How can you ensure that you do not relapse on drugs or alcohol in your recovery?
Is it a question of:
* How much support you have from other people?
* How much support you have from recovery programs?
* Interaction with a sponsor and taking suggestions?
* Length of sobriety and the longer you have the more protected you are from relapse?
* Personal commitment to the goal of long term sobriety?
* External environment and what triggers you come into contact with?
* Your life circumstances and whether or not you have chaos happening in your life?
* A combination of all of these factors?
* Something else entirely?
My thought is that while all of these factors might be important or relevant, none of them are as crucial as the following single idea:
* Take positive action every single day.
That may sound a bit simplistic but you have to realize how powerful that idea can be when stretched out over a lifetime of recovery.
Continuous self improvement is very powerful. Most people, even those in recovery, do not concentrate on making positive changes every single day. But nearly everyone in recovery pushes themselves at some time or another to make big changes. Most of them do not do it consistently though.
I would challenge people to make this a continuous effort. Why?
Because IF you are continuously pushing yourself to make positive changes in your life, then the threat of relapse is greatly diminished. You can ensure that you stay clean and sober by elevating your recovery to an exercise in continuous personal growth.
Some people might protest: “What about practicing some self acceptance, and just enjoying life for a while in recovery?”
I would argue that you can still do that while having big goals about personal growth in your life. I have balance in my life today, but I keep pushing myself to grow as well.
They have a saying in recovery: “You are either working on recovery, or you are working on a relapse.” Therefore, the way to ensure that you do not relapse is to keep working on your recovery, every single day.
Recovery = personal growth.
What is important is that you stay honest with yourself. Say that you have been attending 12 step meetings, but you don’t really feel that they are helping you much anymore. They do not seem to push you to grow or challenge you in any way to be a better person. You have become stagnant.
So you decide to spend your time in other ways, and your goal is to take some new positive action that improves your life.
Now here is where it gets tricky, and many people could fool themselves:
Don’t decide to leave 12 step meetings and then just go home instead and watch television. Your goal is to take positive action, to create something positive in your life, to create positive changes.
For me, that came about in a number of different ways when I stopped going to meetings, including exercise, connecting with people in recovery online, and working hard to improve my life and my physical health.
Complacency is what threatens to kill you in long term recovery. If you become idle in your growth and basically stop learning new things or challenging yourself in any way, then that is the danger zone. This can happen both in or outside of a 12 step program. If AA is helpful in keeping you motivated to take positive action on a regular basis, then you should probably continue with it.
But if you can motivate yourself to take positive action every day without any programs, then you can still ensure success in recovery.
Each day is a new opportunity for you. Each day that you do NOT take positive action is a missed opportunity. This is how success is measured in recovery….not by programs or step work or sponsor discussions or days clean or any of that stuff, but by if you are taking positive action every day to help better your life.
Continuous self improvement is not the only way to recover, but it is the only way to ensure continuous success. Because if you are not making continuous self improvements, then you are slowly stagnating and sliding back toward relapse.
The choice is yours: sit idle and drift closer to relapse, or push yourself to make personal growth and thus ensure continuous sobriety.
Ask yourself: “Have I taken positive action today?”
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