Endorsing and endorphins
We’re told in Recovery to “endorse”: Endorse for the effort, endorse for the will to bear discomfort, endorse for practising the Recovery method. If you don’t feel like getting up in the morning, endorse for moving your muscles and sitting up in bed, then endorse for swinging your feet over the side of the bed, for standing up, for taking one step, and so on.
Some of us are so used to being critical of ourselves and others that getting in the habit of endorsing is a dramatic change.
Over the years therapists and books and ideas (“Im OK-You’re OK”, “How to be your own best friend”, etc.) told me to stop saying negative things to myself, to say positive things instead. Recovery is teaching me how to do it: Follow the example method when I start to work myself up over a triviality, and at the end of Step 3, Endorse. Endorse anytime. Endorse in a car, at a computer, at the grocery store. It may sound silly but sometimes I reach around and pat myself on the back. After doing that enough, I can simply imagine the pat and get the same rush of well-being.
I love this quote from Dr. Low: “What Recovery teaches you, through its philosophy of averageness, is to endorse your successes and to refrain from condemning your failures. An attitude of this kind permits you to accumulate a vast fund of self-endorsement which is made to flow in a running stream from your leading predisposition (philosophy) down to your dispositions for total acts, finally to seep through to each separate position taken in every single part-act.”
Dr. Low–from the 1930s through the 1950s–knew a lot about how brains worked, without having access to the biology of neurotransmitters or the use of MRIs. The result of frequent endorsing can be a happy, Zen-like glow of contentment–encouraging us to endorse even more. And that’s a good habit to have!
