The last and final stage of addiction recovery (according to me!) is living in long term sobriety.
At this point you only have one perpetual challenge that will never really end: avoid relapse by avoiding complacency.
If you happen to ?let your guard down? in recovery then you run the risk of relapse.
How to get lazy and cocky in long term recovery
It is easy to become lazy, cocky, and complacent in long term recovery. In fact it will happen pretty much automatically if you do not actively fight against it.
For example, one common scenario is for people who are used to attending 12 step meetings in order to recover will fall into a long pattern of doing basically nothing other than attending meetings.
This is not generally a problem in itself, the problem comes in when they start to rely on the daily meeting and the venting session to keep them clean and sober, instead of pursuing personal growth outside of the meetings. In AA language we would say that such people need to get active in their recovery and ?work the steps in their daily life? rather than just coming to meetings every day and preaching about how to stay sober.
Recovery is about living, after all.
Of course you do not have to be in AA or a twelve step program in order to become lazy, cocky, or complacent. I know of many people who were working alternative programs of recovery (and also those who claimed that they needed no structured program at all) who have relapsed due to complacency.
One of the problems with complacency is that it is very easy to see it in retrospect, but it is almost impossible to identify it when it slowly creeps into your life.
Think about this carefully for a moment. Complacency is easy to see when you look back on it, but almost impossible to detect while moving forward in life.
Therefore there is only one way to defeat complacency in long term sobriety:
You must be proactive about it.
You have to know going into your long term sobriety journey that you are going to have a long term battle with complacency.
The only way to overcome complacency is to realize that the threat is always there and that it will be a constant battle.
If you try to deny that complacency is a threat to you or that your ordinary routine in recovery (such as daily meetings) is enough to overcome complacency, then this is probably just fear based thinking and you might do well to expand your idea of personal growth.
So in order to do well in long term recovery we have to realize:
* That the threat of complacency exists and will never go away entirely.
* That in order to deal with this threat we have to be proactive about it and have an awareness of complacency.
* That the solution to being lazy in recovery is to challenge ourselves to take positive action, grow, or become a better person.
The line between acceptance and personal growth
One of the ways that people get lazy in recovery and become complacent is through the use of ?acceptance.?
Don?t like something about yourself? Just accept it! After all, isn?t that the answer to all of your problems today?
If you accept something then you do not have to take action and deal with it. If you accept something then you do not have to put energy, thought, and creative effort into solving the problem.
They actually teach this as a serenity-enhancing technique for recovery, but obviously there is huge potential for misuse.
The serenity prayer is an attempt to guide us with ?the wisdom to know the difference? between that which we should change and that which we should accept.
People become complacent when they are accepting everything and changing nothing.
Therefore one of the key strategies in long term sobriety is to be hyper sensitive to any time you are using the idea of ?acceptance? to justify something in your life. In many cases, there may be an opportunity for growth that you are sweeping under the rug due to the idea of ?acceptance.?
In long term recovery I think it is helpful to ask yourself at regular intervals: ?How am I challenging myself lately??
If you have not done anything to challenge yourself in a while then it would be a good thing if this makes you restless. A good strategy for long term recovery is to continuously revisit the idea of how you might make positive changes in order to become a better person. This will be challenging, and that is the whole point. If you are not pushing yourself to grow then you run the risk of becoming complacent.
The backdrop of AA does not necessarily influence the amount that you challenge yourself to grow. Being in AA may be a benefit or it might be holding you back. Obviously it is all in how you approach things and what you do with your life. Some people do get stuck in AA and they just show up to meetings every day and they are not challenging themselves to grow in any way. Other people who are very active in AA and they are working with newcomers all the time, they are actually challenging themselves and they are on a path of personal growth. The AA program itself is actually somewhat nuetral in all this; if you want to pursue personal growth then you can certainly do so in or out of AA.
Likewise, if you want to coast through recovery and run the risk of becoming complacent, it is very easy to do that within the AA program (or outside of it).
How to challenge yourself in the right ways in long term recovery
Two questions come to mind which are really pretty much the same question if you boil them all the way down:
* How can I be a better person?
