Showing up consistently to do what is necessary to not engage in your most damaging behaviours. This is what recovery looks like.
I want to address two stereotypes about recovery in this post:
- The representation of recovery as rehabilitation clinics, group therapy, 12-step prayers, resolutions made on the first of the year or month or week, before and after transformations as depicted by once sickly addicts crossing the finishing line of triathlons and such.
- The promise of an everlasting contentment, sense of peace and freedom from all of your woes in the “second life” of sobriety.
Bulls**t.
Most of the work required for long-term recovery for most people does not happen in the container of an in-patient clinic. It happens in the uncontrolled and chaotic environment that is real life. 97% of new year’s resolutions fail so I doubt the power of the new year/month/day symbolism. There is certainly a place for therapy and the accountability of groups, but they can’t be with you all of the time, nor can they make you do the things that are good for and not do the things that are not. No longer consuming or engaging with a substance or behaviour that harms you means that and only that. The other monkeys in your circus of struggles will still be prancing about even if the gorilla representing your most harmful addiction has been exiled.
I suspect that most recovery for most people is getting on with the highs, the lows and the general humdrum of life, just without the object of your addiction. It is not a lightbulb moment and a final transition. It is the slow dawning of the the unthinkable and irrevocable commitments you must make in order to be well: the substances and/or behaviours you must completely abstain from, the people you cannot spend time with, the skeletons you must release from your closet by sharing shameful truths with people you want to respect you, the complete ownership of how you hurt yourself repeatedly and your responsibility to yourself to stop doing that. Recovery is continuing to commit to this every day and every hour.
Leave a Reply