Inspiration

The SHARP Self-Esteem Workshop

Start celebrating your personal strengths

Self-esteem is an essential ingredient to living a happy, fulfilling life. How we feel about ourselves affects every aspect of our lives. Addiction can wear away at our self-esteem, so it’s important to find ways to build our self-esteem and make sure we keep building it. To use techniques that help to silence our negative thoughts and inner critic, so that we can start celebrating our personal strengths.

In the Self-Esteem workshops we are introduced to some of these techniques -ways that have helped us and many others in recovery. You will even develop your own techniques. Use what works for you and make it work.

Development of Responsibility & Self-Awareness

The development of responsibility and self-awareness is the cornerstone of recovery. "Responsibility" at first seems like a bit of a loaded word, to understand it better we can break up the word to say "response ability". So in this way we understand "responsibility" as our "ability to act".

All actions have consequences, so we need to be aware of how our actions affect ourselves and those around us. As we become more aware of the affects of our actions, we can act in a way that is less selfish and destructive. Our actions become more beneficial and have more and more of a positive effect on our lives and those of others.

Surfing Site

This is the link to a website for the Alcohol and Drugs History Society. It’s an incredible resource including articles written on alcohol and drugs from all around the world. This is an excerpt from the site:

Try swapping cocaine for cooking
According to Ireland Online, 24 star Kiefer Sutherland is hooked on cooking after realising he only enjoyed cocaine because of the preparation involved. The actor reveals he was hooked on cocaine for a year but he quit when he realised he could cook up the same thrill in the kitchen. He says: "I did like the ceremony - the ritual of preparing cocaine - as much as doing it. I feel the same way about cooking now. It's an amazing time to focus on something else. You work out a lot of stuff from your day."

Books

THE SELF-ESTEEM COMPANION, Matthew McKay (Review by Anastasia)
This book gives you little exercises you can do to help build your self-esteem. For example there’s something called the ‘Five Finger Exercise’ which you can use on a gloomy day. For each finger you think back to your past to a time when you felt really cared for, a time you felt really successful, a time that you did something important for someone else, and then a moment when you felt love for another very strongly. You can use this exercise whenever you need a quick reminder of how to feel good.

THE MASTERY OF LOVE, Don Miguel Ruiz (Review by Nicolette)
I have seriously tried to finish this book several times, not because it isn’t any good but because I keep coming back to it again and again and finding some important reflection on my life and the way I conduct relationships. Especially the one with myself. It’s very simply written, but I often feel we need to get back to simplicity and just believe in the little things. His prayer for self-love asks that we let the love we have for ourselves be so strong that we never again reject ourselves or sabotage our happiness, freedom, and love.

Movies

TOUCHING THE VOID (Review by Nicolette)

Would it be dramatic to say that a movie changed my life? I saw Touching the Void, a doci-movie, recently on M-net and it’s shifted my perspective in the most extraordinary way - it helped me understand my own role as a new mother! I've been battling to find that place, to get in touch with that “instinct”. Joe's story was so utterly moving, and when he said, "Keep making decisions - even if they're the wrong ones..." a lot of things fell into place for me.

Touching the Void tells the true story about two mountaineers who nearly (and against all odds should have) lost their lives in the Peruvian Andes. After an accident that left him unconscious, Joe’s climbing buddy and friend came to one of the most agonising decisions he’s ever had to make. To cut the rope that joined the two of them. Joe’s limp body fell into the darkness, and to what should have been his inevitable death. Joe awoke hours later, alive but very alone, at the bottom of a deep, dark crevice. He also had a broken leg.

How did Joe survive? Many will say that it was a miracle. For Joe it was about making decisions (even the wrong ones) and setting small goals. His first decision was to climb deeper into the crevice. And though that seemed like insanity, it was how he found a way out, a crack of light in the darkness.

I realise now that there's not a soul in the world who can tell me how to be a good mother to my daughter, that's up to me. And all I know for sure about our future is that I will be making decisions that others probably won’t agree with, but that they will be the right decisions for us at the time.