It keeps you focused on recovery. This might look like circular logic – like we’re saying it’s a good recovery activity because it’s an activity that’s great for recovery – but it’s not. The act of volunteering foregrounds who you are and what you’re doing. You’re out of your home, you’re not drinking or doing drugs, and you’re doing something for anyone apart from yourself. When you’re volunteering, you are “out of self,” which recovery fellowship members offer as a way of handling everyday stress. The book “Alcoholics Anonymous” suggests in Step Ten that when selfishness, dishonesty, resentment and fear crop up, we ask our Higher Power to take them off, and then we “resolutely turn our thoughts to someone we can help.”
It helps manage time. You need to get positive ways to fill your days and nights. Maybe you are okay while you’re at work, going to a residential district support meeting, exercising, or participating in a hobby, passion, or pastime. Oahu is the unscheduled time that trips you up and leaves you vulnerable to relapse. If weekends are tough for you personally, you can put in two full days volunteering. You can even travel – nothing outlandish – to places where people are in probably the most need. As an example, Florida and Texas needed help following the hurricanes of 2017-2018, and California needed help following the wildfires of 2018. If weeknights give you problems, you can find homeless shelters and soup kitchens throughout the country needing evening volunteers.
It improves self-esteem. Whenever you help other people, you feel good about yourself. It’s not the fleeting feeling of euphoria you obtain from alcohol or drugs that fades once the alcohol or drug leaves the body: it’s a regular feeling of rightness and purpose. It’s something you obtain whenever you begin to see the tangible results of your actions and the positive impact they have on the lives of others. When you have that, no one can take it away from you. Build-up enough of these moments and those feelings, and you’re on the road to restoring the self-esteem addiction could have obtained from you.
It keeps you engaged with the entire world and the people in it. Many people who deal with addiction handle intense feelings of loneliness and isolation. Maybe you are familiar with the pattern: you understand you have trouble with alcohol or drugs, but for a million reasons, you think you can’t keep in touch with anyone about it. Therefore, you don’t. You hide it. You drink or use drugs alone, which compounds your feelings of loneliness and isolation. It’s a vicious cycle. Volunteering helps break the cycle by giving you a destination for a go that’s positive and something to accomplish this you understand is good. People start relying upon you, and that’s one of the reasons you keep turning up: someone on the market needs you. As opposed to feeling burdened by responsibility, you feel liberated by choice. You develop a virtuous cycle that reaffirms itself everytime you volunteer.
You help people who need help. There it’s: the essence of volunteering. You volunteer not because it looks good, not because it’s easy, and not because there’s a free lunch involved. You volunteer to simply help a person who needs help. It’s an expanded version of helping a vintage lady across the road or doing a random act of kindness for a stranger. When you’re able to the idea in www.njaddictionresources.com your recovery where you can see past yourself and recognize the requirements of others, you’re making progress.
Where you should Start
Let’s say you’re in recovery and you’re prepared to volunteer some of one’s time to people in need.
Where should you appear?
The initial place you can look is somewhere you probably go many times weekly already: the local peer support groups, such as for example Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), Narcotics Anonymous (NA), Refuge Recovery, or SMART Recovery. Start along with your home group, where you can generally find service positions such as for example meeting chairperson, secretary or General Service Representative (GSR).