A Visual Guide to Addiction Recovery Priorities

If you take a look a these 2 charts you can get an idea of the different emphasis that is needed at different points in your recovery.

Early in recovery you need a heavier emphasis on networking and structure.

In long term sobriety you need a push for personal growth (to overcome complacency) and a broad view of holistic health. Note that networking and any structured program still play a part but they are no longer the main focus of your efforts.

Transition

So how do we transition into long term sobriety? How and when do we start making the shift in these priorities?

The answer is that you should start pushing yourself to grow personally and start thinking about your overall health as soon as you get your bearings in early recovery. The transition will happen naturally if you are pushing yourself to grow as a person.

Personally I can look back at my own recovery and see how I was hesitating to make this transition. My sponsor was pushing me towards it and encouraging me to go back to college and go find a job and so on. At the time I did not see these things as relevant to my recovery but now I can see that they were a part of this transition.

Recovery is about living life. In early recovery we do well to focus on the basics but as we maintain sobriety it makes sense to start actually living again.

Take a look at your own recovery and see how you’ve got your own priorities lined up. If you depend on structure and networking for your sobriety, see if you can’t start pushing yourself to grow outside of the boundaries of traditional recovery. Seek holistic health and start expanding the way that you take care of yourself (start exercising, quit smoking, eat healthier, start meditating, etc.).

So many people who ultimately relapse after a year of recovery can look back and say things like “I got complacent in my recovery” and “I stopped going to meetings” or whatever. What these people fail to realize is that they were supposed to stop going to meetings, and replace it with something even greater and more powerful in their lives. For example, reaching out and helping other people in recovery, or getting involved with sponsorship, and so on.

Recovery is an evolution. You should keep growing and changing in recovery. So if you stay stuck in “newcomer techniques” then you run the risk of relapse eventually. Gotta change in order to survive. Gotta keep evolving. That is just how it goes…..

Recommended Reading

• Overcoming Addiction
• Addiction Recovery is about Discovering New Layers of Information
• 5 Ways to Supercharge Your Recovery, Avoid Relapse, and Dominate Your Addiction Over the Holiday Season
• 10 Ways to Embrace Creative Recovery and Take Your Sobriety to the Next Level
• Holistic Addiction Treatment Center

Tagged as: addiction, recovery