Not too awful long ago one of our viewers asked me a really good question about why people with
addictions drug alcohol or any addiction really
can't seem to self soothe the truth of it is there are actually several reasons for this
and I'm going to go over those in this video along with telling you how to fix that issue
for those of you who are new here welcome to put the shovel down I'm Amber Hollandsworth and
this YouTube channel is all about helping you understand science and psychology of addiction
so you can get your family and your life back on track get back out there
and live the life that you wanna live I want you to know you are not powerless
you do not have to hit rock bottom and there are many things you can do to help an addicted
loved one if you wanna be back in control of your life subscribe to this channel and I'll make sure
you are always five steps ahead of addiction
and don't forget hit the little bell if you want access to the bonus episodes
okay so the first reason people with addictions drugs alcohol or whatever
have trouble self soothing or coping with things is because they're on an emotional roller coaster
they're alternating between feeling really great and feeling really terrible and
even when they're not feeling terrible they're worried about feeling terrible
so the constantly this treadmill are just trying to keep their head above
water and a lot of the time the person is in an actual withdrawal state now when you're in
withdrawal You don't feel good you're really sick if you haven't experienced this before
then I want you to take just a minute here and think about the last time you felt really sick
maybe you had the stomach flu maybe you had strep throat whatever it was
but you felt really terrible now in that moment when you're laying in bed and you just want the
misery to think about how well you coped with things when your
kids needed something when your boss or your work was calling you asking you for
some kind of silly something think about how you felt inside your head
I bet your emotional response just wasn't as great as it normally would be
because when we're sick when we don't feel good when we're distress
our coping naturally goes down because all of our emotional resources
are just being put toward trying to kind of keep it together so if you throw any little
thing on top of that it feels like completely overwhelming and it will put you over the edge
and even if you've never had an addiction you should be able to relate to how difficult it
is to cope with regular life stuff when you're really sick or really distressed now another
reason why people struggling with an addiction have such a hard time coping with things is
because they've been using the addiction or the substance to pretty much cope with everything
it becomes your one and only coping skill kind of like all your eggs are in one basket sort of thing
and after a period of time when something bad happens you just engage in the addictive
behavior to fix it when something great happens you engage in the addictive behavior
when it's just a regular every day Wednesday you engage in the addictive behavior
and I like to say coping it's like a muscle like any other muscle you have if you don't use it
you lose it essentially you stop practicing all of your other coping skills and you rely
solely on the addictive behavior or substance to help you manage and regulate emotions now another
reason why people that have addictions struggle to handle everyday stressors is because
they have a lot of them probably more than most because when you're struggling with an addiction
like I said before you're on that treadmill and your whole life is revolved around that
addictive behavior and the longer it goes the more of your other life stuff like your
regular life stuff starts to fall through the cracks and your relationships fall apart
and you're not doing as good at work and you're not keeping up with your schoolwork
and so you get dug into this hole that just gets bigger and bigger and
bigger by the day and ultimately you're just overwhelmed by all these stressors
you don't have the coping skills to deal with them and you probably feel sick most of the time
and another reason why people who have substance use disorders
just don't have a lot of resiliency that's our ability to overcome challenges is because they
really dislike themselves they have a really strong sense of shame guilt poor self esteem
a lot of times even if they may act cocky or they act like they got it all together deep inside they
have all these secrets and they feel like they're a bad person even if other people don't know it
so that very low sense of self also contributes to the difficulty they have
coping with situations I'd say that's a lot of bad news
right well the good news is is that the ability to cope with situations the ability to
build resiliency actually comes back fairly quickly once you start addressing the addiction
now I'm gonna be honest with you for the first few weeks you're gonna be kind of a mess your
brain chemicals are gonna be stabilizing and everything's gonna be difficult and in those
first couple of weeks I usually ask family and friends just to give you a little extra
grace period and not throw too much on you during that period
where you're trying to get back on your feet because you're going to be grumpy
you're going to be irritable and everything's going to feel a lot harder
but once you get through that period of time things start to get a little better and a little
better and you start to feel better about yourself which then helps you to build that resiliency and
you start using those coping skills again and you start learning how to deal with those difficulties
and you start digging out of that hole of problems that you've built
and slowly step by step you dig out of the hole of addiction and in the end when you beat addiction
you're gonna actually have more resiliency than most people more ability to cope than
most people because you're gonna have to have built up such strong muscles
to dig your way out of that hole you're gonna be even more equipped to deal with life
stressors so I know right now it feels hard and if you're not sober but you're
thinking about getting sober it might even feel impossible but I promise you it's not
people do this every single day and you can do it too
one of the very first easiest steps you can take is not to add more problems to the pile every day
so start dealing with little things as they happen
actually have this really cool nightly recovery checklist that's just a little
PDF that gives you a list of questions to ask yourself every day that will help identify
things that could be happening in your life that you need to deal with
now while they're easy so that things just don't build up on you
I like to say it's kind of like you know if you eat something and you wash your cup or you
wash your glass or you put in the dishwasher right then it keeps everything nice and clean
if you don't and you just pile it all up in the sink for days and days and days
and then you go in there and stuff's been piled in there for two weeks
it's going to take you a long time to get through that nastiness and dishes
and by then the mess is worse and there's grossness and the crud is like stuck on the dishes
it's going to take you twice as long that's why if you deal with it one at a time life will be
much easier so I'll put a list to that nightly recovery checklist in the description below along
with a link that gives you access to lots of other resources that might be helpful and up next I want
you to watch this video because it's about how to start to improve those relationships which is
another big piece to feeling better about yourself to having more mastery over your own emotions
and your environment and it will keep you on that road to recovery I'd like to send a big
heartfelt thanks to all of you who help support this channel
your likes shares and donations are helping us spread the message of recovery and without you
this wouldn't be possible now this next video has been hand selected to go right along with this one
and don't forget to check the description for additional resources