Recovery from addiction is an ongoing process that, theoretically, never ends, but it is ordinarily recommend that it be approached incrementally, one-day-at-a- time. Indeed, smaller time increments are sometimes required - one-hour-at-a-time, etc.
While this advent may be flourishing in reducing the despair caused by viewing the process as a lifelong and arduous undertaking, there needs to be elements of long-term, strategic and anticipatory mental in recovery.
Addiction In Drugs
This does not conflict with the one-day-at-a-time model, but as with any comprehensive plan of action, adds the element of directed goal-seeking and prospect of personal gain to the equation.
Active behavior in addiction is heavily influenced by short-term thinking. Short-term, assuredly often immediate, goals are set and though they might be pursued vigorously, longer term consequences are often ignored. At the same time, dominant short term-thinking "crowds out" notice of longer term rewards that would accrue from productive behaviors.
Experience has shown that an addict will take greatest steps to secure and insure the availability of drugs. This may and often does comprise manipulation, deceit, robbery and other criminal acts, among others. Addicts are often willing to cut lifestyle levels, cut important and cherished relationships, and experience physical hardships in order to secure the drug of choice. Though not a choice, severe criminal punishments are often a consequence of such a mode of thinking.
We often hear about addicts who place themselves in danger trying to purchase drugs or who drive while intoxicated, knowing that the penalties for this behavior are severe and costly. Again, the perceived gain from doing this is a short-term and fleeting one.
In early rescue the addict is still preoccupied with short-term goal setting. That is, he is trying to just stay sober for today. He uses tools such as avoiding those people, places, or things that are related with past drug use. He comes to accept his inability to control drug use and his powerlessness over that use, as stated so clearly in the first of the Alcoholics Anonymous' twelve steps. Triggers are identified and whether avoided or confronted, with the emphasis placed on the former.
What we see happening in this early, and very necessary, phase of recovery, is a particular extraction of elements that had been related with the addict's drug use, together with the extraction of the drug use itself. In the process, the addict often must take off from his life friends, living accommodations, relaxation activities, jobs, and even family.
Given the fact that the addict in early rescue is assuredly in a life or death situation, greatest measures are indicated and such dramatic life changes are often justified and necessary.
As important as these changes are, and role they play in increasing the addict's opportunity of flourishing rescue notwithstanding, they all describe the extraction of something from the addict's life and often are perceived by the addict as a loss. These losses can describe a severe emotional trauma that can assuredly conduce to relapse. Consider the following lifestyle adjustments that an addict may face:
Loss of the relieve and avoidance in case,granted by drug use
Loss of friendships, often the only friendships an addict has
Loss of familial relationships
Loss of jobs not conducive to recovery
Loss of behavioral supports such as rituals related with drug use
Loss of living arrangements posing a threat to recovery
We can see that early rescue can be dominated by losses to an addict. These losses describe much of what constituted the addict's life prior to recovery. This creates a vacuum in the emotional and behavioral environment of the recovering addict's life. The adage that "nature abhors a vacuum" is never truer than here.
To compound the problem, early rescue provides one very important and risky thing: free time. All of the time an addict had spent planning, manipulating, acquiring, and using drugs is now open. While many in Aa recommend that an addict fill much of this time with meetings, commitments, and sober maintain development, and that may be a good advent initially, it still addresses only short-term issues. It focuses on the mechanics of staying sober now and while providing a structural environment supportive of recovery.
While this tactical advent to rescue serves an important purpose I think it is leading that a strategic advent be developed concomitantly. It is this advent that will contribute the addicts with the long-term foresight of life that it is an important part of the human spirit.
It serves no purpose to study how we get someplace if we don't know where we're going. It is this discovery of where we want to be and what we want to be that is the focus here. These considerations are taken, of course, in light of the day-to-day tactical considerations of our rescue program. This offers us an opportunity to reevaluate, indeed, to reinvent our lives in a new way, in a way that allows for if not requires a sober and sane lifestyle.
saving From Alcohol and Drug Addiction - A Strategic advent
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