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Guest Blog: The 5 Pillars of Recovery to Mental Wellness
The 5 Pillars of Recovery to Mental Wellness
Let’s face it. Recovery from one or more mental health conditions isn’t easy.
My name is Jared Bendifallah. I’ve been in recovery from a serious mental health diagnosis since the summer of 2015. But allow me to backtrack a bit.
I struggled with intense anxiety as a teenager, but the structure that high school and college provided kept me relatively stable for many years. Unfortunately, after college, without any structure or direction in my life, my mental health completely deteriorated. I moved back to my childhood home and lived there from 2013-2015. During this time, I became extremely socially isolated and hopeless about my life. I developed an eating disorder and started to have intense suicidal ideation.
Everything culminated when I spent 50 days at a psychiatric hospital. Thankfully, in the summer of 2015, I got a second chance at life at a residential program in Boulder, Colorado where I was able to get stable for the first time in three long years, overcome my eating disorder, and get my life back.
I started attending peer support groups with the National Alliance on Mental Illness Westside Los Angeles (NAMI WLA) in the summer of 2019, and in the summer of 2020 I took a large step towards working in the mental health field by getting my peer support specialist training with SHARE!. What I learned through SHARE!’s Peer Support Specialist training helps me to this day in my work with NAMI WLA.
I have developed these 5 Pillars of Recovery to Mental Wellness by observing what has worked for me along my recovery journey and observing what has worked for others throughout my time as a mental health advocate over the last several years.
The 5 Pillars of Recovery are:
- Basic stability
- Having a self-care plan
- Trusting the process of recovery
- Finding your community
- Expanded self-awareness and intuition
The first pillar is basic stability, which is the foundation of recovery. This includes having clinical support, such as a psychiatrist and a therapist, and non-clinical support such as friends and family. It also includes having some kind of structure in your life to keep you grounded. My personal lack of structure in my life from 2013-2015, I believe, heavily contributed to my mental health deteriorating after college.
The second pillar is having a self-care plan, which includes cultivating your mental and emotional well-being and having self-care tools that you can use when needed. It also includes having one non-negotiable self-care tool that you can use every single day. This should be something that acts as an anchor for you and provides you with a strong foundation for self-care. For some people this could be exercising 4-5 times a week. For others, it could be journaling or some form of creativity.
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The third pillar is trusting the process of recovery. Recovery is a process with bad days and setbacks, but it is important to never give up and to keep moving forward. Take one small step at a time and over the course of many months and even years you will be blown away by how much progress you have made.
The fourth pillar is finding your community. This could be anything from a bird watching club to a book club or a support group. You know you have found your community when you feel like you truly belong and you feel seen, heard, and supported by the people around you. SHARE! has so many support groups all week, every week that you can take advantage of and meet other people with similar struggles.
 Photo Credit: Dan Myers (Upsplash) |
The fifth pillar is expanded self-awareness and intuition. Becoming more self-aware includes learning about your strengths and talents as well as your struggles and challenges. Self-awareness can lead to greater insight into who you are as a person and is a powerful tool for personal growth.
The fifth pillar also includes following your intuition. Some may call this “intuition” while some may call it a “gut reaction” but it is the part of you, a form of higher intelligence, that knows or understands something without any logical explanation. When you take what I like to call “enlightened action” based on your intuition, you can move your life forward in a way that brings you closer to your deepest dreams and your soul’s purpose, and gives life and recovery greater meaning.
Implementing these 5 Pillars of Recovery can lead to profound growth and healing over time. Keep pushing forward and never give up hope.
Jared Bendifallah
Copyright © Jared Bendifallah 2023 All Rights Reserved
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