Recovering from an addiction to misery demands a type of care and precision not always required in other addiction recovery programs.
All recovery programs are about getting into right relationship with yourself and others. Yet, with every addiction, at least one thing about recovery is difficult and one thing is easy. For example, recovery from alcohol addiction is difficult because if you slip once, you might never crawl out of the bottle again. One drink can kill you. Food addiction is easier in that respect because one wrong bite is not likely to kill you.
On the other hand, an alcoholic can stay away from alcohol in a way that a food addict can never hope for. An alcoholic doesn’t have to sit down with his demon three times a day.
In most of the common addictions, our first task is to separate ourselves from the addictive behavior by becoming abstinent. The first days and weeks of abstinence are a serious challenge because we experience the discomfort of withdrawal. Thus simply achieving abstinence is a job in itself.
Once we’re past withdrawal, our next challenge is to learn to live differently. By getting others’ support, going to meetings, and keeping ourselves in contact with recovering people, we can take whatever time we need to refine our manner of living. Both tasks—getting abstinent and altering one’s manner of living—are challenging, but we don’t have to do both tasks all at once.
With an addiction to misery, however, it’s the manner of living itself that is the problem.
Abstinence is clear-cut with alcohol, drug, and food addiction. You don’t drink, use drugs, or eat addictive foods.
But what is abstinence with misery addiction? After all, misery addicts are addicted to a system—the system they’ve used to survive.
It’s standard for us recovery professionals to say that we can’t work with someone’s personal history until he is in recovery. As long as a person is drinking or using other drugs, he isn’t clear enough to do therapy. Even a compulsive gambler, food addict, or codependent will have limited success with therapy as long as he is practicing his addictions.
For a misery addict, though, the injuries of childhood are part and parcel of the entire addiction. The addiction typically begins with early trauma, which results in incomplete life and relationship skills, which in turn create more trauma as a result of the person being unskilled and unconscious of the addiction. Add to this the problems created by the tool addictions, and the misery addict has a big task in front of her.
If you love a misery addict, perhaps you can see now why she hasn’t been able to pull herself out of her situation on her own. Recovering from any addiction is a challenge, but the special characteristics of a misery addiction make the task daunting.
Yet it is a task that is entirely doable. Misery addicts succeed at it daily.
Still, recovery from misery addiction has special requirements. The recovery process can’t proceed in a copycat fashion exactly like recovery from other addictions. In recovering from an addiction to misery, attention to the deeper issues and skill training must be present nearly from the beginning. This is an addiction so entwined with disorder and dilemma that recovery must occur hand in hand with therapy and structure.