recovery tips

You have changed. You can feel it within every part of your being. Your soul cries out with a sense of peace you have never felt before. You are physically clean, spiritually pure, and emotionally healthy. You know you have a long road of sobriety still ahead of you but you believe it is something you can, and will, conquer. The only missing element for you is your family. Throughout your recovery they have consistently turned their backs on you and now you are left facing the future alone. Going forward, you wonder how you will continue to move forward by yourself.

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It’s tough enough trying to stay clean and sober if you have a loving family to support you, but not all of us in recovery are so fortunate. If you’re flying solo in recovery, how to stay on the right path is something that you’re probably eager to know. Here, we talk about some of the ways that can make the transition a bit easier.

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“Never bend your head. Hold it high. Look the world straight in the eye.” – Helen Keller, American author, political activist, and lecturer, the first deaf blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree, went on to inspire millions, depicted in The Miracle Worker (1880-1968)

We don’t have to suffer from blindness to be blind to life and what the world has to offer. For many of us in recovery, but especially those of us in early recovery who may have been addicted for many years, just being able to look others straight in the eye seems like an impossible task. We’re coming from a supreme deficit, lost, but trying to find our way in this new world of sobriety.

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“Be what you are. This is the first step toward becoming better than you are.” – Julius Charles Hare, English theological writer (1795-1855)

Wondering where to begin when first entering recovery? One way to really get off track is to attempt to be what you are not. While it is very tempting to want to better ourselves, to improve upon our current state, we have to begin right where we are. That isn’t all bad, however, since we are already a leg up on where we were just a short time ago. After all, we’ve overcome our addiction through treatment, helped considerably by our firm determination to get clean and sober. That tells us a lot about our fortitude and desire to live in sobriety.

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“Change is not something you do, it’s something you allow.” – Will Garcia

When we awakened today, what was the first thing on our mind? What got us up and out of bed and eager to take up today’s challenges? Or, did we awake with a feeling of dread, or worse, nothingness? While we cannot know how we’re going to feel when we first open our eyes, we can mentally prepare ourselves for what will come. How? Let’s look at this for a minute.

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“Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much.” – Helen Keller, American author, political activist, and lecturer, the first deaf blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree, went on to inspire millions, depicted in The Miracle Worker (1880-1968)

Think about the tireless efforts of ants and bees. One ant or bee can’t make much of a difference, but the combined and coordinated work of thousands of the insects can result in miraculous transformation.

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 "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." – Oscar Wilde, Irish writer and poet (1854-1900)

When we are in recovery, whether we are literally coming back from lying in the gutter or just feel as if we’re climbing up from the pit of despair, we know what it means to be at rock-bottom. When we look at our life thus far, we know one thing for certain: When we’ve hit bottom, there’s only one place to go, and that’s up.

This is the good news and the bad news. It’s certainly good news if we vow to change our behavior and not only get clean and sober, but stay that way. It is bad news if we know that we could do something to make our lives better but we choose to remain in our current state. While we may not totally relapse, we’re not getting any further along in our recovery either. So, faced with the good news/bad news dilemma, what should we do when we enter recovery and find ourselves in a quandary, not knowing exactly where to turn? Here are some suggestions.

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"Happiness is not a station you arrive at, but a manner of traveling." – Margaret Runbeck, American author, teacher and humanitarian (1905-1956)

Ask anyone the definition of happiness and we’ll get different answers. For some, defining happiness has more to do with how they feel at the moment, whether they got up feeling terrific or were already late getting out of bed and their whole day is a matter of catching up. We are colored by our surroundings, by the weather, by the changing seasons, even by our digestion.

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“Man’s rise or fall, success or failure, happiness or unhappiness depends on his attitude…a man’s attitude will create the situation he imagines.” – James Lane Allen, American novelist and short story writer (1849-1925)

When we think about having “attitude,” sometimes we think of something bad or too forward or outgoing. As if this is something we shouldn’t project. But let’s take another look at attitude, specifically, the importance of attitude when it comes to our recovery.

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“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.” – Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady of the United States, from 1933 to 1945, wife of Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of the United States, she was an author, speaker, activist for civil rights, worked to enhance the status of working women (1884-1962)

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