We may wonder why it is so hard for many of us to forgive. Why do we harbor resentment toward others for so long? Why do we condemn ourselves to such an extent that we won’t allow the mere thought of self-forgiveness to enter our minds?

There is no easy answer for why those of us in recovery have such a difficult time with forgiveness. But there is a common thread here. The way to forgive others first requires us to be able to forgive ourselves.

This certainly isn’t easy. It demands a lot, and for some of us, finding the strength to forgive ourselves takes more energy and time than we are willing to devote to the process. Yet, if we fail to forgive ourselves, we will never really be able to progress far in our recovery. We will forever remain stuck, unable to get past a certain level of our recovery foundation.

It doesn’t need to be this way. Maybe we don’t think we have it in us to forgive. Maybe we believe that forgiveness is for the other guy, not for us. Deep down, we probably believe that we deserve to continue suffering. This is a mistake, although a common one at that. Instead of continuing to suffer in our self-loathing, we may find solace in asking our Higher Power, or God as we know Him, to help us better understand. Ask for peace and forgiveness. Be willing to listen to that small voice inside that tells us, whispers, perhaps, that it is okay to acknowledge what we’ve done and ask for forgiveness. Then, take the next step and actually say the words, "I forgive myself."

We may not believe it at first, but if we surrender ourselves to our Higher Power and continue to ask for guidance, it will come. We will find peace. We will be able to forgive ourselves and then to forgive others.

How will we know when we have forgiven ourselves? When will we recognize that we’ve forgiven others? This is a good question and, again, there are no simple or easy answers. It may be that something that we’ve felt remorse over for many months or years gradually fades from our consciousness. We may find, for example, that we don’t think about that bad thing we did years ago during our drug- or alcohol-using days as often as we did. In fact, when we do remember it, the sting may be gone. This is one example of how we may know that we’ve forgiven ourselves.

In the meantime, while we daily ask for guidance and help from our Higher Power, we should devote our efforts to doing all that we can for our recovery. This means we walk the talk, we do the work, and we put in the time and effort. It all will pay off, not the least of which will be that we find ourselves able to forgive – ourselves and others.

"By forgiving and choosing to move on, one takes the power back to morph it into positive energy." – Eugenia Tripputi, author, founder of Global Career Solutions International

We’ve often heard that it’s important to forgive in order to move forward in our new life of recovery. But that is so easy for someone else to say and often so hard for each of us to do. Even though we’ve struggled to come to grips with events and scenarios from the past, acknowledged their existence – and our part in them – it’s another thing to summon the ability to forgive.

As the two quotes by Eugenia Tripputi point out, forgiveness involves not only forgiving others but also ourselves, and we take the power back when we are able to forgive – and then move on.

Why, then, is it so hard to do?

Pain is hard to deal with. And emotional pain is often the worst. For years we may have numbed our bodies and our minds with powerfully addictive substances. While those were adequate enough to wipe out nasty memories, the salty wounds of our own or others’ transgressions, we found ourselves dealing with yet another problem, and a worse one at that. Sure, we were able to forget about the past, about what we did or others did that caused harm, but we became addicted, dependent on some toxic substance just to exist. And our existence became just a round-robin of chasing after that substance, getting over the effects, and doing it all over again. What a life!

Eventually, we found the courage and made the life-changing decision to overcome our addiction. We sought treatment, go to 12-step meetings, and work our recovery as diligently as we can. Still, though, we harbor bad feelings about certain events and people. Guess what? Until we’re able to isolate the root of what’s bothering us and truly forgive either that person or another and most of all ourselves, we’ll be stuck.

And stuck is no place to be if we’re going to move on with our recovery. Think of it this way. We wouldn’t want to remain in a desert with no water and no shelter from the intolerable extremes of heat during the day and cold at night. If we remain locked in bitterness and resentment, we’re like that stranded traveler in the desert. But we have the keys to the vehicle to get out. That solution is forgiveness.

