Community is crucial for everyone, regardless of age, gender, or life experiences — and when you’ve experienced a hard season of life, such as addiction, community plays a vital role in accountability, encouragement, and continued healing throughout treatment.
Yet, when you first enter recovery, you honestly don’t feel as if you can trust yourself, staff, or anyone. So why would you feel comfortable getting to know others within treatment? Why would you want to be vulnerable, let your guard down, and begin to establish your own community to foster encouragement and hope?
Valid questions. Understandable skepticism. Even when community sounds comforting, it can be an intimidating world to navigate. Meanwhile, community is vital as you work your way through the highs and lows of treatment, and community is essential when it’s time to reintegrate post-recovery.
For now, though, let’s stick with the importance of the recovery community. Check out these two ways to invest in an intimidating, yet inspiring community within your treatment facility:
#1. Map Out Your Journey of Trust
Trust is a delicate thing. Trust is something that often takes years to cultivate but only requires seconds to shatter. Trust comes with a high price, too, as you must give and take of the sacrifice it requires. You exchange pride for vulnerability to gain trust, and you swap fear for faith to give trust away.
Of course, you can hold onto wariness and dodge trust altogether, but it makes healing nearly impossible. It leaves little room for encouragement from others and accountability to keep you moving toward full recovery.
So, as hard as it may seem, give trust a try. Map out your trust journey, recognizing if a past experience has made you skeptical of trust, and discovering if ruined friendships or family abandonment has you doubting trust altogether. Once you recognize your core concerns with trust, you can wrestle through those problems.
Trust issues can’t serve as permanent stumbling blocks but rather as the prodding needed to give trust a second chance with those who need trust in the same way that you do. More likely than not, your recovery community has struggled with trust just as you have, but they need it just as desperately as you.
It is scary, but trust is worth the try. What’s the worst that could happen? Someone can let you down — as if we haven’t all experienced that in life. However, the best thing that can happen is having someone who will forever believe in you — and that’s worth the risk.
#2. Understand the End Goals of Those Around You
The healthiest communities are those that have the same end goals and strategies to get there. A unanimous sense of purpose creates a bond like no other, particularly when the bond was formed out of a deep desire to be set free of bondage.
It is safe to say that your colleagues in recovery have the same end goal as you: to be set free from the bondage of addiction. They want to reclaim their faith, relationships, and former hobbies that they love. They want freedom in the best way possible, but such freedom comes from a place of sacrifice, which means you’re surrounded by people who are fighting the same uphill battle that you are.
Most relationships start with a simple “hello” over coffee or a common joke, but relationships are forged with fire when they endure hardship together. As odd as it seems, what better place to create a strong community than within the walls of your recovery treatment facility?
Here, people understand your backstory, but they do not want your story’s ending to stop at treatment. They want your future as expectant and hopeful as they want their own; they want you to experience the same freedom they long for.
Such a commonality formed from a place of hardship and hope creates the type of community you can bank on long after you have reintegrated and joined other communities.
Trust, Honesty, and Vulnerability
It’s important to understand how crucial trust, honesty, and vulnerability are through the healing process — but before you can get to any of that, you must first face your past and unearth the reasons why you might be hesitant to find community.
Trust is hard. Opening up with honesty, being vulnerable, and sharing experiences is just as hard. Fortunately, there’s a beauty to celebrating your arrival — not only your arrival at the end of treatment, but your arrival at recognizing that you can lean on others, that other people can point you to God, to goodness, to a truth that tomorrow holds purpose.
Here at Renaissance Ranch, we value not only your addiction recovery but also the friendships you forge and the community you create throughout your time at our treatment facility. We believe that with time, you’ll discover these answers and begin to grow through them. While this can be intimidating and scary, we are happy to help you map out answers and solutions to some of your toughest questions. You put in all the hard work, took the necessary steps to make recovery such a vital priority in your journey, and now, we celebrate this next step with you. It’s essential to be mindful of not only your accomplishments but of the accomplishments of others around you. With programs ranging from alumni retreats to family recovery treatment, you are sure to find the support that suits your individual needs at Renaissance Ranch. For more information, call us today at (801) 308-8898.