According to Behavioral Neuroscience of Motivation, addiction is a syndrome of dysregulated motivation. The prevalence of malformed motivation can be seen in the sensation-seeking and impulsivity of addiction. Thus, addiction erodes your motivation to maintain other aspects of your well-being, like relationships, employment, and health, in favor of the prioritization of substance use. Without health motivation, you lack the energy to empower yourself to effect positive change in your life. Therefore, fostering self-empowerment in recovery is invaluable to cultivating the motivation to remain engaged with support resources for sustained recovery.
At Driftwood Recovery, we recognize that your ability to turn clinical insight into action requires more than abstinence. How you relate to yourself and others is fundamental to building the self-empowerment needed to effect positive change in your life. As a result, we are dedicated to providing an active alumni program to support healthy attachment with yourself and others to heal. Recovery is a dynamic process that requires more than just listening or attending meetings to be effective. To heal, actionable steps like treatment and sharing are the building blocks to self-empowerment in recovery.
Yet, you may wonder: What is self-empowerment? Are empowerment and motivation the same thing? How do you enact empowerment in your daily life to thrive?
What Is Empowerment?
As noted in “Empowerment” by Lisa M. Haddad and Tammy J. Toney-Butler, empowerment can encompass a variety of things as a process or an outcome. Broadly, community-level empowerment is the process by which people, organizations, and communities gain power. Moreover, at the community level, people unite to accomplish common goals, as two underlying assumptions must exist:
- Everyone has the potential to become empowered
- Community empowerment is born from empowered individuals who work together to achieve mutual goals
Therefore, the process of community empowerment requires the fostering of mutually supportive relationships in the community. Yet, if community empowerment requires empowered individuals, where does individual empowerment come from? Haddad and Toney-Butler note that empowerment in cognitive psychology is to enable one to act. Thus, psychological empowerment at the individual level is the link between:
- Your sense of personal control and efficacy
- A willingness to change and take action
As a result, psychological empowerment enables you to understand the relationship between your actions and their outcomes. The understanding of empowerment as the relationship between action and outcome speaks to empowerment as an intrinsic motivation. Further, the intrinsic motivation of empowerment is made up of four cognitions:
- Meaning
- Your beliefs, values, and behaviors
- Competence
- Sense of self-efficacy
- Belief in your capability to perform activities and skills
- Self-determination
- Sense of choice in initiating and regulating your actions
- Impact
- The degree to which you can influence outcomes in your life
Looking at the four cognitions of empowerment highlights the value of understanding self-determination to support self-empowerment in recovery.
Addressing Self-Determination in Self-Empowerment
According to the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, self-determination theory (SDT) argues that humans are born with the tendency to pursue growth, well-being, and health. Moreover, the encouragement of self-determination in self-empowerment is built on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation:
- Intrinsic: engagement in a particular behavior for your own sake
- Motivation for enjoyment, satisfaction, and self-interest
- Extrinsic: engagement in certain behaviors due to external outcomes
- Monetary rewards, awards, and social recognition
Furthermore, at the core of SDT is the recognition that social environments influence your motivation through psychological needs. As stated in “Application of Self-Determination Theory to Substance Use and Its Treatment” from Substance Use and Misuse, there are three universal psychological needs:
- Competence: Feeling capable
- Autonomy: Freedom to engage in a behavior
- Relatedness: Sense of connectedness to others
Thus, the social environments that support the three psychological needs foster autonomous motivation for improved behavioral adoption and maintenance. On the other hand, social environments that undermine the three psychological needs contribute to controlled motivation, which reduces behavioral maintenance.
In treatment and recovery, self-determination is the foundation from which people have the full capacity for decision management and proceed along a continuum of shared decision-making for greater support. Along the self-determination gradient, greater support is applied to the individual needs and capacity of each person. Therefore, self-determination is a valuable tool for self-empowerment in recovery. With self-determination, you gain autonomy, agency, and choice to support learning, self-monitoring, accountability, and quality care in treatment and recovery.
How Addiction Impacts Self-Determination
Yet, addiction can erode your self-determination and thus self-empowerment in recovery. The act of addiction robs you of self-determination and empowerment as you lose your capacity to make healthy choices. At its core, addiction is a loss of control and a loss of self (to the addiction).
In addition, the impact of addiction on self-determination and self-empowerment in recovery is particularly harmful to underserved communities. People of color and women face additional barriers to services and resources for treatment and recovery. Therefore, access to resources that support self-empowerment in recovery is invaluable to sustained recovery for the most vulnerable.
Uncovering Self-Empowerment in Recovery
Through empowerment-based services, you can learn how to take back control of your life to thrive. However, what services and resources can support self-empowerment in recovery? Some of the tools to support empowerment include:
- Finding your passion
- Setting goals
- Skill-building
- Awareness and access to resources
- Modalities that enhance self-awareness, self-worth, and competence
- Connecting with others
The building blocks of empowerment highlight the power of education, access to resources, and supportive connections for healing.
Unlocking Self-Empowerment in Recovery at Driftwood Recovery
At Driftwood Recovery, we are dedicated to providing community-based resources in a continuum of care for sustained recovery. With a comprehensive range of community-based resources, you can continue to heal and make positive changes in your life. Through our connection-driven alumni program, you can access tools that empower you to thrive in every stage of recovery. Your alumni family is here to encourage, support, and guide you as you rebuild your confidence to lead a courageous and self-empowered life in recovery.
Empowerment exists at both the individual and community levels to make actionable changes in your life. An important element of empowerment is self-determination, which supports intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to believe in your ability to make decisions and enact control over your life choices. However, when psychological needs like competence, autonomy, and relatedness are undermined, self-determination and (thus) self-empowerment are eroded. Addiction is one of the ways your psychological needs are undermined to rob you of control and selfhood. Access to support resources is invaluable to fostering self-empowerment in recovery. At Driftwood Recovery, we are dedicated to providing connection-driven services and resources for education, skill-building, and connection with others. Call us at (512) 759-8330 today.