If we’re finding it impossible to forgive, this is something we need to really work on. Talk with our sponsor about the issue. Bring it up with our counselor or, if we’re no longer in counseling, seek out professional help to unlock the keys to our forgiveness vault. We each have the ability to forgive within us. And it’s up to each one of us to open the door and let forgiveness flow. It’s only by releasing the anger and hurt we feel and forgiving ourselves first – and then others – that we’ll be able to move forward in recovery.

Credit must be given here to Earnie Larsen, author of the remarkable guidebook on recovery, Now That You’re Sober. Larsen, along with his sister and co-author, Carol Larsen Hegarty, outlines the following 10 values as being the most important to recovery. We’ve taken those values and elaborated on them further.

Endurance

You know all about endurance, don’t you? Without it, you’d never have made it through detox, let alone the tough sledding you had to go through during treatment. There were undoubtedly days when you couldn’t stand the thought of getting out of bed to attend yet another painful examination of your past during one-on-one therapy. Trying to unearth the how and why of your addiction, still battling the incessant cravings and urges, and just wanting to creep away from contact with another human being – that required endurance in a big way. Ditto learning how to sit through and share personal experiences with others during group sessions and later, 12-step meetings.

It’s no different in recovery. Well, it is, in that you’ve already gone through detox and treatment and you’re used to the self-examination and sharing with others. You’ve likely got your recovery schedule down or are working hard to hone it to suit your needs. But you still need to recognize the importance of endurance.

Without endurance, how could you manage to keep going when times get tough? And they will get tough, as anyone who’s ever been in recovery will tell you. As you know yourself from personal experience.

Recovery experts say that recovery isn’t a sprint or a race. It’s a journey. They say this for a reason. If you try to reach a goal by running flat-out, you’re likely to burn yourself out and quit long before the finish line. Marathon runners have to train for a long time to build up the endurance to keep on going despite hitting the wall.

In recovery, sometimes finding the last ounce of strength to keep going in the face of incredible obstacles or disappointments means that you’ll need to appreciate the value of endurance. Build up your endurance day by day, bit by bit. Every part of your recovery plan requires advance planning, practice, and building up of skill level.

Maybe you never thought of recovery this way before, but it makes a great deal of sense, doesn’t it? Endurance is a value in recovery that should be right at the top of your list. The way you build endurance is to do your best every day. Your recovery legs may be weak at first, but they will get stronger. Endurance is key.

Honesty

How many lies have you told yourself before, during, and even after your darkest days of addiction? How many lies have you uttered to friends, co-workers, your boss, and your loved ones? In fact, being honest was probably far down on the list of what you considered important. And we know what was most important during those days – seeking and using your drug of choice. In the face of such all-consuming need, everything else paled in comparison.

Smacked upside the head with the brutal truth of your addiction, no doubt you felt that honesty was just too painful to bear. How much easier to bury your pain under the soothing sense of nirvana you achieved through drugs or alcohol (or compulsive gambling, compulsive sex, overwork, overeating, or other process addictions). Once you got clean and sober and went into treatment, however, that magic elixir was no longer available. Time to face the truth squarely. No question that was painful.

Even now, honesty may be tough to cultivate. And, yes, it does need to be cultivated. Given your history, your past shading of the truth, telling outright lies or half-truths, practicing honesty is a little like trying on ice skates and venturing out on the frozen pond for the first time. You’re bound to slip a few times before it starts to feel natural.

Building your life in recovery requires honesty in all your dealings. You must be honest with yourself about your feelings, your commitment to sobriety, facing up to your past and accepting responsibility for all the wrongs that you have done to others. You must be honest with others so that your word means something, so that you can be counted on to act with integrity, so that you are the person of self-worth you aspire to be.

How do you practice being honest or brush up on your ability to be honest? Here’s a suggestion. Before you open your mouth to say something to another person, think about what you’re going to say. Don’t self-censor, but do consciously take into consideration the words you’ll use. That way, you can make a choice to say what you mean to say in an honest and reflective way. It won’t be blurted out in anger, meant to be cruel and hurtful. Even if it’s criticism, it will more likely be constructive.

