Recovery is not a linear process.

It is important to be aware of what we can expect in recovery.

If we are not mentally prepared of the rocky ride of breaking an addiction, it is easy to get stuck in black and white thinking and give up. We will do this because our default mode of thinking is one of the addict.

This means that we often struggle with the gray zone. This is the area where change happens: at the border of our comfort zone. Not inside it, yet not outside it.

The problem arises when we don't follow the path of HOW WE THINK recovery should be - then, we feel like a failure. We will easily give up, because we feel that we are not "doing it perfect".

Whenever we run from something, sooner or later it will catch back up with us. In recovery the key take-away lesson should be to dive into the pain we encounter so that we can decode the language of it - not suppress it in order to take the straight… — Whenever we run from something, sooner or later it will catch back up with us. In recovery the key take-away lesson should be to dive into the pain we encounter so that we can decode the language of it - not suppress it in order to take the straight way out of addiction. The perfect path out of addiction is the rocky path.

Fact is, the real measure of recovery is how we view the obstacle - every set-back is a learning opportunity to dive deeper into the why's of what is driving our addiction.

If we push our rocky parts of recovery off as an annoyance; something that we just need to move past, they will build up inside is. Because we are repressing what is is that we need to release and learn from. Nothing ever just vanishes into think air without our acceptance of what the learning objective is from it.

This is what makes the difference between the relapsed addict and the recovered addict:

Can you ACCEPT the messy part?
Have you committed to take one lesson away from each set back or struggle you encounter during your recovery?
Can you gradually be more present in the moment, rather than focusing on the future? Being in a state of mental escapism only leads to us suppressing our body intuition in the now.

We need our body intelligence and intuition in order to decode the language of our self-destructive behaviour and make for a permanent change in the future. Otherwise we allow our past to become our future.

To avoid this, we must accept, embrace and let go of every pain that we encounter during the messy journey that is recovery.

The messy journey is the perfect journey.