Patience (Episode 3 - Archive)Patience (Episode 3 - Archive)
Relational Recovery
Wes Thompson and Austin Hill talk about patience in recovery, focusing on the stories people tell themselves and how these shape reactions, relationships and relapse risk. They describe patience as a skill that can grow over time, even amid hurt, unmet expectations and self-sabotage.
6:13•21 Sept 2026
Patience, Self-Talk and the "I'll Hurt Me" Trap in Recovery
Episode Overview
- Patience is described as a dial, not a switch, and can be strengthened like a muscle through repeated practice.
- The stories people tell themselves about others’ behaviour strongly affect how patient or impatient they are.
- Unmet expectations in relationships, especially with family, can trigger relapse when patience and perspective are lost.
- Impatience can lead either to cutting people off too quickly or to self-sabotage expressed as "I'll show you, I'll hurt me."
- Seeing yourself as a continual work in progress creates space to grow in patience without demanding perfection.
“patience is not a switch that you turn on and off it's a dial that you can turn up the volume or down the volume depending on how healthy you are”
What can we learn from those who have battled addiction? In this archive episode of **Relational Recovery**, Wes Thompson and Austin Hill chat about patience as a core part of recovery, relationships and everyday life. They start with a painfully relatable story from an unnamed alumni who relapsed after feeling rejected by his daughters.
He had been pursuing a relationship with them, but their response "wasn't what he wanted," and he began telling himself a story that led him back to using. That example opens up a bigger theme: the quiet, powerful stories people tell themselves and how those stories either support patience or sabotage it. Austin points out that if someone thinks, "if they don't get this fixed right now the relationship's over," patience goes out the window.
From there, they talk about two common reactions in recovery: cutting people off too quickly, and the darker pattern of self-sabotage. As Austin puts it, "you didn't respond the way I wanted you to so I'm gonna hurt myself as like punishment to you," summed up in the line, "I'll show you, I'll hurt me"—a move where, as he says, "nobody wins." For anyone wrestling with unwanted behaviours, this conversation frames patience as a skill, not a personality trait.
Wes and Austin describe patience as "not a switch that you turn on and off" but "a dial" that can be turned up or down, like a muscle that grows stronger with use. They connect this to Christian faith and the idea that people are "always works in progress," which means there is always space to grow in patience without beating yourself up for not being perfect.
If you've ever felt stuck between wanting change now and feeling let down by others or yourself, this episode might help you ask a different question: where could you turn up the patience dial today?
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