Also, if your mind tells you that it’s okay to drive past your old haunts, hear that little voice that’s being dishonest with you. This will be easy to recognize. It’s your past trying to entice you into your old self-destructive ways. Valuing honesty as integral to effective long-term recovery, you now know that it’s sometimes harder not to take the easy way out. But nothing worthwhile is ever easy. And recovery is definitely worthwhile.

Patience

Patience is a virtue. It’s also an important value in recovery. Too often, the tendency is to want to get where you’re going quicker, without delay. When you’re in recovery, it’s easy to want long-term sobriety. The reality is that it takes patience (along with endurance and honesty) in order to achieve that goal.

Easier said than done, admittedly. How can you be patient with yourself when you’ve got so many months, perhaps years, of time lost to addiction that you’re trying to make up for? Looking at recovery this way, however, is a one-way path to frustration. You can’t worry about the past. That’s dead and gone. This doesn’t mean that you won’t need to take responsibility for what you did in the past, but you can’t allow it to cause you to become so impatient to jump-start your recovery that you make some ill-conceived or rash moves.

Patience, when incorporated into your recovery values system, will reward you a hundred-fold. For one thing, it helps to keep the long view. While you live in the present, all the things you strive for – your long-term recovery goals – are like the scenery you see in a steady march. What appears to be far off on the horizon will, one day, be in the present. Take each day as it comes. Remind yourself that you don’t have to be perfect, you just have to do. Be gentle and be patient with yourself – and with others.

Caring

Let’s face it. When you were in the grip of substance abuse or addiction, the only person you cared about was yourself. Actually, you didn’t really care about yourself all that much either, as evidenced by your lifestyle and its many accumulated negative consequences. Even so, now that you’re on the road to recovery, learning about the value of caring is something that should be integral to your journey in sobriety.

What does it mean to care? Why is caring so important in recovery? The truth is that no one recovers alone. To truly appreciate the benefits of community, you need to share with others. That’s the beauty of the supportive 12-step network. Here you find individuals who, like you, have embarked upon the goal of long-term sobriety. Their sole purpose is to commit themselves to sobriety and to help others who choose this path as well.

You can’t be supportive and encouraging without being caring. Your fellow 12-step group members care about you. Gradually, you will begin to care about them.

But caring as a value in recovery goes beyond just your 12-step network. It also encompasses your loved ones, your close friends, co-workers – even the neighbor who needs help or passersby on the street. Caring means that you step outside yourself and what’s going on with you to lend your hand or your heart to someone else. You do this completely selflessly, without thought of reciprocity or remuneration. Caring goes hand in hand with another virtue in recovery we’ll talk about a little further on, generosity.

Caring in recovery also means realizing that you have value. You are a person who is worthy of being cared about. You are capable of demonstrating how much you care for others. You could call it love, but it doesn’t have to be that strong. Caring can extend far beyond immediate family and friends to encompass all humanity.

Granted, you probably aren’t ready to embrace all of mankind just yet. And no one says you need to. Suffice to say that just coming to the realization that caring is important to your recovery is a good place to begin. Allow yourself to care – about you and others.

Forgiveness

Who doesn’t have some thought, words, or action from their past that they wish never happened? Who doesn’t suffer anguish and shame and regret over things that were said and done and thought in the height of addiction? Some of these may be truly reprehensible, may have caused others incredible pain and suffering, may have caused you to feel you could never be forgiven – let alone forgive yourself.

Without forgiveness, recovery is all but an impossibility. Recovery experts say that you have to be able to let go of the past – truly let go of it – in order to begin to solidify your recovery.

Forgiving yourself doesn’t mean that you don’t acknowledge what you did and thought and said that was so bad during your addiction. It doesn’t mean that you don’t accept responsibility for all that you thought and said and did. You do need to acknowledge and accept responsibility – that’s a given. Then, you work on your list of amends and begin to make them. But that’s part of the 12-steps, and it’s something that you’ll spend a great deal of time working on together with the help of your sponsor. Forgiving yourself is something that you need to do on your own.

Start by asking for help from your Higher Power. If He can forgive everything, surely you can forgive yourself.

