Addiction Recovery Motivational Quotes

If you examine your motive for doing anything, you'll soon discover that your reason is that you believe it will make you happy.

Sometimes we motivate ourselves by thinking of what we want to become. Sometimes we motivate ourselves by thinking about who we don't ever want to be again. Everything we do is part of who we are. How we choose to use those memories, to motivate or to submit is entirely up to us.

Update your version of me because I’m not the same person I was before. If you don’t get that, you don’t get me.

When we feel like giving up, like we are beyond help, we must remember that we are never beyond hope. Holding on to hope has always motivated me to keep trying. I have found this hope by connecting with others. I’ve found it not only in individuals who have dealt with eating disorders but also in people who have battled addictions and those who have survived abuse, cancer, and broken hearts. I have found much-needed hope in my passions and dreams for the future. I’ve found it in prayer. Real hope combined with real actions has always pulled me through difficult times. Real hope combined with doing nothing has never pulled me through. In other words, sitting around and simply hoping that things will change won’t pick you up after a fall. Hope only gives you strength when you use it as a tool to move forward. Taking real action with a hopeful mind will pull you off the ground that eighth time and beyond.

There is no addiction centre in the brain, no circuits designated strictly for addictive purposes. The brain systems involved in addiction are among the key organizers and motivators of human emotional life and behaviour; hence, addiction’s powerful hold on human beings.

You don’t recover by stopping the old, but by starting the new. You’ll go back to your old ways unless you create new ways.

When you fall don’t get up until you figure out what tripped you.

You can numb the pain, but that hasn’t erased your problem, it’s just given it time to grow.

Life is the slow change from who we used to be into who we are now.

Achievement and competence. People fall prey to addiction more readily when they lack positive motivation to achieve or work. Children need to learn that accomplishment is important and within their reach, not solely for material rewards, but because people should make positive contributions to the world and other people and because it is satisfying to make such contributions and to mobilize one’s skills effectively. Participating with children in constructive activity, like reading, building, or gardening—and encouraging independent activity whenever feasible—are strong precursors to achievement and competence. Consciousness and self-awareness. Addiction is the result of accumulated self-destructive behavior that people ignore, just as unconscious acceptance of any negative syndrome ingrains that habit in people’s lives.

The world teaches us to be self-sufficient, self-reliant, self-motivating. But anytime we put self before Savior, we’re in trouble

You’ll go back to your old ways unless you create new ways.

Thinking about your problem is like watering your house plant. You only make it grow.

We are all addicted to something whether we admit it or not.

There is no evidence from anywhere in the world that harm reduction measures encourage drug use. Denying addicts humane assistance multiplies their miseries without bringing them one inch closer to recovery. There is also no contradiction between harm reduction and abstinence. The two objectives are incompatible only if we imagine that we can set the agenda for someone else’s life regardless of what he or she may choose. We cannot. Short of extreme coercion there is absolutely nothing anyone can do to induce another to give up addiction, except to provide the island of relief where contemplation and self-respect can, perhaps, take root. Those ready to choose abstinence should receive every possible support — much more support than we currently provide. But what of those who don’t choose that path? The impossibility of changing other people is not restricted to addictions. Try as we may to motivate another person to be different or to do this or not to do that, our attempts founder on a basic human trait: the drive for autonomy. “And one may choose what is contrary to one’s own interests and sometimes one positively ought,” wrote Fyodor Dostoevsky in Notes from the Underground. “What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.” The issue is not whether the addict would be better off without his habit — of course he would — but whether we are going to abandon him if he is unable to give it up. Are we willing to care for human beings who suffer because of their own persistent behaviours, mindful that these behaviours stem from early life misfortunes they had no hand in creating? The harm reduction approach accepts that some people — many people — are too deeply enmeshed in substance dependence for any realistic “cure” under present circumstances. There is, for now, too much pain in their lives and too few internal and external resources available to them. In practising harm reduction we do not give up on abstinence — on the contrary, we may hope to encourage that possibility by helping people feel better, bringing them into therapeutic relationships with caregivers, offering them a sense of trust, removing judgment from our interactions with them and giving them a sense of acceptance. At the same time, we do not hold out abstinence as the Holy Grail and we do not make our valuation of addicts as worthwhile human beings dependent on their making choices that please us. Harm reduction is as much an attitude and way of being as it is a set of policies and methods.

Always love, always encourage, and never let despair get in the way.

A recovery friend of mine once belonged to an AA group called “What’s Your Motivation?” She said she’d always ask herself that in situations where she had to say or do something she might regret, and she’d ask others as well. She asked me that once or twice. So, you start out by asking yourself that question when the situation arises, and a lot of time you realize there is no good motive behind the thing you want to do or say, so you don’t say it. You don’t do it. After a while, it becomes second nature. Unfortunately, however, so many people out there are living their lives while untreated for their afflictions. Whether it’s addiction, including alcoholism, or a type of personality disorder, their behavior often stems from how they feel about themselves based on other people’s words and actions, things they had inadvertently taken on and clung to fiercely. They may have a desperate need for attention, validation, admiration, and respect. Maybe their delusions distort their perception of themselves and how others view them. They are so busy worrying about themselves that they are often oblivious to their motives and may not realize how little regard they have for others. In a genuine sense, they are fighting for themselves, but they’re not winning. Many of us have lived that way once upon a time and, because of it, spent a copious amount of energy on damage control. Knowing we said something we shouldn’t have said or did something we shouldn’t have done and going into this anxiety-ridden desperation to save our “image”—an image that likely isn’t real but a delusion. When we should be more concerned about apologizing or making amends, we’re more obsessed with not wanting to be seen in a negative light and having to act in order to change the negative perception. It takes recovery, healing, and time to learn that if you are intent on doing the right thing, doing right by people, and having everyone’s best interests at heart, you’ll know how to react and respond to things. And if you ever say or do something you regret, you simply say you were wrong and apologize. Empathy for others and for ourselves is what makes it possible. It makes us care about how we treat people and the effect it’s having on not only them but on our lives and the lives of anyone who cares about us. We eventually understand that how we treat people is just as important as catering to our own needs. I think it’s important to understand what made us a certain way in life and to acknowledge that, but then we have to fix it. It becomes our job and responsibility to heal that so that we grow and change. Too many people never get to a point where they can see it, let alone understand it, so those of us who do are quite fortunate.

As women, like all forces of nature and works of art, our beauty is formed through refraction, revealed in dimension and contrast, shadow and light, our benevolence becoming both the result and the salve, the subject and lens. The road may be beastly but the result, if allowed, can be spectacular.

Kotler believes that finding flow is the “source code” of motivation. When you find flow, you get “maybe the most potent dose of reward chemistry” your brain can give you—which is the reason he believes flow is the most addictive state on Earth. Once we start to feel flow in an experience, we are motivated to do what it takes to get more. But it’s a circular relationship—if you have motivation to accomplish a task but you have no flow, you will eventually burn out. Motivation and flow need to work together, and they must be coupled with a solid recovery protocol, like good sleep and nutrition.