SMART Recovery Tool: Unconditional Self-Acceptance (USA)
POINT 3: Manage Thoughts, Feelings, & Behaviors
Unconditional self-acceptance is the idea that you have worth, just as you are. This explains what separates “you” — your character, traits, personality, strengths, and weaknesses — from your behaviors. This is why SMART doesn’t use labels. You may have addictive behaviors but you are not an addict. While this might seem like a game of words, it’s important to recognize how powerful words and labels are.
The same labels that you may carry internally — “failure,” “disappointment,” or “loser” — led to your unhealthy behaviors. Attaching new labels won’t help.
If you can’t accept yourself, can you really expect others to? Even if they do, would you believe them?
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Unconditional Self-Acceptance (USA)
Unconditional Self Acceptance (USA) is an important exercise because as anyone in recovery knows, addiction to any substance or behavior generates a host of emotions, many of them quite negative, that can undermine your feelings of self-worth. When your self-worth takes a hit, remember one of the core values of SMART Recovery: YOU ARE NOT YOUR BEHAVIOR.
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Unconditional Others Acceptance (UOA)
You may judge other people inaccurately and in an exaggerated way, just as you judge yourself. Once you accept that other people are capable of making mistakes, then you can accept that they may fail at things, too. Judging another as totally bad – no matter how badly they treat you – is as exaggerated and as damaging as making the same judgment about yourself.
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Tips & Tools for Recovery that Works!
Unconditional Life Acceptance (ULA)
Unconditional Life Acceptance is a key part of the SMART Recovery toolkit, and a very powerful way to deal with whatever life throws at you. While we may not all have the ability to change our life circumstances immediately, we all have the power to change the negative ways we think about them, learn what we can and cannot reasonably control, and how to work towards acceptance.
Your own journey toward life acceptance may be long, difficult and often painful. It takes practice, patience, persistence. It can sometimes seem impossible during the roughest of times.
But at SMART Recovery we feel that the journey is both well worth the effort, and attainable by anyone. Always remember that you DO have a choice on how you react to and/or feel about any given situation – however bad it might be. If you think about life challenges in this light, unconditional life acceptance could eventually become a powerful tool to succeed at long term recovery.