* How can I be a healthier person?
And then you might also add:
* How can I use my unique gifts to best help others?
If you never ventured outside of those three questions I think you would still do quite well in recovery.
Pretty much all of the gains and benefits that I have received in my life would fit under those three questions.
It all starts with your decision to be clean and sober. This is your baseline for recovery and this is your starting point that all future growth must be based on. The obvious reason for this is because your continued success in recovery depends on sustained sobriety. If you drink or use drugs, all other forms of growth and progress in your life are generally compromised quite a bit (such as relationships, finances, spiritual growth, etc?.it all goes down the toilet when you relapse).
So your decision to be clean and sober is the starting point, and ultimately this is a decision for greater health. You realize that addiction is killing you and robbing you of happiness and of a better life, so you make the decision to overcome your addiction and seek better health.
Recovery is a decision to pursue a healthier ?you.?
So it should follow quite naturally that anything in recovery that can significantly increase your health is going to be seen as beneficial to your recovery journey.
For example, consider the recovering alcoholic who quits smoking and starts exercising. These are some excellent decisions that greatly enhance this person?s health in recovery. Not only that, but both of those decisions help support the overall recovery plan, and help increase the chances of continued abstinence.
The point though is that you should think in terms of ?greater health? if you are looking for ways in which you might grow in your recovery.
Personal growth as relapse prevention
What happens when you stop making positive changes in recovery?
You relapse.
Plain and simple. They harp on this concept in traditional recovery all of the time, because it is true:
?If you are not working on recovery, you are working on a relapse.?
Personal growth IS recovery.
So the key is to actively pursue personal growth. You have to actively plan to make positive changes in your life.
This is the key to long term relapse prevention. People who have relapsed in long term sobriety did so because they got lazy. They stopped challenging themselves. They stopped growing. And so they got bored and restless and eventually decided to self medicate.
Some people confuse this issue and they say ?So and so stopped going to meetings, that is why the relapsed.?
No, the reason that they relapsed is because they got lazy and they stopped pushing themselves to make positive changes. Quitting their meetings was not the real issue, their lack of personal growth was the real issue.
People can overcome complacency and stay clean and sober both with and without AA meetings. Leaving the meetings may be a convenient excuse for some people, but it is not the real reason that they relapse. They relapse because they are bored with recovery and they are not challenging themselves to grow and so they get bored, listless, frustrated, and irritable.
You might think of personal growth in recovery as ?building a wall around relapse.? The more you engage in positive changes in your life, the more protected you become from relapse. If you stop making positive changes altogether, though, eventually the wall will break down and weaken. Recovery is a lifetime job, and you can never stop working on it entirely. This is why continuous personal growth is so important. You have to keep building the wall, over and over again, and that requires continuous effort.
Another way to think about it is that you must continuously re-invent yourself in recovery. This has to happen if you want to remain clean and sober because your default way of being is to self medicate with drugs and alcohol. If you stop the process of constantly reinventing yourself in recovery then you will slowly revert to ?the old you,? the one who self medicated with drugs or alcohol. So in this process you are constantly asking yourself in recovery ?How can I make positive changes in my life? What can I do that will improve myself as a person?? And so on.
Working with others in recovery as relapse prevention
One of the best things that you can do for long term recovery and relapse prevention is in working with other recovering alcoholics and addicts. Connecting with them in some way is a powerful form of relapse prevention.
This is one thing that traditional recovery programs definitely get right. Helping others in recovery is a powerful form of preventing relapse in your own life.
That said, you can easily get burned out after a while, depending on how you go about helping others. I know many people who were involved in 12 step sponsorship who eventually burned out on it. I used to chair H&I meetings (?hospitals and institutions?), but after a few years I moved on to other things. Obviously I connect with a lot of people in recovery through the web as well.
Do you need a formal program of recovery (such as AA) in order to overcome complacency in the long run?
In my experience, working with others in recovery is far more important than long term involvement in AA or NA.
Although for most people those two things are likely to overlap. The thing is that they do not necessarily have to overlap (as most people in AA or NA would lead you to believe).
