Both Paths Hurt. Only One Leads to Peace.
The painful truth about addiction and recovery I had to learn the hard way.
Summary:
After many years suffering through addiction, relapses, and eventual recovery, I’ve learned a core truth: both continuing to use substances and committing to recovery involve suffering, but only one of them leads to peace.
If you’re struggling or early in your recovery, I wrote this for you.
The Question We’re Really Asking.
What is it we are trying to do, exactly, and why, when we decide we need to stop misusing drugs or alcohol?
For many of us, it’s simply to stop suffering as much. Often, there comes a point in addiction when the substances are taking more from us than they are giving and increasing pain is the result.
Maybe we want to stop using so we can regain peace of mind or rebuild relationships. Maybe we feel ashamed and are watching our standards slip and then slip further.
But whatever the reasons are for you, if you are considering stopping using substances, or currently early in recovery, there’s a truth you will need to carry the whole way.
Path One: Continuing Use
In path one, you simply continue to use drugs or alcohol. The ongoing use may be affecting you in a number of ways already:
- Mental health declining
- Finances worsening
- Difficulties in your job and with colleagues
- Relationships failing
- The people that care about you losing trust and respect
- Your sense of self worth in the toilet
- Growing sense of ahame and hopelessness
- Fear
As time goes by, with addiction unchecked, our life usually goes downhill. I watched my own life disintegrate. Marriage smashed. Finances wrecked. Walked away from a long term job. My mental health hit the lowest point I’d ever known. Literally broken.
Sometimes our downfall is gradual but it can also escalate very quickly, until we’re stood in the wreckage of our lives wondering just how it happened.
Path one is the path of increasing suffering.
Path Two: Recovery
In path two, we commit to stopping using substances and we get the appropriate support to help us do so. Such support might include therapy, professional drug and alcohol services and/or recovery groups in the community. Some of us won’t get such support until we have failed to stop, by using our own willpower, over and over again. And again.
Eventually, we realise we do need help, that we can’t do it on our own, and so we begin a journey to come to terms with ourselves and our situation. With our actions. Feelings. The things we have lost. Whether we have hurt others. Or been hurt by them.
Now, here’s my point.
Path two also has suffering.
It also has sadness and fear.
There’s no way around this.
But…it is the path of decreasing suffering.
To get well and, importantly, stay well long term, we must be prepared to grit our teeth at points and hold our head high in the midst of uncertainty and pain. We might need to face things we’ve been avoiding, and interact with people again when we’d rather hide away.
Many The Truth About RecoveryThe Truth About Recovery.
Here’s the truth, best I understand it. Unless we are prepared to do the work on our recovery, the risk that we will return to a familiar pain remains very high.
You have two paths to choose from and both contain suffering.
Path one = keep using = suffering increasing.
Path two = recovery = still suffering but it’s decreasing.
Please keep this in mind, especially when you are having a challenging day. Because such days are part of the human condition, and must be faced head on with as much gentleness and dignity as we possibly can, if we wish to not return to the use of substances and the shit show that comes with it. Those hard days are markers on the path to increased inner freedom and joy. They’re worth it, trust me.
Each rough day you get through in recovery, is a day you had to get through.
Simply said, there is no path away from addiction and into freedom that doesn’t involve hard moments.
What Awaits on the Other Side
What I couldn’t see when deep in addiction, was the blessings that awaited me: a dear friend of mine calls recovery a banquet. It took me a while, but I understand him now. Mornings without shame, relationships built on trust rather than lies, and a growing sense of self-worth that comes from facing life on life’s terms. Everyday.
Almost eight years into recovery, I experience joy again in simple pleasures I had forgotten existed. The path is still challenging some days, but the suffering continues to decrease while meaning and connection grow.
Let that sink in.
Then choose your path and walk it like your life depends on it.
Because it does.
~ Written by a regular guy who’s gone through it and came out the other side.
DMB
Kindness Blog 