The great news is that We Do Recover!
As the bar chart above shows, get to 3 years and the chances of long term recovery are very high indeed.
Treatment and Recovery
Just Click here for various Blogs on Recovery
A selection of blogs on the recovery process:-
Early Recovery
The most important period in recovery can often be these early days of recovery when the brain is full of stress and intrusive thoughts about drinking or re-using and the heart distress.
We hope the blogs linked below will help you in what areas may challenge you most and perhaps how to cope with these. Getting over the first, at times difficult, obstacles of recovery.
Don’t fight those intrusive thoughts about alcohol or drugs!
Don’t worry if you still have experience urges!
“Drinking Dreams” reflect Motivation to Recover?
How Do Recovering Alcoholics Appraise their Alcohol-Related Thoughts?
Shame about the past related to not recovering in the present?
Here is a series of short videos which look at the early days of recovery and offer some tips on how to survive them!
These videos were made by SAMSHA – well worth a look, some of the advice and suggestions offered I can completely relate to in relation to my own recovery, especially in the, at times torturous, frustrating, confusing early days.
The videos specifically mention the Matrix Model of treatment but I found that the descriptions of early recovery are practically applicable to someone like me who recovered via Twelve Step Facilitation Treatment and via 12 step groups.
We are recovering alcoholics and addicts no matter what treatment we seek.
We are learning a new way of life which can be difficult but there is so much help out there in recovery communities, so many people who have been through what you are going through. If you let them they can guide you and help you. Your are no longer alone. We in recovery want nothing more than to help you recover. The unconditional love in recovery is rarely seen to the same extent any where else, in my experience.
Remember it will get better and continue to get better, that has been my experience. We do Recover! You can recover too.
Roadmap for Recovery (Part 1) Recovery Begins With Withdrawal
Part 2 – Importance of Scheduling your day.
Part 3 – Early Abstinence
Part 4 – Addressing Triggers
Part 5 – Protracted Abstinence –
Part 6 – Adjustment and Resolution –
12 Step Recovery
How The Alcoholics Anonymous’ 12 Step Program of Recovery Helps with Emotional Dysregulation.
Maintaining Emotional Sobriety (and sanity) via the steps 10-12.
Why a “Spiritual Solution” to a Neurobiological Disease?
The Stories They Tell in AA – Transformation through AA Narratives.
Looking Inside 12 Step Recovery
How Religious are 12 Step Groups?
The Benefits of Helping Others
Carrying this Message to the Wider World?
Effectiveness of 12 Step Recovery
Participation in Treatment and Alcoholics Anonymous – a study of AA effectiveness.
Alcoholics Anonymous Effectiveness: Faith Meets Science
Measuring the “psychic change”?
AA helps to reduce impulsivity
Reducing Impulsivity via 12 Step Mutual Aid Group Affiliation
Does science show what 12 steps know?
Social Anxiety and Peer Helping in Adolescent Addiction Treatment
Alcoholics Anonymous Effectiveness: Faith Meets Science
AA linked to Higher Rates of Continuous Abstinence/Recovery.
Ernie Kurtz on the History of AA, Spirituality, Shame, and Storytelling ~ with William White.
A Brief History of Treating Addiction as an Emotional Processing Disorder
Prayer and Meditation
How meditation improves emotional processing and regulation
Getting out of “self” via Prayer and meditation
Differential recovery of cognitive control over emotional regulation and impulsivity.
Mindfulness training targets neurocognitive mechanisms of addiction (Part 1).
Mindfulness training targets neurocognitive mechanisms of addiction (Part 2).
Mindfulness training targets neurocognitive mechanisms of addiction (Part 3).
Other
We do Recover – the relationship between the duration of abstinence and other aspects of recovery.
The Relationship between Motivation to Change and Alcoholic Problem Severity.
