Healing hurts

No one ever tells you how much healing hurts. No one tells you that on your journey, you will have to open up old wounds and address new ones. No one tells you about the shame of knowing better, but still being stuck in old routines. The shame and disgust you feel because you feel like you are failing yourself. 

A perfect example of the difficult road to healing is the road to recovery from addiction. It’s not a simple straightforward process where you just quit whatever or whoever your substance of choice was. Recovery isn’t a linear process. Relapsing is part of the process and may happen multiple times. When it does happen, it often doesn’t feel as euphoric as it did back then. The substance is now tainted, laced with shame and disgust. Yet you will still use it. That’s when it hurts the most, when you are most likely to give up. It isn’t the substance that breaks your spirit; it’s the shame and self-loathing that creeps up on you and pulls you into darkness. That’s the unseen demon that causes the most damage. 

A relapse isn’t the end of the world. A relapse doesn’t undo the work you’ve done on your recovery, and coming up short is not a total failure. Everything has ups and downs, and relapse is part of the downs of recovery. If you were taking dishes from the dining room to the kitchen and you dropped some cutlery along the way, you wouldn’t throw the rest of the dishes onto the floor because you dropped a spoon, and neither would you have to go back to the dining room and start all over again simply because you dropped the something on the way. You would stop, pick up the cutlery and keep on walking to the kitchen. And if it happens that you dropped something again 5 steps later, you would pick it up again and continue. And that’s all there is to it, pick yourself up again and continue. Lord knows how much I hate Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) and his speeches but he was right when he said that “it’s not about how hard you can hit, but how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward…” Because I promise that life will swing at you and the harder you try the harder it seems to swing. 

So when your heart feels heavy after a therapy session or an uncomfortable conversation with those in your life, keep on swinging. Healing is an uphill battle that never truly ends, but it’s a fight worth fighting, and never let a knockdown be a knockout.

When you catch yourself with a joint smoking away a particularly terrible day, or when the bottle finally seduces you after months of it whispering sweet nothings and fond memories in your ear; wake up the next day and pick up where you left off. Acknowledge the relapse, if you don’t want to talk about then write it down. Don’t try to hide it or gloss over it, because it’s in secrecy that our demons grow, and on our shame that they feed. 


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