Recovery is defined as getting back to normal or regaining what has been lost. For misery addicts (and other addicts too), recovery may actually bring experiences they’ve never had, such as kinship or self-confidence. In that sense, the term recovery is a misnomer. Nevertheless, it is the commonly used term that describes the process of rising from the depths of addiction and experiencing emancipation and joy.
Recovery offers community, sanity, and instruction on how to fully live.
For the sheer genius of the recovery process we can thank alcoholics. In 1935, two men known today simply as Dr. Bob and Bill W. began the process that led to the establishment of Alcoholics Anonymous. Since then, tens of millions of alcoholics all over the world have successfully followed their recipe for crawling out of addiction.
Over the past few decades, use of the Twelve Step process has spread to a growing list of other addictions and compulsive behaviors. It keeps working, no matter what type of problem it’s applied to. It is effective for any problem of living, large or small. Over time, it can bring about a complete overhaul in the way one approaches life.
It isn’t enough just to read about the recovery process. It has to be worked, personally put into practice. There are things we must actively do to experience recovery. However, once the process starts working—which is usually with one’s first efforts and first recovery group meetings—it has a mysterious force of its own, bringing forward gifts, insight, and serendipitous happenings.
It works in a way opposite to addiction. Whereas addiction takes from us, recovery gives to us. Addiction makes our lives unmanageable; recovery causes life to become more orderly. Things mysteriously go wrong for us when we’re stuck in addiction. Things mysteriously improve with recovery.
The starting place for recovery is at recovery meetings or in a form of addiction treatment. Twelve Step recovery meetings (those founded on the same principles as Alcoholics Anonymous) end in the word anonymous, such as Alcoholics Anonymous and Misery Addicts Anonymous. (Exceptions: Alateen and Al-Anon—sometimes spelled ALANON—which are Twelve Step programs for people who have a partner, spouse, parent, friend, or relative with an addiction.)
These meetings are always free, but someone will pass a basket for donations that are used to buy supplies, pay rent on the room, and contribute to the home office of that particular Anonymous group. Most people donate a dollar, but less is fine and none is okay too. There are no professional group leaders. Leadership is rotated among members, and a standard format is followed for each meeting. To go to a meeting, just show up. No reservation or appointment is needed. There are no requirements or application. You don’t have to reveal any personal information, not even your last name. You do not have to sign in.
In contrast, treatment is a professionally managed experience of recovery led by one or more psychologists, counselors, social workers, or other professionals.
If you continue to live in your regular home while you’re in a treatment program, that program is usually called an outpatient program. (The term is borrowed from our medical system.) If you stay in a hospital or hospital-affiliated facility during treatment, you’re in an inpatient program. And if your treatment takes place at a retreat center or recovery center, it’s usually called a residential treatment program. Most residential programs are put together by recovery professionals who have a dedication to recovery and the people who seek it. Treatment facilities differ widely in price and are relatively expensive. As with so many things in life, some are much better than others. Cost is not necessarily an indicator of effectiveness or value.
The advantage of treatment programs over recovery meetings is that they immerse you in the recovery experience and protect you from relapse during any withdrawal. I prefer nonprofit treatment programs because they only have to meet expenses; they don’t have to turn a profit for owners or stakeholders.
Some treatment facilities run aftercare programs, which means they offer at least one weekly group meeting for alumni for a certain number of weeks after they’ve completed treatment.
However, no treatment program is sufficient by itself. To sustain your recovery, you will still need to attend regular recovery meetings. This is why treatment programs will connect you with Anonymous programs while you are still in treatment.
If all this sounds like a lot of work, it is. If misery addiction were easy to handle, you’d have fixed it yourself by now.
On the other hand, after the first six months to a year, recovery isn’t nearly as difficult as addiction. Addiction is painful every single day in terms of anguish, cost, missed opportunities, and messed-up intimacy. Recovery is hard at first, but it gets easier as time goes on. It starts being worth the effort right away.
