Achieving Healthy Recovery: We Keep What We Have By Giving it Away
This blog entry completes a series, “Seven Basic Essentials of our Recovery” so to quickly review:
To engage in a truly healthy, lasting and useful recovery we have to first and repeatedly be willing to do whatever it takes
Adding to our willingness is learning about how we got here, our particular challenges and how addiction and recovery work
To our learning we begin and continue to change patterns of our behaviors.
Another essential is cultivating our spirituality, an admittedly huge and challenging topic for many of us
We develop a culture of support because we’re wired for connection and none of us can recover well on our own
We evaluate our need for professional help and if indicated, we pursue it
And…
7. To achieve healthy recovery, as we learn these—and other—principles and practices of recovery, we continue this way of living and we share what we’ve learned with others; we can keep only what we give away
Healthy Recovery and the Twelfth Step
The last of the Twelve Steps reads this way for those of us struggling with compulsive sexual behavior: “Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other addicts, and to practice these principles in all areas of our lives.”
The two admonitions here are to carry the message of recovery to others who need this message and to practice the principles we have learned in every area of our lives, not just our sexual behaviors. Following these two prescriptions are the best way to pursue healthy, long-lasting recovery.
Paraphrasing the Big Book of AA, our experience repeatedly shows that assisting others by sharing and showing the way of recovery helps us with our own sobriety like little else.
I’ve seen this at work in my own recovery. Sharing life with others, reaching out and being available gets me out of my own head and the circuitous thinking I so often fall into. When I show others grace and share with them the truth that has been helpful to me, my own soul opens to receiving truth and grace in fresh and newly applicable ways.
Check Our Motives
It is important that we check our motives here. It’s possible to think I’m caring for others when I actually have a hidden motive, hidden even to me.
Do I need someone else to respond to me so I’ll feel better? Am I offering acceptance or friendship as an attempt to deal with my own loneliness? Do I need to be needed?
In short, is my motivation to give away to someone else what’s been helpful to me, or am I using the relationship for a different, self-serving and unhealthy motive?
Sometimes it’s not clear, what our motivation is. What’s important is to be aware, be questioning and be open. This kind of self-examination is useful to our own growth in self-understanding and healthy caring.
Two-step Recovery
One of the phenomena of the recovery movement is that of two-stepping, hitting Steps One and Twelve and sort of skipping through the rest. Step One can be summarized as recognizing we have a problem that we have no control over (compulsive sexuality) and that it has become unmanageable (consequences).
We are grateful to finally understand the nature of our problem (“I’m allergic to sexual cravings!”) and discover we belong to a tribe with the same vulnerability. We’ve found our people, a place where we’re accepted, where we belong. There’s tremendous relief and shame-reduction with that and it’s as valid as it is important.
But some of us have a tendency to skip though the work of the program to a sort of relief, delight or escape in Step Twelve, taking the message to others.
We need to do the work first (Steps two through nine), and keep doing the work of maintenance (ten and eleven) before moving into twelve.
We are most useful when we are working our own program and then genuinely connecting with others.
What Principles Do We Practice?
The basic recovery principles of the Twelve Step movement are:
Surrender
Trust
Honesty
Willingness
Accountability
Service
This list makes a great outline for periodic review of our behavior in every important relationship and every area of our lives.
Prudent Caution is Wise Here
In healthy recovery, we do need to be careful. There was a certain carelessness in our compulsive behavior. And talking too openly about our recovery can inadvertently create the same exciting feelings. Appropriate sharing isn’t about excitement. It’s about service.
The goal of healthy recovery is a useful, increasingly calm and love-filled life. Emotions managed, parts and pieces reconciling, thoughts harnessed and integrated.
In recovering from compulsive sexual behavior and the things that caused it, we need to exercise cautious wisdom in whom we speak with and what we say.
For almost all of us, this means sharing with folks who are newcomers or folks new to us whom we meet in our recovery communities. Some of us, like me, are quasi-public figures and our stories are known. We can be more open.
But our society has a lot of issues around sexual behaviors and folks can be terribly judgmental. And once you’ve let something out, you’ll never get it back. So be careful.
Living the Life You Want
Sustaining our healthy recovery is how we change the dynamics we inherited and discovered, how we live a different way, how we make our little part of the world a better place, how we hand off to those coming after us something worth having.
What is it you can do today to take your next steps in living the life you want? tcr