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When I came into recovery, I didn’t feel I had much to be grateful for. My life was at an all-time low, again. I felt miserable about myself and everything around me. My thinking was still geared towards extreme negativity and I couldn’t see that for all my problems, I still had the gift of life and loving support of my friends from the program.
One night, I was thanking a friend incessantly for some assistance he provided me. “Gratitude is an action word. Don’t tell me. Just show me,” he replied.
Those words stopped me dead in my tracks and revolutionized my outlook on the world. I’d always thought that gratitude meant saying ‘thank-you’ when one received a gift. It had never occurred to me that my gratitude could simply be reflected in my actions. My gratitude speaks when I honestly and diligently work a program and apply principles. My gratitude speaks when I reach my hand out to the next newcomer and offer my support.
In recovery literature, it states that a grateful addict will never use. This is a strong statement and yet, in my personal experience, I’ve found it to be very true. The disease of addiction robs us of gratitude and programs us to always look for more, better, faster or stronger. Thinking and behaving from a place of gratitude is the polar opposite of compulsion and a very powerful antidote to the addictive mindset.
Working at TSN and in the treatment field gives me something to be grateful for on a daily basis. Speaking to addicts and alcoholics reaching out for help gives me a stark reminder of my own affliction. Taking the time to offer love, tolerance and assistance to a suffering individual and their family gives me the opportunity to ‘pay it forward’ for all the help I received along my own path. And today, I always offer the same challenge to thankful clients – Don’t tell me, just show me.