Acceptance is the Key – Using Acceptance-Based Mindfulness to Promote Emotional Regulation
From Active to Recovering Alcoholic – The Role of Self Schema in Recovery
Reconstructing the Self in Recovery
Recovery as a process of social identity transition
Differential recovery of cognitive control over emotional regulation and impulsivity.
Labeling Negative Emotions Lessens Their Intensity
Demonstrating Neouroplasticity in Short-Term versus Long-Term Abstinent Alcoholics
Prolonged Abstinence and Changes in Alcoholic Personality?
Recovering Cognitive Control Over Emotions In Recovery.
Self Compassion Eases the Distress at the Heart of Addiction
Healing the Hurt That Can Drive Addiction
Treating Addiction as Attachment Disorder
Treatment needs to allow addicted clients to “earn Attachment”
Issues in the Treatment of Addiction
Medication Assisted Treatment
Getting free from the chemical straight jacket – Part 1
Getting free from the chemical straight jacket- Part 2
Recovery
Recovery Surveys
Life In Recovery – Australia, USA and the UK
Life In Recovery – Australia (Part 2)
What’s life in recovery like in the UK?
For anyone interested in recovery and the history of recovery movement William White is probably the best place to start.
Here is a series of brief videos describing recovery up until the recent creation of the new recovery movement which has seen recovering people, come out of the closest so to speak, to publicly reveal their identities as recovering people in the hope it not only reduces stigma around suffering from this chronic illness but to help encourage many more people enter treatment and recovery groups.
Related blogs:-
What does Recovery mean to You?
Recovery – a new research paradigm?
When does Recovery Become Durable?
Recovery is Recovery is Recovery?
As William White mentions it is strange that a chronic illness is treated as an acute illness, in other words, the treatment of alcoholism and addiction does little after care in helping long term recovery, especially when the data is showing that recovering persons after 5 years of recovery have a very high chance of being in recovery long term.
Should recovery persons (and treatment) not be doing a lot more “after care” post acute treatment-based work? Can recovery communities help with long term recovery and global recovery i.e. deal more effectively with the interpersonal nature of addiction and recovery? Can it help more with recovery of people, their families and their communities? Addiction affects all these, should recovery not heal all these relationships? Should we as recovering persons not share the gifts of our recovery with others, with our communities and societies?
Should we not seek to make recovery from addiction the same as recovery from, say, heart disease?
Should we let others define us by our silence? There are up to 25 million recovering persons in the US, all with a life changing story to tell.
The power of this type of advocacy is probably immeasurable! One day treatment and recovery from addictive behaviour, hopefully, will be seen as commonplace, the norm.
It is a very interesting and idealistic development and one that will be critically appraised in due course in this blogsite.
In this section we will be linking to blogs on the mutual aid groups for the “treatment” of alcoholism going back to the century preceding AA.
William L White is one of the foremost writers on the History of “recovery” from the 1730s up until the present day and the advent of the new recovery movement (in the US). The first two of nine videos looks at the early history of mutual groups leading up to the founding of AA and beyond.
It is fascinating to see how certain types of treatment and views about addiction appear to have a cyclical nature, coming in and out of fashion at different times in history.
Listen here to White’s authoritative accounts of the formative years of recovery movements and then go to the Recovery page to hear the other seven short videos in this impressive collection which move on to explain the “new recovery movement” which involves the creation of recovery communities to help with long term recovery. The formation of these recovery communities also reduces the stigma of addiction and in reducing this stigma may help many more addicts and alcoholics start recovery as stigma around this chronic illness appears to impede many in seeking initial treatment and recovery. The future of recovery?
Some books on Mutual Aid History
Blogs
What does Recovery Mean to You?
Illuminating interview with Michael Botticelli, recovering alcoholic and Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP).
12 Step Recovery
Recovery Communities
Putting a Face on Recovery – Connecticut Community for Addiction Recovery
The Healing Power of Recovery – Connecticut Community for Addiction Recovery
Inside The Alcoholic Brain 