Therapy is good. Therapy is where you can heal from childhood neglect and abuse, experience a safe bond, and learn relationship skills. But unless your misery addiction is quite mild (i.e., you don’t fall into the self-sabotaging or miserable categories on the continuum in the previous chapter), therapy alone won’t be enough. As Bill W., a founder of AA, wrote in 1939: “Surely this was the answer—self-knowledge. But it was not, for the frightful day came when I drank once more. The curve of my declining moral and bodily health fell off like a ski-jump.”1
Therapy is powerful, and it goes very well with the recovery process, but it does not replace it. Each is enhanced by the other.
Few addicts of any stripe recover in isolation. In fact, addiction thrives on isolation. When we are alone too much, we don’t have other minds balancing our sometimes extreme thoughts. Plus too much loneliness may send us to our addiction for relief.
To enter and sustain recovery, we must join the other courageous folks who took the chance of doing something different in the face of their own pain. In any recovery community you find these miraculous people, survivors who endured withdrawal and surrendered their self-centeredness on a bet that felt risky at the time—a bet that their own lives could be different.
When you listen to recovering addicts, you often hear phrases such as, “I didn’t think I could ever give up gambling,” or “I was sure I’d be the one who failed at recovery,” or “If it could work for me, as sunk as I was, it would work for anybody.” They know how difficult it is. They’ve been there. And they are your best guides out of the haunted forest.
Hanging out with recovering people gives you an attitude adjustment, reminds you of how the recovery process works, gives you practical tips for handling the details of overhauling an entire life, and creates a lot of laughter.
This is the news that might sound bad at first. To be in recovery, you need to be abstinent from your addiction.
It makes sense. Practicing your addiction is the antithesis of recovery. As long as your eyes are on your addiction, they are not on recovery.
Directing your attention toward recovery puts you in an entirely different mind-set than when you are thinking about how terrible your life is (or how terrible you are), or when to shop or eat addictively, or how to do something to hurt yourself.
Recovery lets you step into an alternate universe. It alters and enhances your consciousness.
Here’s some really good news: you don’t have to be abstinent in order to go to a recovery meeting. You go to a meeting in order to get and stay abstinent. The only requirement is the desire to stop doing your addiction.
Abstinence for a misery addict gets complicated. An alcoholic stops drinking; a gambler stops gambling; a food addict stops eating trigger foods. What does a misery addict do?
You stop sabotaging yourself. You
That’s a lot. Yet it can be done. Many others have done it.
Admitting to powerlessness is the starting point of recovery. As long as we think we can control our addictions, we are operating out of an illusion.
We have no control over an addiction. The addiction is controlling us. It’s only our own addictive thinking that tells us that we can have control over this thing we can’t stay away from.
An addiction makes us try to control and manipulate other people. Directly or indirectly, we try to get them to support our addiction. We try to control how people view us, what the guy in the next car is doing, how fast the grass grows.
The addiction influences our minds and our thinking. It tells us we are better than some people and worse than others. It keeps us busy thinking about when we’re going to get our next fix—whether it’s a drug, a food, a stretch of computer game-playing, or a bout of avoidance, frustration, failure, and self-criticism.
The addiction tells us we don’t have an addiction. It’s a type of brainwashing, and we are its hostages.
We are not in control, not even of our own minds.
Admitting to this is the starting place.
Once we honor the truth—that we are powerless in the face of the power of the addiction—we make an internal shift that is receptive to the other realities of recovery. We understand that we can’t find abstinence by ourselves. We realize that we need a strength greater than ours alone to get anywhere.
Surrender is different from either compliance or sacrifice. Compliance means just going along with the program, while internally criticizing others and trying to manipulate them. Sacrifice is giving yourself away to someone or something else. In contrast, surrender is about letting go of trying to control what, paradoxically, we never had control of in the first place.
The blueprint for change in any Anonymous group is called the Twelve Steps. The first of these Steps is an acknowledgment of our personal powerlessness over our addiction.
Once you achieve abstinence, it will become clear that the problem is not just with the addiction: the deeper problem is with living. Thus the Twelve Steps help us transform our relationships with ourselves and with others.
