“I don’t deserve sobriety” men have told themselves. As men who have caused a great deal of damage in our lives and the lives of people we love as a result of our addiction, we find ourselves feeling undeserving for a lot. We don’t feel we deserve our family. We don’t feel we deserve their love, forgiveness, or help. We don’t feel we deserve to recover, to have a chance at life, or to make something of ourselves. We don’t feel we have the right to be happy or healthy. Somehow, we have fallen under the belief that the worst of what addiction has to offer us is the best that we deserve in our lives. Thankfully, this isn’t so.
Everyone deserves a chance to be happy. Everyone deserves a chance at forgiveness, rehabilitation, and transformation. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we have an opportunity to change and in so doing make amends to ourselves as well as to others. We learn how to let go of all the narratives in our mind which tell us we are undeserving. We learn how to act in ways which hep us feel we are deserving- we earn our confidence, we earn our esteem, and we earn back the trust of others. Overtime, we build ourselves to be the men we never thought we could be and as a result we live the kind of lives we never thought that we could deserve to live.
In treatment and recovery for addiction, there is a copious amount of ego reduction involved. However, the process of recovery is not about beating ourselves up or tearing ourselves down to an unhealthy level. Our goal is to build our confidence back up to a healthy level where we know we deserve to recover and heal. Deserving is not a matter of entitlement or earning when it comes to recovery. We deserve a chance at life, living, and loving, because we are men- human beings who have had to overcome a significant number of challenges in our life.
