First Recovery Post…

Everywhere we go there are social classes. There are the ones where the doctors and their wives hang out at. There are those that the lawyers and their friends hang out with and etc. But what happens when you take a bunch of addicts or a bunch of recovering addicts and put them all together? I have been around to know that most of the time it don’t turnout good. You have the ones that are really serious about their recovery, they are doing good for themselves, they are finally getting somewhere in their life, and they have been going through it for a while. Then you add to those that are new to recovery, their lives are still a mess, they don’t really want to be there (they are cause it is a requirement or they are doing it to make others happy, or the last time that they used they had a bad experience and decided that they are going to try to quit, well until something gets put in front of them) You put them with the ones that have been in recovery for a while and somehow or another most of the time, the new ones end up somehow getting the ones that have been there for a wile back into using. This is a crazy cycle and people wonder why the success rate of recovering addicts is slim to none. People wonder why addicts tend to relapse so many times… There really isn’t a system that works and I have thought about the problem but its a really hard problem to fix. The out patient treatment programs almost need to have people entering the program and then the people in the program take a test of some sort to determine where they are at in their recovery, how serious they are about their recovery, and if they are “faking it to make it”, and then separate them into some sort of ranking and keep them in that ranking until they are ready to be moved. By working the out patient recovery program this way it would eliminate some of relapse. It would eliminate what I like to call social relapse. This maybe a really good idea in theory, but designing a testing system to categorized people would be tricky, as every person is different and they do think differently. I would say in order for this to be completely successful you would have to have a “inside person”, that could help with the process. The other most common mistake in recovery, and this is another one that I have seen quite often is what I call the right now, right now, I am all better and it has only been a week. In recovery we all start off really strong and I mean really strong, during the first six months of my recovery I wanted kept telling my counselor.. “I feel like I am on a treadmill, like I am running and running as fast as I can, but I am not going anywhere, my life just seems to be staying the same.” This is where most people new to recovery find it the hardest. I guess that I had convinced myself that if I got clean my life would get better instantly and it don’t work that way. I had to remember that I didn’t become a addict over night and nothing was going to get better over night either. I have since come to realize that recovery is like someone getting ready for a marathon. You have to first spend time in a gym when preparing for a marathon. You have to learn the rules of the marathon, just like you have to learn the rules of living a sober life. Starting in the gym when training for a marathon is so that you can build your endurance to be able handle things that are going to come your way when you start your training outside the gym. Well in recovery you have to “train” to be able to handle the other side of society and you have to be able to say no to the temptations that are going to come your way in life. You can start to see the analogy, recovery is a marathon, a life long marathon.

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