Addicts have trouble asking for and accepting help. “I’d like to do it myself, thank you.” Recovery, being the opposite of addiction, gives us increasing practice at using help. Twelve Step groups and programs have a formal system for it called sponsorship.
It can be hard to spontaneously ask a stranger to listen to us when we’re having trouble. It becomes somewhat easier if we’ve made an arrangement with a person we have at least met—someone who is expecting us to call.
A sponsor is anyone who has more experience in the recovery program than you do. She becomes your personal guide into the program, helping you achieve abstinence, supporting you through the rough bumps, and shepherding you up the Steps. She does this in part by helping you create a structure to follow. At first this will probably involve calling her once a day and going to a certain number of meetings a week.
As your relationship and trust grow, you will discover that you can be completely honest about what you are feeling and get helpful direction in response. (I can assure you that there is nothing that you have done or thought that someone else in recovery has not also done or thought.)
How do you get a sponsor? You listen at meetings, and when someone’s experience or integrity appeals to you, you simply ask him if he will sponsor you.
You may be thinking, Why would someone do this for me? It’s asking too much. Or, I don’t want to embarrass someone who might want to turn me down. Or, What if she says no? I’ll be mortified.
First, it’s not asking too much. In fact, it’s asking just the right amount because it’s a central part of working your recovery program.
Second, you don’t have to worry about embarrassing someone else or putting pressure on him by asking for his help. People with recovery experience know how to take care of themselves. In fact, by being your sponsor, someone is taking care of himself. He knows that by helping you with your program, his own recovery will be strengthened.
Third, it’s indeed quite possible that the person you ask might say no. She might be going through a very busy period, or she might already be sponsoring all the people she can handle—in which case, it’s important to her own recovery that she turns you down. So if someone does say no, you help both yourself and her if you simply ask another. (See how in recovery everyone naturally helps each other?)
If a sponsorship turns out to be a bad fit, it’s okay to change sponsors. Sometimes people have both an abstinence sponsor and a Step sponsor.
In Twelve Step programs, it’s customary (but not required) for your sponsor to be the same gender as you.
All Twelve Step programs encourage participants to surrender control—not to some other person, but to what the programs call a Higher Power.
You get to decide what this Higher Power is for you. It can be God, or the Goddess, or Jesus, or Allah. It doesn’t have to be religious at all. It can be your recovery group. (After all, its members have collectively demonstrated power over an addiction that had beaten them individually into the ground. If that’s not a Higher Power, then I don’t know what is.)
No one will ask you who or what your Higher Power is, and you do not have to have this worked out before you go to a meeting.
While Twelve Step programs often meet in churches, they are not affiliated with any particular religion, including the one housing the meeting.
Some recovery programs—which are not Twelve Step, Anonymous programs—are affiliated with specific religions or denominations. Some of these are more valuable and effective than others. Your chances for recovery increase if a program includes sponsors and abstinence and if the people in it are comfortable speaking the whole truth.
One problem with many church-run programs is that there can be a denial of the shadow side. If people in the program feel pressured to do well in order to prove their faith in God, they’ll have difficulty talking about the things that go wrong. This actually makes abstinence tougher rather than easier. Any program that pressures its participants for success will not be of lasting help. It will only encourage people to try to control the addiction—and in that direction lies failure.
There’s a just-do-it school of thought that says, “Just quit smoking. Just stop drinking. Just stop being miserable. There’s no need for all this program crap.”
It should be very clear by now that, for a misery addict, this is asking too much. The addiction is too subtle and uses too many schemes and devices.
An addiction squanders time. Recovery gives you your time back for the bargain price of two or three hours a week.
As a client recently said in amazement, “I have so much time! I didn’t realize how much time my addiction was taking up.”
In recovery, you can discover time to garden, sing, laugh with friends, walk beside the water, watch birds, hold your cat, throw sticks for your dog to chase, cuddle your children, play golf with your partner, and walk steadily toward your deepest dreams. Once you can let yourself receive it, there is no comfort that is as warming or as rejuvenating as the genuine, kind human contact that blossoms with recovery.