There’s No Vacation from Recovery

Recovery is never short-term. There is no vacation from recovery. It’s a minute by minute, day by day, lifetime process. If we continually think of addiction as an emotional disease, we can better monitor our recovery.

Addiction is all about emotional medicating. We can be sailing along through our day and all is good. Then suddenly someone makes a comment that hits on an old unhealed emotional wound from childhood, and we nosedive into being a shamefaced five year old. The feelings we experience seem unbearable so we order a Martini, or we make a quick stop by the bakery, or we head to the shopping mall or casino, or we return to work and drown the pain in busyness.

Prior to recovery, we didn’t understand that there were certain emotional triggers that sent us into addictive acting-out. Now that we know, we have to practice vigilant awareness. It helps by being able to identify our discomfort.

First off, we need to acknowledge that the discomfort is emotional. Second we need to try and identify the feeling. Is it shame? Guilt? Anxiety? Worthlessness? Then we need to realize that we need to accept the feeling and allow it to be present. It needs to be felt and released. So we need to allow it to simply be, but we don’t need to be controlled by it in any way.

Addictive acting-out is the primary way we have allowed these old unhealed feelings to control us. It’s a quick fix, but it never lasts. Instead of acting-out, we can allow the feeling to exist knowing that it’s just a feeling and we don’t have to give our power away to it. Eventually, it will wear itself out and be gone for good.

And we will have conquered it by allowing it to be present—by simply accepting it no matter how uncomfortable it is. In the end, we will be the victor over that feeling, instead of being the victim of it.