Discipline and Motivation Practices in Early Recovery

Use all the steps above to reinforce your motivation and ability to cope with life stressors. When you feel stuck in your recovery, or the rest of your motivation for sobriety life feels stressful and messy, your eating disorder might look attractive again. You think about all the benefits of maintaining your eating disorder.

Research has shown that autonomous motivators — the internal things that motivate you to recover — are much more effective than external motivators. Autonomous motivators are things like following your personal values and achieving goals you set for yourself. External motivators are things like being shamed by family or friends to recover. A lot of people want to change more negatively portrayed eating disorder behaviors, but not the behaviors deemed “positive.” For example, many people want to stop bingeing, but not the restriction that leads to bingeing.

Sources of Inspiration Can Keep You Motivated in Recovery

Success in achievement of disciplines that we have come to treasure as acts of self-love. The above outcomes are the perfect recipe for a motivated recovery that will continue to get better and better. In the case of needed practices in early recovery, those items could be attendance in 12-step meetings, appointments with a therapist, a group therapy session, an early morning run, healthy eating practices, etc. In my experience as a clinical therapist at the Sanford Outpatient Center, most people have 3-5 items they need to accomplish weekly to keep their recovery on track. In direct contrast, discipline isn’t subject to changes in our experiences and environments.

• Experts trained in addiction recovery can support you through each stage of change.
• Unfortunately, this feature of all behavioral therapies is often overlooked.
• Working the 12 steps with a sponsor can help guide you and keep you motivated to continue the progress in your journey of recovery.
• Likewise, meta-analytic studies that investigate the results of numerous individual studies have produced mixed results regarding the efficiency of Motivational Interviewing.
• In that way, there is no difference in methodology or treatment focus.
• As advocates of mental health and wellness, we take great pride in educating our readers on the various online therapy providers available.

Another concern is based on the notion that, to fully benefit from treatment, patients must be motivated to participate in treatment and change behaviour, and that the use of coercion disregards the importance of internal motivation in recovery. Typically, it is considered to be crucially important that the treatment manages to change the patient’s motivation. Little research has examined the stages of motivation and compulsory commitment to treatment among patients with SUDs.

What Is Intrinsic Motivation?

If someone acts because they feel it is the healthy or right thing to do, they are driven by intrinsic motivation. When someone does something based on external factors or to pursue a reward of some sort, they have experienced extrinsic motivation. Both addiction and recovery can be driven by both types of motivation at once. Starting your addiction recovery journey is the first step in building a healthy future, and it will continue throughout the rest of your life. To keep moving down that path to health, wellness, and the joys that go along with it, however, you must maintain both motivation and inspiration.

• MI on the other hand, is a technique that can be used in many settings and used in combination with other therapies.
• Brief interventions like MET have been shown to be just as effective in recovery as other forms of substance use interventions (DiClemente et al., 2017).
• Your support community will help to ensure you are staying motivated when you are struggling.
• The first and one of the most powerful therapeutic techniques is to express empathy to the client.
• Most of the patients in these studies were not alcohol dependent and were treated either in primary care or substance-abuse treatment settings.
• As you start navigating through sobriety, you will start to understand that your recovery must be the most important motivating factor in your life.

Recognizing these differences was the first step to evaluating how differences in motivation affect participation in treatment programs and drinking outcomes. When you make your own decision to seek recovery, you may find that your life post-recovery starts to look a lot different. Many people who are recovering https://ecosoberhouse.com/ from a substance abuse disorder have to cut off old social ties, sometimes even family, move locations, find new favorite hobbies, and build an entirely new life for themselves. The IA patients scored significantly lower levels of motivation to change on the RTCQ than the VA patients at admission.

What Is Inspiration?

Based on motivational psychology and the stages-of-change model, MI focuses on enhancing and facilitating the patient’s internal motivation to change (Miller and Rollnick 1991). This approach assumes that the patient is responsible for changing his or her addictive behavior and recognizes ambivalence as a natural part of the process. In contrast to confrontational approaches, MI is designed to assist patients in working through their ambivalence and in moving toward positive behavioral change. To respond to harmful substance use, most countries provide some form of compulsory commitment to treatment [5, 6]. This is often motivated by the intent to protect an otherwise legally capable individual in a self-destructive and vulnerable situation due to substance use [5].