More on Addiction Recovery

For the next couple of weeks I’ll write about the experience of addiction treatment and addiction recovery. Not everyone who recovers from addiction receives formal treatment, but the experiences are much the same. Those who don’t receive formal treatment have to learn recovery principles the hard way, and many slip back into drinking or drug use over and over. Denial is often the biggest hurdle to overcome.

Denial is not always a complete denial that there is no addiction problem when there is an addiction problem. With many in addiction recovery, what they say to others sounds like acceptance, but most often people in early recovery are still far from deep acceptance.

When there’s outside pressure to stop drinking alcohol or using cocaine or smoking pot or quit using opiates, the person can comply due to the pressure, but much of what he/she is doing or saying about recovery is to pacify those who are applying the pressure for change. The person in recovery can even fool themselves for while, but if the acceptance is to please someone else, once the pressure has subsided and the situation has improved the compliant person will most likely return to their drug of choice.

Tomorrow, maybe, I’ll write about the compulsion to drink or use drugs that persists in recovery. This psychological aspect of addiction is very real and very stubborn, and the desire to drink or use drugs is not easily removed. The famous Psychiatrist, Carl Jung, once told a severe alcoholic, who was a friend of Alcoholics Anonymous’ co-founder Bill Wilson, that recovery from alcoholism takes a spiritual experience of some sort, a deep psychic change. Jung wasn’t talking about a religious conversion, necessarily, but, rather, a deep desire for meaning and purpose — something much greater than pressure from a spouse, an employer or a friend.

Sometimes a person in early recovery will depend on calculation to stay away from alcohol or other drug of choice. Calculation is stronger motivation than compliance. When someone looks realistically at their addiction and calculates the costs and consequences of active addiction compared to the benefits of not drinking or using drugs they can rationally motivate themselves to remain in recovery for awhile, sometimes permanently.

The main problem with calculation is that benefits have to remain constant and significant. In the beginning, the calculation appears correct because there are immediate benefits of feeling better and not throwing money down the black hole of addiction. Memory fades though, and recovery is not a constant uphill path to happiness and fortune. Many times the past catches up with the recovering addict and bad things happen in recovery. A person can get a divorce because the relationship was irreparably damaged. Creditors can beat on the door and bankruptcy might be the only option. Many things in recovery can happen that weaken and erode motivation based on calculation.

The strongest form of motivation is associated with Jung’s assessment – commitment. Commitment to recovery means that the person will do all that’s necessary to stay in recovery and not take the first drink or drug. Commitment means that you’ve made recovery very personal and will build on it, manage it, live it.

I’ll write more in the next few weeks about what this commitment to addiction recovery entails.