Addiction is both a physical and mental illness. This makes it complex to treat. It also means that techniques not always associated with health care are necessary in recovery.
Gratitude and appreciation are generally considered valuable traits. They promote both personal and social wellbeing. However, working on them in addiction treatment is particularly important.
What is the difference between gratitude and appreciation and why are they important in recovery? Let’s get into the nuts and bolts of each.
What is Gratitude?
Gratitude refers to the capacity to feel thankful for the good things in your life. It is both a personal trait and an action. Gratitude is generally expressed to a third party. This may be a person who has helped you, a higher power, life itself, or even your own conscience.
While gratitude is usually felt and expressed in response to events viewed as positive. However, one can also feel gratitude for seemingly negative things that have occurred in their lives. This happens when one recognizes in hindsight that the incident was ultimately for the best. For example, a terrible mistake made while drunk or high may turn out to be a turning point that leads to rehab and health.
Everyone feels grateful and expresses it at times, but it requires work if it is to become a habit. What about appreciation?
What is Appreciation?
Appreciation is often used as a synonym for gratitude. However, they are very different concepts. While gratitude implies the recognition of a positive, as well as the existence of a recipient of the gratitude, appreciation can be seen as more neutral. When you appreciate something, you see it as it is without judging it as good or bad.
Since appreciation can be tough to define, an example might help.
A person who has lost a loved one will naturally see this in a negative light. That is a healthy response and indicates that the person is able to feel empathy and love. But this view of what has happened can become toxic. The person might find it tough to see existence as anything but painful. They may fall into a depression and end up harming themselves.
What’s the alternative? Except when the person who died was in terrible pain, the likelihood is that one can’t be grateful for the loss. However, they can appreciate it. Appreciation means accepting that it is something that has occurred and cannot be changed. It means recognizing the feelings it has brought up and the absence it has left in one’s life.
And, most significantly, it means accepting that loss is a part of life, as is grief. When a person sees grief this way, they do not try to fight it. They process it, and may even be grateful for its presence. This allows them to move on, even though they never forget the person they loved.
Why are Gratitude and Appreciation Important in Addiction Recovery?
People who enter addiction recovery tend to have developed a very negative worldview. Their experience of life while not drunk or high has become painful due to their dependence on substances. Alternatively, it may have been their difficulty seeing good in the world that led them to use substances in the first place.
Gratitude is necessary for the sake of balance. A person cannot sustain a life in which they only see the bad. They need to start recognizing the positive that is present every single day. It might take a while to start feeling the goodness, but gratitude pulls their attention to it over and over again.
But gratitude does not make pain go away – that is not its purpose at all – and, when one is recovering from addiction, fear of or aversion to pain can be a significant barrier. Their instinct is to turn to substances when in pain.
This is why appreciation is so important. When the person appreciates that pain is a natural part of life, they begin to see it for what it is. Not only can one not survive without it, but it is also temporary. Pain comes and goes in waves. It is only the attempt to avoid emotional pain that ensures it sticks around.
This is in stark contrast to the perspective of pain being a “bad” thing. People will always try their hardest to stay away from something considered bad. Not appreciating pain for what it is, without judgment, makes it difficult to move on and find healthy ways to manage the experience.
How Do You Cultivate Gratitude and Appreciation?
It can be difficult to motivate oneself to begin cultivating gratitude but the practice itself is fairly easy. You might take some time every night to identify the good that has occurred that day and find reasons to be grateful for it. You might start looking out for these moments as they happen, internalizing them and even expressing them out loud to those around you.
Appreciation is a little more tricky, especially since we have a natural tendency to try to avoid feeling pain. The good news is that mindfulness, which has become a common part of addiction treatment, places major importance on appreciation. Mindfulness practices provide training in appreciation.
Modern psychology has incorporated mindfulness into certain treatment models. These models are specifically designed to cater to the needs of those struggling to regulate emotional pain. They provide very practical ways to work towards an appreciation of life with all its ups and downs. The result is healthy emotional regulation.
Conclusion
Gratitude and appreciation are different concepts but both are important to addiction recovery. They are worked into programs at the best rehabs, with experts understanding their necessity.
If you or a loved one are struggling with addiction, get in touch with Seasons in Malibu today to start your process of healing.