Baby Step Your Way to a Meeting!

One of the most frustrating things about recovery is that it happens through baby steps. The modern world is all about having what we want NOW. Life moves as fast as light. We don’t want to wait for anything—much less happiness.

But recovery is a lifetime process. It’s about taking those little steps toward mental and emotional sanity—and then falling hard on your ass. It’s about picking yourself up, saying “It’s OK” and getting to a support group meeting.

Meetings provide us with the ability to acknowledge that we’ve made progress and to be happy about it. They also provide us with a means of expressing our frustrations with the mistakes we are still making. And they provide us with a means of owning and safely releasing the feelings that sometimes overwhelm us.

Experiences and feelings intertwine between members of support groups. As they do, we know that we aren’t alone and that we aren’t “freaks” because of our feelings or the mistakes that we have made.

As a result, a sense of belonging develops between members of support groups who attend meetings on a regular basis. And attending meetings on a regular basis is ESSENTIAL to recovery.

I think this is where many people who enter recovery make a huge mistake. They aren’t willing to invest the time and effort into helping themselves by finding a meeting they feel comfortable in and committing themselves to attending it on a regular basis.

Instead, they opt to attend lackadaisically, maybe when they are really feeling desperate, and so they never really jell with the group. They then feel like outsiders and they use this as an excuse to stop attending meetings—and to stop helping themselves. They cop-out on recovery.

Getting to meetings on a regular basis is a HUGE baby step. It proclaims to God and to the entire world that you believe you are “good enough” and that you are worth the effort. It also allows you to bond with people who can help you to grow ever stronger in your recovery.

So if you’re attending support group meetings lackadaisically, please stop. To continue to do so is to effectively give up on yourself, If you can dedicate hour after hour each week to the television set, or to shopping or to caretaking someone, then you can definitely find an hour or two each week to attend a meeting. Compulsively watching TV, shopping or caretaking have never benefited anyone. Attending meetings does.

Attending meetings is life-changing in all of the right ways.