Owning my own recovery
What does it mean to be in recovery?
I’ve been in recovery for around 10 years now and I should have it all together, right?
Fortunately, recovery is a process, sometimes a life-long process. I don’t have to have it all together right away. I can take my time as long as I’m going forward.
As I get further and further into recovery I find deeper and deeper layers of pervasive learning that has to be undone and redone. I have to practise and practise being different until it's second nature.
If you think about it, we’ve spent our formative years learning the way things work in our world. Now, however, we have to spend some time unlearning and relearning the way things work in the rest of the world.
The un-addicted world.
Here's an example.
Last year I went on a holiday that turned out to be pretty terrible. I was grouchy and discontented. So we were both miserable. For the life of me, I just could not work out what was going on. Over and over, I told myself I was lucky to be there, that many people don’t get to take holidays.
That didn’t work though and only made me feel ashamed that I couldn’t enjoy it.
After the holiday, I decided to work out why I was so miserable on the trip. So I examined my values about holidays and discovered a lot about myself, my values and my expectations.
Change your values in four easy steps
Take a look at your own values. What is important to you? How do you want things to work, how do you think people should be?
The best way to figure this out is to use the three-step process. Firstly, pick one aspect of your life that you are unhappy with. Write down four or five statements about that one thing that you want to examine. Use the worksheet and write down the first thing that comes to mind. It honestly doesn’t matter if it’s ridiculous and unrealistic. Nobody is going to judge you. Here's an example using my sad holiday.
I know holidays should be:
Always spent together all the time doing the same thing
Not spent doing useful stuff, no exercise allowed
Doing nothing except watch tv/play on the tablet/read fiction/shop/eat out
Spent eating rubbish food and drink lots of alcohol
Going away somewhere, not staying at home
I must spend all my money and come home broke
Pretty ridiculous when you look at it like that! No wonder I was in such a bad mood.
What is the big picture?
Secondly, we need to look at the way we measure those statements (thanks Mark Manson).
I asked myself what is the essence of a holiday? What is the big picture?
By the time you are an adult, you have had many interactions and picked up many values.
For example, what is the essence of a relationship? Or what do I want out of a career? What sort of parent do I want to be? What does support look like?
I decided that the essence of a holiday is to do something different from everyday life. Something fun and nurturing. A shared experience that would bring me and my partner together. Besides this, we needed to rest and prepare for the upcoming season.
With this in mind I wrote out the measures I used for each of the values I wrote.
Mark Manson once said “With great responsibility comes great power”. This may be a hard concept to get your head around, but it’s liberating to know that you have the great responsibility and power to change your own life.
Break the spell. You don’t need to stay captive to outdated measures any longer. Or hold on to those old constructs of yourself that don’t quite fit today’s world.
Instead, you can take your power back and change your values using the measures that work for you.
Take your power back
Thirdly, this is what I did to address my holiday values: I identified each measure as helpful, not helpful, or kind of helpful, and considered whether they were realistic, not realistic, or kind of realistic.
I'll do the first one to show you then you can do your own...
Holidays should always be spent together all the time doing the same thing
We must eat, drink and sleep together
Both of us must only do the same activities at the same time all the time
We must get up and go to bed at the same time
We must only do things that we both want to do. (In reality, this looked like only doing things my darling wanted to do to keep her happy. Or in my head, she would leave)
These measures are not helpful or realistic. Why not? Because I get frustrated when I follow them! Then I get cranky and take it out on my beloved.
What are some helpful and more realistic measures?
Eat together if we’re both there
We don’t have to go to bed at the same time
Only do activities if you want to
According to the new measures, it’s ok to do some things apart. It’s ok to do some things together.
Sparkly new values
The last step in the process is to write out a new value. For my holiday values the new value becomes: It’s ok if we don’t spend every single minute together.
Does this fit into my big picture of what a holiday is? Restful, fun, and different? Yes, it does.
I was excited! I carried on with the rest of the values and measured them and examined the measures. Then I labeled whether they were realistic or helpful. I wrote out what the new values were that fitted into the big picture.
This is what I ended up with. It's ok to:
Do some things apart. It shows R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
We only have to do the things we want to do; my partner may still choose to do them alone, and that’s ok.
Do some useful stuff or productive thinking sometimes. It’s ok to do nothing sometimes.
Stay at home. The other values still apply. Have fun every day!
Let go, as long as I’m not hurting myself in the long run.
All the usual mental health whatnot still applies. Be aware of my thinking, eat well, get enough sleep, don’t drink too much.
Read these values every day until they are a part of me.
Reinvent yourself
Never forget you have the responsibility to yourself to ditch whatever is not working for you.
Also remember that with great responsibility comes great power.
So now you know the four-step process of examining the values that drive you.
Write four or five statements about the aspect you want to examine
Work out how you measure these statements
Identify the measures as helpful/realistic, not helpful/realistic, kind of helpful/realistic.
And make new values.
In time, you can do this exercise many times to analyse all aspects of your life: child-rearing, work, relationships, money, where to live, food etc.
The new person, unencumbered by the cloak of the spell, continues to emerge. In this task, she finds a way of being in the world that causes love and joy.
The Magical Path of ACOA Recovery