Sobriety versus Recovery II

8 July 2020

These blogs usually begin with image selection.  It took some time to find a graphic expression of open-handed letting go i.e., the opposite of white knuckling.  It’s noteworthy that, despite the title, these dancers are stretching (in tension) after a rehearsal or performance.  Which brings us to the factors common to sobriety, recovery, and dancers in repose.

1. Sobriety is not using.  Recovery is learning why you used.
2. Sobriety can still include destructive behaviour because the roots of that behaviour remain unexamined and unchanged.
3. In sobriety, a “transfer of addictions” often occurs as the causal issue(s), that led to addictive behaviour, has not been identified or treated (evidently, a sign of this is jealousy of others still using your drug of choice). 
4. Recovery is a continuous effort toward understanding yourself and your relationship to your (chosen) contexts.
5. Recovery is rarely a solitary effort i.e., (re)integration into relationships, groups, and society is essential. (Benton, 2010; Strum, 2020)

When these five factors are compared, the first four involve a deep dive into the reasons you have become the person who behaves as you do.  From that dive, the goal is to gain an accurate understanding of harmful past patterns of behaviour and relating.  The much-maligned Freud outlined a phenomenon he called the repetition compulsion: an obsessive repeating, in varied guises, of an earlier and unresolved painful experience (Gay, 1988 pp. 400-1). Not all people in recovery will have a repetition compulsion but, all those in recovery will know a helluvalot more about themselves in recovery than they did in sobriety or pre-sobriety.  From there, as point five states, a reintegration is required, first at the level of the primary relationship, flowing outward to peripheral social groups.

In his study of personality, McAdams (2015) accepted and acknowledged Shakespeare’s metaphor of life as an unfolding drama for all human actors.  We are on stage anytime we are with others. In sobriety, we uncritically accept our default behaviours; in recovery, we’re moving as a disciplined dancer who, even in repose, is preparing herself for her next act. 

Dan Chalykoff facilitates two weekly voluntary group meetings, as well as private appointments, for SMART-based counselling services at danchalykoff@hotmail.com