Recovery isn’t healing – and healing doesn’t always look like recovery
There’s a big difference between not using and being free, between managing symptoms and resolving what caused them, between changing behaviour and transforming your relationship with yourself.
Most recovery frameworks teach people how to cope:
- How to manage urges
- How to avoid relapse
- How to make it through another day
- But that’s not the same as healing
Healing is what happens when you stop asking ‘How do I stay clean?’ and start asking –
‘Who am I when I’m not coping?’
‘What have I never questioned because I was too afraid to look?’
I’ve sat with countless clients who were years into recovery…
Holding keyrings, wearing titles, doing all the ‘right’ things – and still suffering silently inside, because while they’d changed their behaviours, they’d never healed the story underneath them. (i was this person too)
According to a 2022 report by the UK Government’s Office for Health Improvement & Disparities, only 47% of people in structured addiction treatment achieved abstinence at discharge – and long-term recovery rates drop even further when trauma and somatic integration aren’t addressed.
That’s not a failure of will,
That’s a failure of approach.
Rupert Spira says:
You are not a bundle of problems to be fixed, You are the open presence in which all problems arise and dissolve
Until we understand this – recovery will continue to treat the symptoms of disconnection, not its cause.
Recovery often focuses on the outer world, while healing requires going inward, meeting what hurts, and seeing it clearly enough that you don’t need to run anymore.
One isn’t better than the other – but they are not the same
And if we confuse the two, we risk keeping people in lifelong management…
When what they truly need is the chance to uncover who they are beneath the pain, this may come about from recovery ie being sober, but without good direction its not guaranteed, and quite often healing does not look all las vegas clean time.
If you’re in this field, ask yourself –
Are we treating what’s wrong – or guiding people back to what’s right in them?
Are we keeping the recovery system alive – or helping the human being emerge?
Because healing cannot be prescribed!
But it can be uncovered,
And there is a place beyond the disease model – where people are no longer seen as broken, but as whole, waiting to be remembered.