Addiction Recovery Management Revisited

It’s been awhile since I wrote about recovery management. This might be the most important concept to understand for someone in addiction recovery. After a few months in recovery, a person can become so routine it seems as if all this recovery stuff, such as going to a support group, meditation, talking with someone on a regular basis who understands addiction, improving relationships, exercising, eating right, etc., just isn’t all that important. The person feels like they’ve recovered, have it under control, and they usually become bored.

This is a mindset that can start the process of relapse. If a diabetic became tired of the treatment after using Insulin and maintaining a proper diabetic diet, so stopped the insulin and diet because it didn’t seem necessary anymore, that would be a mistake. If someone with heart disease quit using their heart medicine, stopped their low-fat diet and the other recommendations just because they didn’t like taking the treatment, this could be deadly. Addiction can be deadly.

Addiction recovery management is long term. This can seem overwhelming to someone new in recovery. They begin feeling restricted, plus, didn’t they get clean and sober to enjoy life and become useful to society and close to family and friends? If they’re going to AA or NA three to four times a week and talking to a sponsor every few days, and if they’re working out and worrying about what they eat, and if they’re continuously dealing with relationship problems and trying to find time to meditate, isn’t there more to life? 

It’s understandable that recovery is boring at times, especially in the beginning. Changing from one life style to another is daunting. Old friends (drinking buddies) drop off because you’re no longer any fun — you’re sitting at the house drinking Diet Coke while your favorite pub’s playing the Super-Bowl on the big screen. This is a dangerous state of mind for someone in recovery. It’s important to deal with these feelings rather than allow them to build up into resentments that turn you against recovery and toward relapse. Remember, relapse is a process, not an event (I know, it’s a cliché) — relapse starts in the mind long before the person takes the first drink or begins using their drug of choice.

People who understand and accept recovery is long term and requires recovery management are prepared for this boring part of recovery that seems too restrictive. The person in recovery who’s playing with the idea of drinking or using again, however, is operating off of a fiction — that drinking or drug use was exciting and fulfilling at the end before they started recovery. It wasn’t. Addiction was painful, and, ironically, the drug use was much more restrictive than their recovery. The person was chained to a drug, unable to do the things many others were doing because of the consequences, demands and barriers of addiction. The person who’s bored in recovery thinks of a time when he or she first started drinking or using some other drug, when it felt exciting and fun, when he or she could control the use and there weren’t any serious consequences. The person falsely begins to think they can go back to that point where it was all fun and games and excitement. They’re chasing an illusion.

The addict can’t go back to that point. The addict picks us where they left off and it progressively gets worse. Until the person can end this fiction, that returning to drinking and using is a viable option, they likely won’t put the necessary effort into building a lifestyle that’s fulfilling and meaningful. It’s a sad reality to say you don’t naturally have what it takes to enjoy life without an artificial stimulus in your body. The recovering person does have what it takes — they just haven’t found it. Recovery management is about managing recovery and finding that part of ourselves that naturally feels good, that wants to learn and grow, to have fun, to be serious when needed, to react appropriately to reality. It could be that a person in recovery hasn’t dealt with a biological depressive disorder, or an anxiety disorder, but, again, this is what recovery management is about — managing recovery holistically. The main thing about recovery is finding meaning and purpose — then it’s not boring labor, but a labor of love, as they say, but not really labor at all, just natural awareness, self-discovery, mind-body-emotions-spirit, and a strong connection to reality. The truth is that addicts who find themselves and recover reach a state of being so much more rich and fulfilling than even the beginning use of alcohol/other drugs, there’s no comparison.