Good interpersonal skills help you communicate and connect with others. This can be in a professional or personal setting. You use them to make friends, get along with coworkers, bond with family, and even make small talk every day. They can be crucial in your recovery when you are growing your support network and working to become part of your sober community. We at Spero Recovery understand the importance of good healthy interpersonal skills and want to help you learn them so you can thrive in your new sober life.
What Are Interpersonal Skills?
Interpersonal skills can also be known as “people skills.” They are what help you connect and have healthy interactions with others. Some of these skills include:
- Communication
- Empathy
- Active listening
- Mediation
- Motivation
- Responsibility
- Teamwork
- Conflict resolution
- Emotional intelligence
How Can They Help My Recovery?
Learning these skills and how to use them can help you significantly on your recovery journey. They help assess and respond to situations appropriately. You can use them to make new and rebuild damaged relationships.
Active listening helps you hear what someone is telling you. Empathy and communication skills help you understand others’ feelings behind the situation and calmly and accurately convey your feelings and thoughts. Mediation and conflict resolution help you work through problems between you and others. Working through your issues rather than letting them sit and build enables you to maintain and strengthen your relationships.
Your emotional intelligence is your ability to recognize, understand, and process your feelings. You use this to respond to situations but to do so correctly, you need to be able to digest your emotions for what they are and not just use them as the response.
For example, if you get into an argument with your significant other, you can have feelings of anger, anxiety, sadness, and more. These emotions should not be your response because they will only escalate the situation. Instead, these emotions should be processed before you say anything. A good response could be that you are feeling overwhelmed with the situation and would like a few moments to settle down before returning. This shows that you recognize the problem may be getting out of hand and don’t want to risk hurting the other person with your response. It also shows that you realize you may be getting triggered and want to step back to prevent relapse.
Spero Recovery Can Help Build Your Interpersonal Skills
We are a residential substance use disorder (SUD) recovery facility. With the use of grants and donations, we are able to keep our costs below the national average. This makes us the perfect match for all economic statuses, including under and uninsured individuals seeking help.
Our programs are separate for men and women because we understand that each group has different obstacles to overcome. The recovery programs are based on the fundamentals of The Twelve Steps. These include community, sponsors, understanding that addiction is a mental health condition that we need help to control, and spreading support to those that need it. There is no religious component; our higher power is the recovery community you choose to join when you seek out treatment.
Community
We use a community setting to promote healing, growth, and support. Using interpersonal skills to build these relationships is vital. Without them, you can’t connect with others working their recovery paths.
Being surrounded by others struggling with SUD and working to overcome it gives you a chance to work on your interpersonal skills with unbiased empathetic parties. They understand where you are coming from and can help you learn from your mistakes. You can also learn from their mistakes so that you don’t make the same ones. We use sponsors and alumni to help you through this process.
Sponsors
A sponsor is someone that has been in recovery for at least a year and uses their experiences to help others on their recovery journey. Spero Recovery has all newcomers reach out and get a sponsor. We want you to have access to someone you can have one-on-one talks with and who you feel comfortable talking to. They can also provide you with more support than the group setting can and more time than your case manager may be able to.
Their knowledge of the recovery process can answer questions you might have about what you’re in store for. Your sponsor can help you work The Twelve Steps and get prepared for when treatment ends, and you enter sober living or back into the world.
Alumni
Our alumni are people that have completed the recovery program and come back to run experiential treatment sessions. They gain a connection to others working on their recovery, a sense of purpose, and can give back to their community.
You get to see that success is possible, and give you hope that you, too, can thrive in your sober life outside of treatment. It also gives you a chance to talk with and learn from someone that has been where you are and made it through.
Experiential Treatment
Through the use of activities and hobbies, we can perform experiential treatment sessions. These sessions include rock climbing, cooking classes, meditation, woodworking, and sand volleyball.
Mediation is an important activity that can help you grow, learn from your past, and improve your interpersonal skills. It helps connect the mind and body so that you can relate your feelings and thoughts to behavior. You can use this to learn from your responses and how to have better ones in similar situations.
A healthy and large support system can make or break your recovery. It gives you people to turn to when you need help or are feeling close to a relapse. They help you stay motivated and give your something to work to keep. These relationships can be formed with a sponsor, others working towards recovery, friends and family. If you feel like you are struggling to build a healthy support system during your recovery journey, reach out to Spero Recovery at (303) 351-7888 for more information today. We understand the difficulty that can come from forming interpersonal relationships. Reaching out and rebuilding damaged relationship takes courage, strength and perseverance. We can and want to help you.