I have achieved much meaningful recovery outside of those formal programs by focusing on personal growth in my life, some of which has led me to interact and work with others in recovery. Much of what I do revolves around recovery concepts and ideas and interacting with others, though I do not do so through any sort of formal program.
How you find such a balance in your own life is up to you. I know several people in long term recovery who do not depend on daily meetings any more to keep them clean and sober. Many of them started out that way but they have drifted away from the meetings and found other ways to make positive changes in their lives.
The cycle of growth and reflection that overcomes complacency
If there is one thing I have found in long term sobriety it is that people who stay clean and sober in the long run never stop growing and challenging themselves.
There is this rhythm, this cycle of growth and reflection that you can fall into that is ?the right place to be and the right way to live,? in my opinion.
You could describe it as:
Attempt at personal growth, set a specific goal, push to achieve that goal, pause and reflect on progress made, lock in the success of that goal, then evaluate your next possible goal to take on.
So it is not just a blind push to make personal growth. Instead you take time to pause, reflect, and evaluate the growth that you have made. This is important because then you can set yourself up for success in the future by taking on new challenges that will be of more benefit to you.
One of the things that I found to be extremely important in my early recovery was the idea of making ?high impact positive changes.?
All efforts and attempts at personal growth took a lot of effort. If I wanted to try to accomplish something or change one of my habits, I knew that it would take a great deal of effort in order to do so. With so many different possible changes and choices to make, I did not want to put a lot of time and effort into something that was only marginally helpful to my overall life. I wanted to find the changes in my life that would give me the most ?bang for the buck? in terms of my effort that I put in.
So I started to explore those possible changes so that I could find the path in my life that would be the most rewarding.
This took some experimentation because I did not know what I was doing at first. Furthermore, I did not have a key piece of knowledge at the time which I later learned over the next five to ten years and can now share with you, and that is this:
* Seek to eliminate the negative stuff from your life FIRST, before pursuing your dreams.
Seems a bit counter-intuitive, right? It is. So you have to think about this carefully.
What you need to do in your recovery journey is to seek to eliminate all of the negative stuff from your life as your first priority.
So after you get clean and sober and you have established a baseline of recovery, you can start to seek out new positive changes for your recovery. This is the path of personal growth, this is the journey that you must take in order to keep re-inventing yourself to avoid relapse.
If you fail to re-invent yourself over and over again in recovery, if you fail to keep re-discovering yourself and learning new things in your journey, then you run the risk of possibly relapsing at some point. Your old drug of choice will always be there to tempt you, to be familiar to you and to lure you and comfort you. It will always be an appealing option and so you have this battle in recovery to create enough action and inertia to overcome that temptation.
The way to ?re-invent? yourself is to master your habits, make positive changes, and remove all of the garbage from your life. When you strip away all of the garbage you are left with a happy person in recovery. You do not need to do anything special in order to experience joy in recovery?you just have to get rid of the garbage. When you get rid of bad habits, bad behaviors, or overcome negative thought patterns, this is like a ?reinvention? of yourself. The old ?you? has been made new again. This is how growth really is measured in recovery, by how much of the negative you can successfully strip away, which will reveal this joyful soul underneath it all.
The way to do this most efficiently is to make high impact changes first, and then chase your dreams later on. Yes, you can still do both. But recovery is about repair first and foremost. My highest impact change was to get clean and sober. After I did that, I stopped for a while to get my bearings, lock in the positive change (learn how to live sober) and then I started to seek out my next high impact change.
It turned out that for me, my next highest impact positive change was to eliminate cigarettes. This took me a few years to master but once I did it the reward was incredible. This was a new level of freedom and I was overjoyed to have achieved it.
Later on I found more freedom and rediscovered myself anew when I became dedicate to regular exercise. This was a healthy move that I never would have thought could have such a positive impact on me. Luckily it was suggested to me by others enough that I eventually took the advice and started exercising.
Thus you should seek to find this cycle of growth and reflection yourself, so that you are always looking forward to that next potential change in your life, that next challenge, that next positive transformation. Thus you can always be reinventing yourself in recovery and be protected from the threat of relapse.
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