3 August 2022
The prior pair of blogs outlined the first two stages of recovery from addiction. Those stages are abstinence and repair. Today we look at the third and final stage, growth, per Melemis (2015).
Near the end of the last blog, there was discussion of the unfortunate absence of life skills which often lead toward addictive behaviours. It is within the growth stage that those skills are learned. Melemis (2015) maintains that this stage lasts 3 to 5 years, making it the longest of the three. Unsurprisingly, as is often discussed in recovery meetings, learning those absent life skills also opens up the self, allowing one to deal with prior trauma and/or family challenges. This presents one of the most interesting recommendations made by Melemis.
Up until reading this research, my sense was that digging for the root causes was a necessary and pressing issue i.e., best done sooner than later. Melemis claims that the underlying issues are not so pressing and if pushed too early, can provoke a lapse or relapse as a result of dealing with heavy issues before a better coping (self-care etc.) skillset is learned. As earlier, Melemis (2015, p. 329) helpfully included a list of tasks associated with the growth stage.
This list is comprised of two types of growth: reforestation and maintenance. Reforestation is necessary where old growth didn’t make it or was never there. This is the second bullet point (immediately above) and is the subject of the two paragraphs preceding the bulleted list. I see the tasks of reforestation as 1) identifying harmful thinking, feelings, and behaviours; 2) finding and examining the historical patterns within your historical families and communities; and 3) working through or integrating that knowledge into who you are today and who you wish to be tomorrow.
My own experience of this process is that, like the cycle of change (Prochaska, DiClemente, & Norcross, 1992), there’s forward movement and backsliding (two steps forward, one step back) but that’s not a bad thing because those backsteps allow us to review what we’ve thought and to re-examine those thoughts or behaviours in a new light. Again, more personally than empirically, big changes in perspective take time and practice; I didn’t get them the first time around, and nor did most people who write or talk about change.
We’ll leave these stages with a fascinating parallel observed by Melemis (2015, p. 329): “The tasks of this stage are similar to the tasks that non-addicts face in everyday life. [I don’t like the term addict as it puts addiction at the core of a human identity, which is inaccurate.] When non-addicts do not develop healthy life skills, the consequence is that they may be unhappy in life. When recovering individuals do not develop healthy life skills, the consequence is that they also may be unhappy in life, but that can lead to relapse.”
Dan Chalykoff is working toward an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies. He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understandings of ideas. Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery. Please email him (danchalykoff@hotmail.com) to be added to or removed from the Bcc’d emailing list.
References
Melemis, S. M. (2015). Relapse prevention and the five rules of recovery. Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 88, pp. 325-332.
Prochaska, J. O., DiClemente, C. C., & Norcross, J. C. (1992). In search of how people change. Applications to addictive behaviors. The American psychologist, 47(9), 1102–1114. https://doi.org/10.1037//0003-066x.47.9.1102
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