NEEDING RECOVERY FOREVER ISN’T RECOVERY!

For much of the years I spent in fellowships, stopping recovery was unthinkable!

Because I knew what could happen, or at least I thought I did

Stop doing the things that keep you well and eventually the old you comes back

Stop going to meetings
Stop working on yourself
Stop maintaining your recovery
Become complacent
Relapse
Maybe die

So continuing to “do recovery” becomes evidence that you’re taking your recovery seriously

But eventually I had to ask myself a question I hadn’t really been willing to ask!

What exactly am I afraid would happen if I stopped?

And an even more uncomfortable one!

If I have to organise my life around preventing addiction, what do I actually mean when I say I am free from it?

To be clear –
I’m not saying people should stop going to meetings
I’m not saying they should abandon something that enriches their life
And I’m certainly not saying everyone should follow the path I eventually took

I’m questioning the assumption that needing recovery idefinitely must automatically be considered recovery

Because there is a difference between
I still do this because it adds something beautiful to my life

and
I have to keep doing this because I’m frightened of who I’ll become without it

Those can look identical from the outside

Thirty years of meetings
Thirty years of fellowship
Thirty years of practice

But internally they could represent completely different relationships with recovery

One chosen freely
The other maintained through fear

And perhaps we’ve become so accustomed to celebrating the continuation of recovery that we don’t ask the person the most obvious question

What do you believe would happen if you stopped?

Would you relapse?
Lose yourself?
Become selfish?
Return to the person you used to be?
Does something dangerous still live inside you that recovery is keeping under control?

And if the answer is yes, I’m not interested in telling you you’re wrong

I’m interested in the question that follows:

Where did you learn that about yourself?

Because perhaps the ultimate purpose of recovery isn’t to become exceptionally good at doing recovery

Perhaps it’s to reach a point where your life is no longer organised around addiction

I don’t think freedom should require us to forget what helped us

But I do think we should be allowed to ask whether we still need it

If you stopped “doing recovery” tomorrow, what are you afraid would happen?