What is the true aim of recovery?

Excerpt from my book 12 Steps To 1 Hero:

We need to be adaptable to change. As author and pastor John C Maxwell says: “Change is inevitable… growth is optional. To grow you must see the value in yourself to add value to yourself and others. You must know yourself to grow yourself, and it is hard to improve when you have no one but yourself to follow.”

So imagine, or maybe you don’t need to imagine, that you’re a million miles away from where you could be. If you are, you more than likely know this. It may be buried deep down, but deep down you know it. You can do something about that. You can go to the place where you could be. More than that, you can go to where you should be, where you’re made to be. You can make those changes, those adaptations and adjustments, that you need to make to be that person you were meant to be. Sometimes these are small changes. Sometimes they are like the response to someone I know, who had needed half his stomach removed due to his heavy drinking, who on starting the 12 Steps asked someone around a long time in AA exactly what he needed to change. The reply was: “How about absolutely everything!”

There’s a phrase that’s popular now that says: “It’s okay to not be okay.” It should I think say: “It’s okay to say or admit I’m not okay.” That’s what I think it’s being used to mean. I hope it’s not being used to mean that it’s okay to not be okay, always, for all of your life. That is plainly not okay. No one was put on this Earth to be that way. That would be pointless, that would be life without real purpose, maybe that is a life that has not adjusted or adapted or made any changes. Many people come into the 12 Steps groups talking about having the same emotional reactions as when they were a child or a teenager. Okay, there’s some food for thought.

When you’re suffering you know it’s not okay. You know this isn’t who or how you’re supposed to be. Maybe, you can hardly even look at yourself in the mirror. Let me let you know that I’ve been there. But you don’t have to stay there forever. Yes, acknowledge and accept where you are, you already know that and you need to admit it – it’s the first step, admission is Step 1 of the 12 Steps – “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.”

This is how it was first written for Alcoholics Anonymous, but you can try replacing the word “alcohol” with whatever you want. There’s more on this to come. But then know that you can move forward to somewhere different, somewhere less dark, somewhere much brighter. Somewhere bright and light and relaxing and full of meaning and happiness. So rest assured, you can do something about it.

I will say to my young children to do their best in life to make it fulfilling, to always be kind, and that maybe those are the same thing. We need to learn to speak to ourselves like this too. Many people are not accustomed to this sort of gentle voice, they grew up with harsh tones. The word gentle here is perfect as it derives from Latin gentilis meaning “of a family or nation, of the same clan”.

So much more than beating an addiction, which is clearly a momentous feat in itself, the 12 Steps enable a realisation that allows you to become this person you’re supposed to be, by going on a journey to find the hero inside. Consequently significantly emboldened, you can now stand tall, even during the worst periods of life: during a relationship or job rejection; as a loved one suffers with sickness; when the world recoils due to terrorism or a pandemic virus; even during the deaths of your mother and father… You are the one that is there for the others, you are the strong one, you are the brave and courageous, you are the calm in the storm and you are the one from where the light shines in the darkness. Isn’t that the aim, to be that one?

It is the enabling of that which can confront the unknown, sometimes the unimaginable, definitely chaos and disorder – and triumph despite it, through it and frequently because of it. It is to be someone who is noble, admirable, excellent and worthy.

From facing what you face, often including your own dark sides, you get something supernatural, something miraculous, something superhuman that you can then pass on to others to change and enhance their lives too. It is wholly transformational. It is being the finder of order within the disorder, finding it and making it grow until it displaces disorder. A hero has to often break the rules of the norm to do this, but they always have to ensure they are a disciplined deviant. You can be that hero time and time again.

We seek some sort of order. Being ready for and overcoming disorder and chaos is the driving force behind many of life’s actions. For some people it becomes overwhelming, even the thought of that disorder in life creating debilitating anxiety or panic attacks where they can barely breathe. Depression is when disorder has taken control and is often an attempt to avoid or hide from it.

Many of the problems called mental health issues are attempts at creating order within this disorder, with varying rates of relative sanity to insanity, collapse, fall, ruin and death. Even such as drinking excessively is an attempt at order, that the alcoholic has some control over something. Of course these type of attempts are just deflections and distractions from the reality and will become their own disorder within the main disorder at some point.

There are two words here that can be used to define the difference: “entropy” means “a lack of order, a gradual decline into disorder” (from en- “inside” plus Greek trope meaning “transformation”); and the opposite of entropy is “resolve” meaning “to settle or find a solution to a problem or contentious matter; to decide firmly on a course of action; to have a firm determination to do something”.

Read more and get 12 Steps To 1 Hero here.