but we are guided through these times by a strong foundation of deep recovery.
As a newcomer I was attracted to those who looked good on the outside—often those who spoke well, were successful at work, and seemed to have it all together.
WHO HAS WHAT YOU WANT?
In early recovery I heard this advice over and over: “Look for someone who has what you want, and ask them how they got it.” That was also the advice I was given for how to pick a sponsor. As a newcomer I was attracted to those who looked good on the outside—often those who spoke well, were successful at work, and seemed to have it all together. But when I look around the rooms today, it’s not always the shiny stars or fine talkers who have what I want.
I started thinking about this when I was trying to encourage a woman I sponsored to do more step work. “But I’m not using my drugs of choice, and I don’t feel like I want to use them,” she told me. I tried to tell her that I want so much more than only abstinence from my recovery.
It’s true; I want more than abstinence from alcohol or other drugs or behaviors. I want more than a saner schedule or a good marriage. I want the whole enchilada. I want a deeply changed mind and heart, and I want peace, serenity, and joy. I also want the highest quality relationships possible—with my husband, family, friends, my higher power of course, and, yes, with myself.
But here’s where it gets tricky. That good, changed life comes with longevity; more time in recovery does equal more exposure to new ideas, concepts, and learning as we go, layer upon layer, through the Twelve Steps. But those changes and that growth are not directly correlated to simply accumulating days in recovery. And not everyone in the rooms wants the kind of deep, continual life-changing recovery that I am describing. I find that I still have to look around the rooms and ask myself, “Who has what I want?”
It’s possible to have thirty-five years of recovery and still be miserable and unhappy and filled with resentment and fear. (Sorry, but it’s true.) We share the rooms with some people who have been around a long time and they are still unhappy at work and unhappy in their primary relationships. That is not the kind of recovery I seek. I want a quality recovery. Marty Mann, one of the first women to recover in Alcoholics Anonymous, and a close friend of Bill Wilson, is credited with first expressing the notion that it’s the quality of your recovery that counts, not the length of it.
TWIGS * FOR CHAPTER ONE:
Stages of Recovery
• What is your image for the stages of your recovery? A quilt? Map? Ladder? Tree? Can you draw, paint, or collage it?
• Divide your recovery into five-year blocks. Name each one as if it were a movie or a song.
• Write in your journal about something you “knew for sure” in your first few years. Is that still true? What changed and what hasn’t?
*One of the definitions of twig is to comprehend the meaning of; so in keeping with the woods analogy, I thought I would offer these twigs to help you further understand what I shared in the chapter.
Chapter Two
The doctor did an examination, and then he had me walk and move and sit and stand up and sit down again while he watched. He had me try some stretches to test my flexibility. And he made notes. He did a few adjustments and then we sat and talked. He talked to me about how I sat and stood and moved. We talked about my writing and reading and my sleeping habits, and how I drove my car.
He explained that I had not hurt my back overnight. The injury had been a slow process of incremental habits building up to cause weakness in some areas of my body and overcompensation of certain other muscles, and to my impatient dismay, my healing would follow the same course: I would have to incorporate new habits over a long period of time.
The doctor told me I would need to change my desk and my chair and also my steering wheel and my pillow—all of which would feel uncomfortable at first because I was used to the unhealthy habits. I would have to learn new ways of sitting, standing, and driving, and by doing that—and doing it over time—my weak muscles would get stronger and my misused muscles would realign.
We start with the physical. Our addiction has almost always caused physical damage—whether it is from drinking, smoking, eating, sex, or other behavioral/process aspects of our disease like television or technology; there is almost always injury to our physical health.
He explained that my back would recover as I learned these new movement patterns, and that I would have to practice them until they became second nature. The repair and healing would come from small, incremental changes over time.
It was much like my recovery from my addiction.
Addiction is a three-part illness (body, mind, and spirit), and it requires a three-part recovery. We start with the physical. Our addiction has almost always caused physical damage—whether it is from drinking, smoking, eating, sex, or other behavioral/process aspects of our disease like television or technology—there is almost always injury to our physical health.
So our recovery began with the physical too. We stopped using, drinking, hurting ourselves with food or work or cigarettes or worry. Then as our recovery progressed, we learned to continue with our physical care. We stopped smoking, lost weight, started to exercise, took yoga classes, or learned to dance. We went to healthcare practitioners (and we followed their advice) and we stopped procrastinating about the dentist, the gym, and learned to eat better.
If we were to take a look in the medicine cabinets of women with more than ten years of recovery, we can see there’s no “one-right-way.” Yes, again, the colorful, messy stage.
One recovering woman may have a bare medicine cabinet with only Band-Aids and aspirin. Another recovering woman looks like she’s got the local pharmacy in her cabinet, although a closer look reveals nonnarcotic and nonalcoholic cough medicine, anti-inflammatories, antidepressants, and tubes of different antibiotic salves. For this woman, these medicines are health remedies and they are used strictly according to directions. In yet another recovering woman’s medicine cabinet you’ll find Chinese herbs, vitamins A to Z, St. John’s Wort, arnica cream, and Bach Flower remedies;
