If you remember, G1 Green Lights focus on Physical Self-Care during addiction recovery. These are the healthy daily activities that you do to actually take care of your physical body. I wrote about how you need to take care of those physical needs first in order to even have a chance of thinking straight and making good choices.
Today I want to focus moving past the physical self care into activities that start to become a little more challenging for us to do. It's the G2 category of the Green Lights. G2 lights are the second tier of green lights and focus on the emotional and treatment activities. These are the activities that we do to start building connection and make us vulnerable.
Today's green light is G2 - Emotional Self Care.
Emotional self-care is a huge part of recovery. Most addicts will tell you that they can't even name the emotions they feel even if they are letting themselves have that feeling. This is where a G2 light comes in. These are activities for treatment that deal with identifying/acting/dealing with emotions and how that relates to our self-care.
There are tons of resources out there for dealing with emotions so I'm not going to actually go into counseling..as I am not qualified to do that. But as you work out emotional self-care in your treatment for your addiction recovery, this is where you would add a light for that.
Some example include journaling, reading, spending time with others. Perhaps for you it's as basic as even identifying your emotions each day or being vulnerable with someone and telling them how you feel. Those are activities that indicate you are taking care of yourself.
Now these emotions might not always be pretty or even easy to identify but I can speak from experience and say that it is freeing to finally be able to label even the ugly emotions. For me, I do count identifying an emotion as a G2 because during my journey I needed to identify what those emotions were and to expand my vocabulary.
Perhaps you can easily identify the emotion you are feeling (great job..you are ahead of most addicts in that case) but you need to deal with the emotion in a healthy way. So perhaps your G2 Emotional Self-Care is more advanced and needs to deal with reacting properly to the emotion.
Or perhaps you just don't allow yourself the time to connect with others or yourself. Go to coffee with friends and just have a conversation..and it doesn't have to be heavy hearted either. Read that book you have been wanting to but putting off. Allow time to take care of yourself from a mental perspective. These are all G2 Emotional Self-Care activities.
Work with your counselor and accountability partner/sponsor to build a list of activities that you need to work on for G2 - Emotional Self-Care. I believe that this Green Light is such an important part of addiction recovery. Identifying emotions and taking care of one-self emotionally is very tiring but it's also healthy. Once we begin to do this as part of our lifestyle, the heaviness begins to fade and it become part of who we are..and that's a good thing.
Don't have recoveryBox yet? Download it from the app store now and begin your journey to freedom.
Connect with others on Facebook and "Like" the app page. Feel free to tell others about how recoveryBox app is part of your journey for your addiction recovery. And don't forget to count that as a G2 - Emotional Self-Care activity too!
