Developing Your Recovery Attitude (COD Lesson)

Co-Occurring Lesson

Developing Your Recovery Attitude

Counselors can utilize this lesson to help clients take a deeply honest inventory of their attitudes toward recovery. By encouraging clients to explore areas like acceptance, forgiveness, self-value, and responsibility, this skill-building exercise allows individuals to identify negative mindsets and replace them with more constructive ones. As clients reflect on these attitudes, they can set realistic goals to improve their mindset, foster personal growth, and enhance their recovery journey. The lesson emphasizes that character and attitudes can be changed, empowering clients to take ownership of their recovery process.

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Written by Dr. Hal Baumchen, PsyD, LP, LADC, this skill-building lesson is built around a candid and structured self-assessment of the attitudes that most directly affect recovery outcomes. For each of nine dimensions, readers are presented with a continuum ranging from a negative pole to a positive one, asked to mark where they currently fall, and invited to reflect on specific ways they can move in a healthier direction. The nine attitude pairs examined are cynical versus accepting, fault-finding versus encouraging, negative versus positive, self-hating versus self-valuing, resentful versus forgiving, uncooperative versus cooperative, arrogant versus humble, helpless versus empowered, and blaming versus responsible. Each dimension is explained with enough depth to help readers genuinely understand both ends of the spectrum – not just as abstract concepts, but as real patterns of thought and behavior they may recognize in themselves. Personal reflection prompts follow each continuum, asking readers to examine how specific attitudes are holding back their recovery and identify concrete steps they can take that week. The lesson closes by asking readers to review all nine traits, identify which matter most to focus on right now, and consider which changes they are most ready and motivated to make – turning self-awareness into a purposeful plan for growth.

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