Starting out our new life in recovery involves taking chances, making decisions that can be life-altering, trying out healthier behaviors and working the 12-steps to firmly ground ourselves in sobriety. It’s an incredible undertaking, a journey that is ongoing. We are never done with recovery. We are at it forever, one day at a time. What about being able to trust yourself to do the right thing? Well, since most individuals in recovery have a difficult time with this, let’s talk about learning how to trust yourself again. Call us at 1-734-288-7510 or tap Speakpipe Join the Chat Room, Tap Live stream and Chat Room email at mark@recoveredcast.com Subscribe to Premium Get daily recovery messages Daily AA Emails.   Step 1 - Start With a Clean Slate When you came in, did your slate need cleaning? What is your experience with this? How do you “drop the rock”? How do you forget the past? How do you focus on the positive? NOTES First and foremost, there’s no point in carrying a lot of baggage from the past now that you’re in recovery. Having gone through treatment and made the decision to live your life clean and sober, you have a new chapter in front of you. Forget about the mistakes that you made in the past. You are not your past. It doesn’t define you or dictate your future. Only you can do that, and you’ve already decided that you’re going to live to the fullest of your ability and be in effective long-term recovery. Starting off with this clean slate will make it easier to concentrate on healing and growing more self-confident. As your self-confidence increases, you’ll find that making decisions becomes a little easier as well. Step 2 - Build Upon Your Successes What does this mean to you? How can this help? Do you have experience with this? How do you do this? How do you “remember” your successes? When you’re just starting recovery, there’s so much to do all at once. The tendency is to either go gung-ho and try to do it all or sink back on the couch in despair because you don’t think you can tackle all that you feel you need to do. The key thing here is to embrace recovery and work it slowly, thoughtfully each day. When you experience a success – such as your first week of sobriety, first month, and so on – think of this as a building block. One successful achievement leads to another and another and so on. Successes can be anything that you deem important. It could be that you’re finally able to have a meaningful conversation about your newly-won sobriety with your spouse or that you’ve worked out a realignment of your workload with your supervisor to accommodate your attendance at 12-step meetings and gradually ramping up you job responsibilities. It could be successfully overcoming cravings by using the coping mechanisms you learned during treatment. Perhaps you find that being able to go to work each day is a success – especially if you had great difficulties with this prior to treatment. However you define success, when you achieve it, build upon it. You will be making it easier to learn how to trust yourself again. Step 3 - Ask for Help When you were new, was this difficult? Why? How did you do it early on? Do you ask for help now? Why is this important? Who do you ask for help? No one expects you to go it alone. In fact, no one recovers alone. You need the support and encouragement of others. Two of your most important support networks are your family and your 12-step groups. Naturally, you’ll feel raw and confused when you first begin recovery. Go ahead and ask for help from your loved ones as well as your 12-step sponsor. Your loved ones already know about your past problems – they’ve lived with them. Of course they want you to move forward in recovery. If you feel reluctant to discuss your fears with them, that’s understandable. But don’t miss out on the opportunity to open the lines of communication at home. Give it some time and bring up the subject when you feel c