Updated on 3/8/2023

Experiencing feelings of loneliness can happen at any point and interfere with your progress in addiction recovery. Persistent loneliness can create negative thoughts and beliefs about yourself and soon cause you to feel hopeless and incapable of managing recovery. While hopelessness is a difficult feeling to overcome, there are ways to manage feelings of hopelessness. This blog looks at how you can identify the onset of hopelessness and what you can do to overcome it.

Alienating Yourself in Addiction Recovery

Alienation is a form of hopelessness and occurs when you begin to believe that you are different from other people. When you experience alienation, you could start to feel like friends, family and peers have exiled you from their lives. You then begin to feel as though they believe that you are no longer worthy of love and support.

Soon, you might start to convince yourself that you are not worthy of love and support. Feeding into alienation will cause you to continue building on negative thoughts and perceptions. Alienation differs from isolation in that you believe that you have become estranged or neglected and that perhaps your circumstances are unique and therefore unrelated. If you are beginning to separate yourself from others because you think they cannot understand you, this is an indication that you could be alienating yourself, and it is time to get help.

Lacking Motivation to Stay Sober and Feeling Uninspired

Lack of motivation can creep up on anybody at any point in their life. Being unmotivated can happen in many ways and for many different reasons; work exhaustion, exhaustion from raising families and overall losing a sense of direction can contribute to a lack of motivation. Because the world is ever-changing, so is your life, and at times, you might forget to reset and refocus on your needs and goals. But doing so is especially important when you’re in addiction recovery. If lack of motivation persists and you continue to neglect your responsibility to yourself and recovery, you can become uninspired.

Feelings of Despair

Feelings of despair can cause you to succumb to the belief that you will never reach where you want to be. Living within the depths of despair can quickly deteriorate the progress you are making in your recovery. Despair can lead to thoughts of relapse and even to relapse itself. If you have noticed an overall feeling of despair and worry about future events that have not and likely will not happen, you may be experiencing hopelessness.

Finding Motivation and Inspiration in Addiction Recovery

Lack of motivation and feeling uninspired happens to everybody at some point in their life; however, when you take the time to focus on yourself, you can restore motivation and inspiration. Many self-care practices can help get you started, including:

Such practices help you see how far you have come in recovery and how much more you have to accomplish. These practices help connect you with your present thoughts to help you understand how and why you feel and react in certain ways. When you take time to sit with your thoughts, you can get to the root of what might prevent you from moving forward. Getting in touch with yourself will also help you look at how far you have come and appreciate the tools and friendships you have gained in recovery. Keeping a gratitude journal, taking hot baths and just reconnecting with yourself helps you realize that things are never as bleak as they might seem and can help you avoid hopelessness in recovery.

Maintain Support and Build Relationships

Understand that part of sustaining recovery takes being able to build healthy relationships. Staying connected with those you can trust through meetings and other healthy social events benefits you in many ways. Support groups help you realize that your circumstances are not unique to you and that the world is not against you. Many of your peers will likely share some of your experiences, and this can bring a sense of connection, comfort and confidence in helping you not feel estranged or experiencing hopelessness in recovery.

Trusted friends and family can support you and are there to help. Taking time to understand the people in your network, including why they are there, will help you identify with those you can trust and separate those that might negatively influence you. If you are struggling to decipher who you can trust and who you can’t, working with a therapist, counselor or mentor can significantly benefit you to not only strengthen bonds but separate yourself from bonds that don’t put your recovery first.

If you are struggling to overcome hopelessness in recovery and are dealing with thoughts of relapse, then it is time to seek help. At New Hope Ranch in Manor, Texas, we help individuals find the treatment and therapy needed to overcome thoughts associated with hopelessness and addiction. Our approach incorporates both conventional and alternative methods as we believe that the journey to overcome substance use disorder is different for everyone. We also understand that treatment is not just about repairing the physical damages resulting from using substances, but also the emotional. For more information on how to get started, reach out to New Hope Ranch at (737) 600-8565.