As your daughter navigates the trials and tribulations of the recovery journey, she will discover that many valuable efforts can aid her in achieving lasting wellness. One valuable effort that often goes unnoticed is that of serving others. Simply put, service engagement can foster physical, mental, social, and spiritual benefits in your daughter’s recovery. It does this by shifting your daughter’s focus from self to others. In this way, service can play a critical role in your daughter’s journey to establishing and sustaining successful long-term recovery.

At Clearview, we are dedicated to helping troubled teen girls overcome emotional and behavioral concerns that interfere with their ability to function well in their academic performance, interpersonal relationships, and overall daily life. Our residential program offers academic programming, faith-based guidance, experiential therapies, and trauma recovery to help your daughter heal. Meanwhile, your daughter’s ability to achieve successful long-term recovery is our main priority. We believe that incorporating the value of service into our program will help her achieve this.

The Therapeutic Benefits of Helping Others

As stated in Alcohol Treatment Quarterly, “Research in social and cognitive sciences has shown increasing evidence for the long-held idea that helping others provides a therapeutic benefit to the helper.” Some of these benefits include but are not limited to:

  • Improvement in mood
  • Decreased symptoms of anxiety and depression
  • Increased self-esteem
  • Decreased limitations on functioning
  • Increased longevity
  • Reduced isolation
  • Increased sense of self-worth

How Can Service Motivate Successful Long-Term Recovery?

Depending on where your daughter is at on her treatment and recovery journey, you may be skeptical about encouraging her to engage in serving others. Perhaps she is in her earliest stages of recovery and you believe that her main priority should be getting well. In this case, it is important to explain why service can be so valuable for successful long-term recovery.

Service Fosters Accountability

One of the most important benefits of serving others in recovery is that it fosters accountability for continued growth and success. Fostering accountability also goes hand-in-hand with promoting responsibility, which will play a key role in your daughter’s healing process.

Perhaps your daughter struggles with engaging in self-destructive behaviors or goes to great lengths to avoid accountability. Whether your daughter is struggling with emotional outbursts, substance misuse, attention deficits, or lingering symptoms of unresolved trauma, she must be held accountable for her actions and decisions to effectively establish long-term recovery.

Service supports accountability because it allows your daughter to connect with her community on a deeper level. Rather than promoting self-serving tendencies, service ensures that your daughter can effectively step outside of herself and lean into the peer support, gratitude, and joy that can result from helping others.

Service Encourages Open Lines of Communication

Another benefit of service in recovery is improving communication through networking and team-building. As your daughter experiences the benefits that can come from service, she will learn that helping others can provide important leadership opportunities and lessons. For example, when working with a team to serve others, she will need to focus on listening and understanding her team. If she is more reserved, service can also provide her with the chance to step up and lead her team, enabling her voice to be heard, validated, and supported during recovery.

Service Provides Purpose

Lastly, your daughter can also develop deeper meaning and purpose for her recovery by serving others. As your daughter offers her time and energy to help others through service, she may discover new interests, values, and causes that she deeply cares about.

Service can also provide your daughter with new perspectives that can help her better understand how she “fits” into the world around her. This sense of accomplishment can help validate that she is on the right path and motivate continued engagement in long-term recovery.

Using Service to Establish Successful Long-Term Recovery

As you can see, there are endless benefits your daughter can experience from serving others throughout early and long-term recovery. Still, the aforementioned article by Alcohol Treatment Quarterly does highlight that “The benefit of helping to the helper may be stronger depending upon the relevance of the service activities to the helper.” This is why choosing the right form of service is important.

In addition, as BMC Public Health notes, “Regarding the volunteering and health connection, the role accumulation perspective supports the position that a volunteer who concomitantly participates in different types of voluntary services can benefit his or her health most. Thus, working with your daughter to identify service opportunities that resonate with her interests or values may be especially helpful to her successful long-term recovery. Finding several outlets for volunteering can be beneficial.

The following are just some of the service opportunities your daughter can get connected with during recovery:

  • Volunteering at a local animal shelter or rescue
  • Participating in community drives
  • Tutoring
  • Engaging in environmental education projects
  • Recycling
  • Serving in a soup kitchen
  • Aiding local churches
  • Helping older people at home
  • Donating
  • Promoting fundraisers

Moreover, at Clearview Horizon Girls Academy, we can set your daughter up with additional service opportunities through life mentoring as she participates in our residential program. This life mentoring program allows us to guide your daughter as she works to establish and sustain successful long-term recovery.

At first thought, you may not consider service to play an important role in your daughter’s ability to achieve long-term recovery. However, as you learn more about the various benefits service can bring during the healing process, you may recognize that serving others is a powerful recovery strategy. From fostering accountability and purpose in recovery to encouraging open lines of communication, service can enhance your daughter’s self-esteem and motivation for long-term wellness. At Clearview Horizon Girls Academy, we believe that service plays a significant role in your daughter’s ability to step outside of herself. Our program will meet her where she is at in recovery. Call 866-584-4788 to learn more today.