Does gratitude promote recovery from substance misuse?

Abstract

This paper explores the role of gratitude as ‘recovery capital’ in the process of recovery from substance misuse. Recovery capital denotes the quantity and quality of internal and external resources that enable an individual to initiate and sustain long-term addiction recovery. The prospects for successful recovery are dependent on personal and social resources including character traits and attitudes, material resources and relationships. In this context, gratitude has been empirically highlighted consistently as a valuable positive emotion and attitude, building lasting and beneficial personal and social resources and helping to maintain interpersonal relationships, improve quality of life and promote more adaptive coping strategies rather than resorting to negative strategies such as substance misuse. Gratitude enables the individual to develop the personal arsenal of strengths necessary to conduct a sober and productive life. The Narcotic Anonymous (NA) program has adopted gratitude as a key component of recovery and urges members to practice gratitude on a daily basis on their journey toward successful recovery. This article represents a first step in examining the role of gratitude as recovery capital in the process of long-term recovery. The results may be helpful for developing treatment that incorporates gratitude-based intervention that initiates and sustains long-term recovery.