Here at the DUI Foundation, we’re excited to partner with Carrie Armstrong, with the How To Be A Sober Girl blog. You can check out her blog here. Over the next thirty days, she has committed to a How To Be A Sober Girl 30 Day Kickstart campaign and we’ll be sharing her stories right here.
And without any more time, here’s Day Twenty Five:
I say it daily: All Recovery Is The Same. Whether that recovery is from addiction, from physical illness, from emotional trauma, from a seismic life change. The tools to recover and build a new life from the mess these things leave us in are exactly the same.
I know this because I used the same tools to recover from the state I was left in after being housebound for years, as I did to get sober. It just took me a long time to work out that that’s what I did.
I also believe this because I work with people from all around the world that have unique challenges life has thrown at them that they wish to overcome. And they (and I) all face one major pitfall in our bid to recover.
We Strive For Conditional Recovery.
Conditional recovery goes something like this. “Yes absolutely, I want to be well. I want to be free. I want a full life. But I want it only in these areas…or with this person…or at this bodyweight…or in this profession…or if I can keep all the old beliefs I’m choosing to see as facts…”
Or, to put it another way: ” I would like to be recovered from addiction/illness/emotional trauma. But I don’t want to incorporate any of the things I find difficult or uncomfortable or that currently cause me anxiety. I’m not interested in changing those things. I just want to be recovered please”
The problem is that this is sobriety, (or any recovery), under very conditional circumstances. To achieve it long term means to become very overtly controlling towards other people, very covertly manipulative, or just shun people altogether and isolate ourselves.
Tonight I would like you to write down on a piece of paper the following headers:
- easy/enjoyable
- indifferent/boring/
- difficult/stressful
I want you to write down firstly the things that you do everyday. Whether it be a commute to work, meetings, traffic, the school run etc. Then the stuff you do maybe once a week, socialising, dinner parties, then all the way to once a month. Try and get as much action-oriented things in there. Try and get place names, as specific as you can get would be great. The three headings and feeling words next to them should be general enough to categorise most of the things you do.
Keep them with you because you will need them tomorrow,
Carrie x
