Celebrating Love for Your Recovery: Navigating Valentine’s Day While Sober

Valentine’s Day can create lots of different emotions for people, for a lot of different reasons. This is especially true for individuals in recovery, as drug and alcohol abuse are notorious for placing strain on relationships.

This means, for individuals in recovery, Valentine’s Day can bring up a lot of painful emotions and memories.

These emotions can feel especially suffocating with Valentine’s Day messaging all over social media, on TV commercials, on the shelves at the grocery store, on billboards when driving to work, in your email inbox, and seemingly everywhere you look leading up to February 14.

As a community of recovery, let us tell you: Valentine’s Day doesn’t have to be a dreaded time. 

You can change the story. Instead, focus on using Valentine’s Day as a time to show yourself love, and a time to check in with important people in your life and let them know how much they mean to you.

Ways to Celebrate Valentine’s Day in Recovery

Prioritize Yourself

• Eat your favorite chocolate
• Treat yourself to a fancy dinner
• Relax with a warm bath and relaxing music
• Turn on a favorite movie and enjoy a favorite snack

Connect with loved ones 

Simply calling some of the people that mean the most to you to let them know you care and be a nice gesture and help with any feelings of loneliness.

Unplug and opt out 

If Valentine’s Day is too overwhelming, opt out! Intentionally turn off your phone, stay home and eliminate your exposure to all of the Valentine’s Day messaging.

Shift the love 

Instead of a focus on romantic relationships, shift Valentine’s Day to ‘Galentines’ or to focus on all the loved ones in your life, instead of intimate, romantic love.

Write Yourself a Valentine 

A simple gesture of writing a letter to yourself in recovery can be a meaningful way for you to explore and express all of the attributes about yourself you appreciate and love.

Celebrate with Love How Far You’ve Come

However you choose to celebrate (or not celebrate) Valentine’s Day, let it be a time for you to reflect and be proud of how far you have come in recovery.

There is Love and Support for You

If you are seeking a community of peers, all on a journey of recovery, Unity Recovery Services offers peer support in group settings, one-on-one support, access to community resources and more.

We are here with love, support and community at unityrecoveryservices.org.