Building Your Moral Compass

1. What is Resilience?
2. Optimism
3. Facing Fear
4. Moral Compass
5. Religion and Spirituality
6. Social Support
7. Role Models
8. Physical Fitness
9. Brain Fitness
10. Cognitive & Emotional Flexibility
11. Meaning, Purpose, Growth
12. Practicing Resilience
13. Resilience During COVID-19

Accompanying Worksheets:

There are lessons accompanying each video that you can access through our recovery portal, Swell.

Medically-reviewed articles:

• Cultivating Patience in Recovery
• What Can Improve the Success Rate of Addiction Recovery?

Professional webinars:

• Relapse Prevention: “Doing” Recovery in this Changing World
• Our Staff’s Stories of Recovery

Moral Compass

Today’s lesson is going to discuss moral compass, ethics and altruism.

Basically, what we’re looking at is doing what’s right and how that can affect our resilience. Consider the typical story. Someone finds a wallet with a couple hundred dollars in it. They have some options. They can take the wallet and attempt to find the owner. They can say, hey, thanks and keep the money or they can just leave it right where it is. That decision is going to be based on your moral compass, your ethics and altruism.

Now when we’re considering morals or our moral compass. One of the key points is personal control. That’s our ability to differentiate what’s within our control from what’s beyond our control and then to be OK with that.

Can you think of an experience where you looked at something and you realized that you didn’t have control over the situation or of the result? How did you deal with that?

So this is one of those difficult things that individuals can struggle with because it’s tough. It’s tough to create these unrealistic expectations and standards that sometimes we can’t meet ourselves and other people can’t meet our expectations.

But the long and short of it is this, morality and having a good moral compass that requires courage is not easy. Courage is like endurance, it’s endurance of fear. It’s a measure of a person’s ability to handle fear. So without fear, there can be no courage. Without courage, all virtues are very fragile. Think about these things as we move through the rest of the lesson.

Now, altruism. That’s when we’re taking our ideas and we’re taking ourself and we’re giving in and focusing on others. Maybe that’s in the form of a peer support group that you’re working with. Or maybe that’s the idea of giving back to your community.

Random acts of kindness. This actually gives back to us as much as we’re giving away. It’s based on reason and emotion both. It’s just not “I’m going to do this to get”, there’s emotion involved there.

Let’s think about some ways that we can build our moral compass or train to make it stronger. Sometimes we have to remember that there’s no right choice. A bad situation can be bad. Now we can look at it from different perspectives and find purpose and meaning in it. But when it comes to our moral compass, there might just not be a right choice. How are we going to train our moral compass? First, we’re going to look at ourselves openly. Most importantly, honestly. If you can’t be honest with yourself, there’s no way you can be honest with others.

Consider some questions. What are your core values and beliefs? Which are important to you? Are you living those values? Are you falling short? If so, where are you falling short? And are you motivated to change? Do you have the courage to change? Then take all these answers to these questions and then find people that you look up to. Engage with other ethical individuals, people that you share the same value system with.

Lastly, remain vigilant because there’s nothing that will pull apart your moral compass and break down your resilience than when you can’t remain vigilant. And then people are able to use that against you. So practice your moral values and try to uphold them even in the most challenging of situations.

Thank you for choosing The Recovery Village. If you or a loved one are struggling with mental health or substance abuse and would like to find out more about the programs we offer, please reach out to us directly at 855-387-3291.