
Addiction rewires the reward pathway in your brain. Someone who is not addicted, for example, might have a glass of wine and feel relaxed, and that is all. For someone addicted, your brain may be rewired to seek this feeling as though it was as necessary or more as eating, breathing, or sleeping. Your brain begins to send you compelling messages that you need to drink more alcohol. These messages start to become more and more difficult to ignore. When your focus is primarily on acquiring and consuming substances, you lose sight of everything else in your life, including your own identity.
How Can You Find Your Identity Again?
The first step to finding your identity again is to re-establish self-awareness. This is accomplished primarily through education. Learning about yourself, about addiction, and how you got here will help you begin to find your way back. Some of the things you can seek to learn include:
- Learn about yourself to know what has not worked in the past and what could work in the future.
- Analyze who you are in your relationships — how this helps you and hurts you.
- Discover what is inside of you that will lead you to success.
- Put into place strategies so that you achieve long-term sobriety.
Once you have stopped using substances, you will be able to learn to reconnect with yourself again so that you can honestly look inside yourself for these answers. As you heal and learn more about yourself, you will begin to re-establish awareness of yourself and what is truly important to you.
What Are Your Values?
What are your core values? What are the beliefs you hold most important in life? These are the fundamental beliefs that guide you and dictate your actions. They are your moral compass, right and wrong, the non-negotiable principles by which you live your life. Some examples may be integrity, loyalty, respect, family, friends, and freedom. Your values are anything significant to you, for which there is no compromising.
There is little doubt that you may have neglected to live up to your core values at least once (or more) in addiction. As you learn more about yourself in treatment, you will re-establish — or even establish — values and implement them into your life. This is an integral part of true self-awareness.
What Strengths Make You Feminine and Powerful?
After using substances for so long, there is a good chance that you have been beaten down physically, mentally, and spiritually. Maybe you have lived in trauma for so long that you bought into beliefs that women are weak and that your voice does not matter. However, who you are and what makes you feminine make you the most powerful.
Deep inside of you, there is power in the uniqueness of who you are. What are your strengths? What are your passions? What drives you? Who are the people in your life that you truly love? What about you and your femininity makes you powerful? What do you want to accomplish in this life? What do you want to change in this world? As you become more self-aware, you will become more precise about stepping into your power.
How Can Becoming Self-Aware Help You to Heal?
Unraveling all of the pain, shame, blame, and guilt that has hidden who you are during addiction helps you to become more self-aware. Learning more about addiction enables you to realize that you are not alone and do not need to be alone in your recovery. Learning to find your true identity, from remembering your favorite activities to finding your passions again, will help you to step out of addiction and into a beautiful world of recovery.
How can women recovering from addiction find self-awareness? Finding your identity again, reclaiming your core values, remembering who you are and what makes you a strong, passionate woman will help you find the strength to heal from substance abuse. The more self-aware you become, the more you will walk away from your addiction and into your recovery. At The Ho Tai Way – Recovery For Women, finding self-awareness through education is our primary goal in your individualized treatment plan. Our dynamic curriculum of engaging classes and individualized and group therapy will help you discover who you are again. Join us in our comfortable facility in beautiful Southern California to begin your healing process. We use trauma-informed care and evidence-based practices to support your addiction treatment. Our program is designed for women just like you. Please call us at (714) 881-8931 today to let us help you find your identity again.