Monday, June 28, 2021

Finding Gratitude

We often hear clients complaining because they live in a sober living community, treatment program, or halfway house.  Mostly the ones complaining are new residents who've never made an effort to change their lives or get clean and sober.  And often those are the ones who leave before giving the program a chance.

I'm not sure why they complain.  Because the things TLC teaches them is simply how to live like so-called normal citizens.  We require them to work and pay a service fee for the services we provide.  We require them to attend educational groups inside the program.  And to go to outside 12-step meetings to meet other recovering people to learn more about their disease.  

Yet many of them are ungrateful because living in the recovery world can be hard work.  And most of them who come to us are unskilled, unschooled, and not highly motivated.  Yet, when they arrived they were homeless and broke - something they seem to forget when they start losing their initial gratitude for finding a place that would take them without funds.  They have everything they need to live a sober and healthy life if they stay and take advantage of the program.  They can change their future.

I do have some suggestions of how they can live a happy and productive life.  And while I normally don't recommend comparing ourselves to others-in this case I do.  Because it works for me

When I start feeling ungrateful I just look at the world around me and quickly become grateful.  Maybe I notice a homeless person pushing a shopping cart of trash.  Or a panhandler outside of a Circle K.

Or I find compassion for the people who lost loved ones when over a hundred of their loved ones disappeared when their apartment building collapsed on them in the middle of the night in Florida.  

We find gratitude when look around us and find those who have real problems.

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