For the Addicted City: The Great Secret to Recovery from Addictions
By rosslaird on June 23, 2004 - 4:32pm
For those addicts genuinely seeking a resolution to their struggle, I’ll tell you the great secret up front: find something else to be addicted to, something healthier. That’s all. Addiction is not a light switch, on or off; it’s a way of being in the world, a part of who you are, a kind of hunger that expresses itself in many ways. What you’ve found are all the ways in which this trait sidelines your life. But that’s just its shadow. Find the other side of it. Successfully recovered addicts find new obsessions: spirituality or exercise or meditation or kayaking or whatever. Find something to love that gives you the same hit as the juice. Eventually it will give you a better hit. You’ll find it, if only you give yourself the chance.
That’s not all, of course.
Finding a substitute avocation is only one part of the long and often difficult process of untangling the roots of addiction, which lie farther back in people’s lives than they realize or care to admit. There’s the slow rebuilding of damaged or shattered relationships, the restoration of physical health, the work of insight and planning and new directions. These and the other many steps require between three and five years of consistent and dedicated attention.
The medical and recovery communities typically speak in terms of months, because their resources are limited and their incentive, in a highly competitive market, is to give clients and their families immediate and tangible hope. But if you ask the clients, the ones who’ve managed to make it far enough to reconstruct the totality of their lives, they will tell you that the toughest work begins long after the substance (or the addictive behavior, in the case of gambling and other similar dependencies) is discontinued.
The real work comes after the relapses — and almost everyone goes through a series of these — after the final surrender to assistance, after detox and treatment and whatever type of recovery you choose. The most difficult part of recovery is after the drama, when finally you emerge blinking into the sunlight, duffel bag in hand, without a clear sense of your own confidence, dogged by a sense of how much of your life was occupied in running and hiding. Feelings of loss and hope and freedom all wrapped up together. But if you get this far, you’re already most of the way home, though the actual homecoming — to yourself — is always the great and final challenge.
And not only for you, the addict. This homecoming is the core of all human development. Welcome yourself to it. And if it helps, recognize that when you stand on the street at the end of your initial treatment or recovery — clean, sober, free of the monkey — you’ve already made it farther than most addicts will. Then find someone to whom you can tell your story.
Don’t bury the wound. Instead, acknowledge it as your guide, as an experience that has stripped you bare and shown you the hard, irascible truth of your life. Inside the wound is your deepest wisdom. You’ve seen the shadow of it. Your task now is to discover its illumination.