You also need to be able to find forgiveness in your heart toward others whom you feel may have harmed you or did you wrong. There’s simply no room in recovery for harboring grudges or ill-will toward people from your past. Not your mother or father who may have been alcoholic, who verbally and/or physically abused you, neglected your well-being, threw you out on the street, abandoned you or were just indifferent to your needs. Not your spouse who cheated on you and left you for another because your "baggage" was just too much. You have to be able to forgive everyone in order to move forward in recovery.

The beauty of forgiveness is that once you forgive, a great weight is lifted from you. No longer crushed by that weight, you’re better able to expend your energy pursuing your recovery goals.

Humility

In the midst of addiction, the world revolves around you. That’s how you view the world. In effect, everything is about you – from the time you get up to the moment you close your eyes and/or pass out for the night.

Now that you’re in recovery, you soon discover that it’s not all about you. In fact, the world doesn’t need you to keep right on going. That’s both a disquieting and a comforting thought, but let’s think about humility for a minute.

When you are humble, you’re not so self-absorbed. Your own concerns aren’t as all-encompassing as you have made them out to be in the past. You’re able to see, most likely for the first time, that there is a larger world beyond your self-imposed limited confines. You may even be able to grasp that you are but a small contributor in the vast scheme of things.

But you are an important contributor, nonetheless. You are unique and have value in and of yourself. You are not insignificant, but are no more nor less significant than your fellow man. Recognize the value of humility in recovery. It will help you put your life in perspective.

Teachability

What is this value called teachability? What it is not is the ability to teach. Teachability is, however, the ability to open your mind to learning something new. Just on the face of it, then, teachability is a value you started incorporating into your life from the first day you went into treatment or set foot in the 12-step rooms.

You’ve learned hundreds of new things since you made the decision to live a life of sobriety. Some of the lessons were hard-learned ones, at that. You may have slipped or relapsed one or several times before a particular lesson made sense to you. But you kept on going, giving yourself another opportunity to allow the knowledge to sink in and make a difference in how you choose to live.

There will always be something new to learn, as long as you keep your mind open to the possibility. You will have opportunities that arrive daily – although you may not be yet fully able to grasp that they are opportunities and not merely challenges. Each day of your life will be chock full of decisions to make, some large and some small. Any one of them can provide the impetus or inspiration for a new direction.

Is teachability within the reach of everyone in recovery? As a value that’s important to recovery, it’s definitely there. The question is, are you ready to accept teachability as an important recovery value?

Put another way, and perhaps one that’s easier to accept: Are you willing to be excited about learning something new? If so, that’s teachability.

Responsibility

Owning up to what you’ve done in your addictive past, being willing to accept the consequences for your present actions – positive and negative – that’s responsibility, and it’s a critical value in recovery.

Boiling responsibility down to its essence is easy. Larsen puts it this way: "Stop blaming and evading. If you spill the milk, you clean it up."

Generosity

Remember the earlier virtue of caring where we said that it goes hand in hand with generosity? When you extend your hand to someone else in an act of caring, that’s generosity of spirit and deed. It takes stepping outside yourself to give of yourself, and many times in recovery that’s the last thing on your mind. You might feel as if you have all you can do just to make it through the day. That’s when generosity means even more as a value.

The polar opposite of generosity is selfishness. When you were in the midst of your addiction, you were exceedingly selfish. All you thought of were your own immediate desires – likely the urge to use, to get the money to use, and then thinking about using again. Concern for doing anything others went right out the window. How could it compete with your all-consuming addiction?

Now, however, you’re in a whole new way of life. What you do and say to others matters a great deal. You can help bring a smile to someone else’s face just by opening up your heart and giving some small token of your generosity. Offer to help a co-worker with a project. Listen to a fellow 12-step member who’s having a rough time. Go out of your way to do something nice and completely unexpected for your spouse or loved one.

Courage

The final value important to recovery could just as easily be listed first. But we’re listing it last because it’s an overarching recovery value. Larsen says that "Courage doesn’t mean going forward in the absence of fear, but rather going forward in the face of fear." He continues to say that there are many times during recovery, whether it’s the first year or any year, where going forward is required in the presence of fear.

