The Warrior's Guide to Successful Sobriety: How to Gain Mental, Emotional and Spiritual Muscles by FOSTER DR. KJ

Author:FOSTER, DR. KJ [FOSTER, DR. KJ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fostering Resilience LLC
Published: 2020-12-29T16:00:00+00:00

5

POWER ELEMENT 5 WARRIOR HEART

The heart of a warrior is an open heart, and freely flows from a place of love. It's a heart that is kind, caring, compassionate and forgiving. A truly resilient warrior, a warrior who is spiritually enlightened, does not harbor anger, hate, judgment, resentment or unforgiveness within their heart. I emphasize the word harbor, because it’s a natural part of being human to feel anger and resentment from time to time. It’s normal to have judgmental thoughts, and to feel so hurt by someone, that you are challenged to forgive. One of the most difficult processes of my recovery was learning how to forgive. It was especially difficult to forgive myself. To reach the Resilient Warrior Stage of recovery requires an open heart that is cultivated and maintained through the practice of forgiveness and compassion for self and others.

In this chapter, I share with you strategies and exercises that will help cultivate an open heart. A heart that is fully open is able to express and receive love and compassion. Unfortunately, as mentioned in the previous chapter, there are many people who are in an abusive relationship with themselves. When one is in active addiction, they are engaged in an abusive relationship with self, the residual effects of which carry over into the recovering stage and beyond. It is common for those recovering from addiction to experience a significant degree of shame and self-loathing.

Thanks to the wonderful work of Dr. Brene Brown, we now know that shame is something which affects everyone. We also know that no one likes to or wants to talk about it, making it very difficult to treat,. This is especially true in the environment of addiction treatment, where clients are limited by insurance dictates. It takes a high degree of trust and rapport to even begin to address shame issues. Yet, generally, most people only attend residential treatment for 28 days (or less) and then transfer to a lower level of care, where they will usually be assigned a new therapist. This makes building trust and rapport, and consequently the ability to address and reduce shame, very difficult.

I remember a time when I was given an opportunity to conduct one of my very first groups as a new employee at a very large treatment center. I was already well into my own reserach work on shame, and decided I wanted to conduct a group where the topic was all about the harmful nature of toxic shame. I think I even named it something like “Learn How to Reduce Your Toxic Shame” or something along those lines. It was such a large treatment center that the clients had 2 or 3 options for different groups they could choose to attend. Out of the 120 clients they had at that time, I believe I had about 12 people show up for the group. Brene Brown was right, no one actually wants to talk about their shame.

Brene Brown’s Ted Talk, Listening to Shame in March 2012, was another transformational experience for me, my recovery, and my career.

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