A friend sent me a saying the other day that I really like.
It goes like this: "Addiction is the giving up of everything for one thing. Recovery is giving up one thing for everything."
This is a saying that is simple – yet very true.
For those of us in recovery, if we just look back over our shoulders we can see a trail of wreckage behind us. Maybe our families cut us loose because of our behavior. Perhaps we lost one or more jobs because of our addiction(s). Many of us even lost our freedom because of crimes we committed that were related to drugs or alcohol. There's no limit to the problems we create for ourselves when we're living in addiction.
My experience with addiction has never been different from what I described above. In my lifetime of using heroin and alcohol I never met a long-term success. Admittedly, I knew people who successfully sold drugs or committed other crimes while they were in their addictions. But eventually all of them paid some kind of a price that made their brief success a heavy price to pay.
As I described above, they either lost their families, their freedom, or their health and material possessions.
It used to puzzle me how many parents and others thought that quitting an addiction was an easy thing. Now that I've been sober for over 32 years, all of that time in the business of dealing with addicts and alcoholics in recovery, I understand why they think that way. After all we don't know much about things we don't have experience with. And most families and friends don't know what their loved ones are going through. A lot of them think that their addict or alcoholic should this be able to just say no. Kind of Nancy Reagan style. But that's not reality.
Those of us who are addicts can all remember someone pleading with us to stop. To just quit. To give it up. However, that's not the way the world of addiction works.
Non-addicts don't understand the disease that we're battling with. They're looking at our dilemma from the standpoint of logic. When were talking to them, we're talking to aliens.
We see their lips moving, but we don't understand the sounds coming from their mouths. They don't understand that our drug of choice is what puts vitality in our lives, a spring in our step, joy in our heart, and a reason to live another day. They don't realize that addiction is a very complex firing of synapses in our brains, a chemical reaction we can't live without until we get some kind of intervention. And only when we get that intervention can we understand what they're saying and even agree with most of it.
I'm here to attest that recovery is a wonderful thing. And I have a life worth living today only because I got into recovery almost 33 years ago. The sad reality is that most of us in recovery do not make it and will die of our disease. That's what the statistics say.
But the only thing those statistics tell me is that we have to try harder and become more innovative in helping our fellow addicts become active in recovery.
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