No, you won’t always have all the answers. No one does. But courage is the foundation upon which your solid recovery rests. Having the courage to face your fears and to make the decisions that are right for you takes time and practice. You’re never going to be perfect, nor should you strive for perfection. It’s enough, say the experts, to make progress.

Take each day in recovery as it comes, embracing the opportunity to learn new things. Give it everything you’ve got. Learn how to step outside yourself and care for and give to others. Be patient and honest and humble. Take responsibility and learn how to forgive. Above all, be courageous. These are the values important to recovery.

How often do we really stop and think how some people seem to be able to accomplish the seemingly impossible task and others are barely able to make it through the day? If we are being totally honest with ourselves, let alone others, we will admit that we cannot help but wonder how some people seem blessed and capable of doing almost anything – while we find ourselves struggling far too often.

The truth is that none of us knows what goes on in someone else’s mind. They may tell us how they accomplished this feat or tackled that challenge or successfully worked that Step, but those are only words. We can’t see into their minds. We don’t know the inner doubt and secret fears that they go through. But we can feel fairly certain that everything doesn’t always go smoothly for them. It may only seem like it does. The difference is that people who accomplish great things – in our eyes as well as the eyes of the world – do so with a mindset and an approach that is akin to taking it one step at a time or, more to the point, taking it one day at a time.

Let’s look at the quote from John Wannamaker again. Here was a man who came up with the idea and put it into effect to create the department store – and promote it like there was no tomorrow. With the concept so long in existence now, it may seem hard to think of a time when there weren’t big department stores like Macy’s and Sak’s and Bloomingdales or big-box stores like Costco and Walmart and Sam’s Club. Back in John Wannamaker’s day, there were no such conveniences. There were little shops, mom-and-pop outfits, that sort of thing. But John Wannamaker had a dream, figured out a way to bring that dream into reality, and took things one step at a time, building upon what he created day after day.

So it is with our efforts in recovery. We don’t start off at the top, knowing everything there is to know about the best way to accomplish our recovery efforts. We often don’t have a clue when we first walk through the door and into the rooms of recovery groups. At first, we’re scared, unsure, and likely having to shed a lot of misguided preconceptions about what this whole recovery thing is all about. But we find ourselves welcomed, accepted, and we gradually allow some of what we hear to sink into our consciousness and find room to grow.

It is from this small and seemingly inconsequential start that we begin our new life in recovery. It also helps when we find ourselves staring at a list of all the things that we want to do in recovery, or are told that are necessary in recovery, and feel that this is just too much for us to be able to undertake. Just remember to take it slow. Absorb what we can each day and make it a point to learn something new. One day, one step at a time. That’s how we measure our progress in recovery. That’s how our recovery foundation gains strength and our spirit begins to lift with each and every success we achieve.

Sometimes it’s a good practice to simple ask yourself: Is that really true?  This question can also help us get out of self-destructive thought loops.

For example,  something bad happens and our first thought is, “Bad things always happen to me.”  First response: “Is that really true?”  Maybe your first impulse is to scream in your head: “YES! It’s true! It’s so true!”  And you scream loud because you want to block out the voice of reason that’s whispering, “Dude, that’s not really true. A bunch of good things happened to you this year.”

So we need to really ask the question with the intent of answering honestly: “Is that really true?”

Hmmm…just last month I found out my daughter got an A in math after months of struggling.  My husband got a raise.  I got to visit my best friend from college after not seeing her for five years.  I had an awesome dinner with a few friends.  My boyfriend told me he loved me for the first time.  I avoided a car accident that could have been really bad.  I made it past all the cuts at my company and still have a job.  My dog seemed sick and it turned out it was nothing serious.   And on and on and on.

Depression is a natural result of the type of thinking that puts “Always” at the beginning.  Who wouldn’t be depressed if that “ALWAYS” happened to them.  The truth is, it doesn’t always happen, and making that honest assessment can go a long way toward easing your frustration.