Learning to cope with bad days during recovery.
There’s a line in recovery literature that one of the guys that attends one of the meetings that I go to likes to quote, and I will paraphrase here: An addict who is not using is in an abnormal state.
Next time you are having a shitty day and thinking about getting high, think about what that means.
As drug addicts who have found our way to recovery, our lives at one point had to get bad enough on some level that we were forced to seek help. Our lives were totally defined by our substance use. It took a long time for us to find our way to our bottoms; One day at a time we inadvertently strengthened our dependence, psychologically and physically, until our every waking moment revolved around the drugs. From the moment we woke and until we finally nodded off to sleep, we were totally obsessed with using.
So it is surprising, speaking from my own experience, that one day well into active addiction, the gravity of my substance abuse really hit me. It seemed like all of the sudden I was in this crazy situation with no where to go and no way out. I couldn’t bring myself to ask for help yet; All I knew was that suddenly I was aware of how bad things had gotten and how dangerous of a predicament I was in.
The truth is, however, just as we can get and stay clean one day at a time, our addiction slowly progressed over a long period of time. It may hit us in a moment of painful realization that wants to appear as if our disease progressed overnight, and we have suddenly been thrust into the misery that is active addiction, but make no mistake, it took a long period of time for us to get here.
It only makes sense then that it will take an equally long time to achieve any sort of ‘normalcy,’ (if there is such a thing for us addicts). When we get clean and start to turn the minutes into hours, the hours into days, the days into months, and months into years, we are going to have to learn to take the good days with the bad.
As my good days have started to outnumber the difficult ones, it seems to always surprise me when I wake up from another using-dream that I just can’t seem to shake off as the morning progresses. After a number of overwhelming positive days during which I have been so grateful for the gifts my recovery has already given me, I suddenly have a bad day… and it hits me like a ton of bricks.
I want to illustrate this with an example.
I have a dog that is absolutely my best friend. She is a big Beligian Malinois (a common type of police dog) and has been my best pal and protector throughout the worst years of active addiction and into my recovery. A few nights ago she got very sick. She was throwing up and obviously not feeling well.
With the benefit of hindsight, I can now say that this is not unusual for dogs to get sick and need some time to recover, but at the time this was a catastrophic event in my mind. My disease likes to manifest itself as extremely negative thoughts, apocalyptic thinking, and a never-ending loop of thoughts of doom and gloom. So immediately I was fearing for my dog’s life. I thought for sure she had some fatal stomach illness, or perhaps ingested poison and was due to die at any moment.
This went on throughout the next morning as she was still uncharacteristically low energy, refused to eat, and didn’t want to go on our morning walk. This had me worried sick. I went to work having a genuine anxiety attack.
As the day went on, my mom was texting me and telling me that my pup was getting better. She was showing signs of recovering from her stomach bug and beginning to act normally. But I was still lost in my own anxiety. I couldn’t shake the negativity, and fears for the health of my dog somehow turned into this vortex of negative thinking in which I mentally exhausted myself with thoughts of all of the fucked up bullshit that I went through in active addiction. I thought of how I ruined my life. I thought about how shitty it is that I am 28 & living with my parents with no car, no license; I’m back in my childhood bedroom with no girlfriend and working at a job well below my ability and education.
What I am trying to communicate here is how quickly a relatively minor stomach issue that my dog had (she was fully recovered by the time I got home and I was greeted with her usual high-energy demands to go outside a play) turned into a totally catastrophic event that brought all of the negative feelings and emotions that had caused me to use in the past right back to the forefront of my mind.
It is so important to remember that this is a common symptom of the disease of addiction. Those thoughts I was having weren’t real. They were just the fucked up result of what happens when you let you disease run your head for a while. Mark Twain is reputed to have said, “Some of the worst things in my life never happened.”
So next time you are having a shitty day, keep in mind that these negative feelings will pass. You are an addict who is not using, and at times that will be difficult to manage. One bad day won’t ruin the progress you’ve made in your recovery. As long as you don’t use no matter what, utilize your network of fellow recovering addicts, and be mindful of your disease you will be okay.
G.M.C., 5.5.2020, Day 167
Daily Recovery 