This graphic to promote recovery month has been on my mind since September.
Is recovery the foundation to a healthy and happy home?
It kinda depends on how you define recovery, doesn’t it?
If recovery is akin to flourishing, yes.
If it’s “a voluntarily maintained lifestyle characterized by sobriety, personal health, and citizenship“, probably.
If it’s “a process of change through which individuals improve their health and wellness, live a self-directed life, and strive to reach their full potential“, who knows?
If it’s just abstinence, who knows?
If it’s remission, who knows?
If it’s “when you say you are”, who knows?
If it’s “any positive change“, who knows?
Without some minimum threshold, it’s hard to argue it’s “the foundation to a healthy and happy home.”
Twelve-step groups recognized this with messages that abstinence is just a beginning and that recovery has interpersonal, psychological, behavioral, and spiritual dimensions.
From Alcoholics Anonymous:
The alcoholic is like a tornado roaring his way through the lives of others. Hearts are broken. Sweet relationships are dead. Affections have been uprooted. Selfish and inconsiderate habits have kept the home in turmoil. We feel a man is unthinking when he says that sobriety is enough. He is like the farmer who came up out of his cyclone cellar to find his home ruined. To his wife, he remarked, “Don’t see anything the matter here, Ma. Ain’t it grand the wind stopped blowin’?”
Yes, there is a long period of reconstruction ahead. We must take the lead. A remorseful mumbling that we are sorry won’t fill the bill at all.
W., B. (2002). Alcoholics Anonymous: The story of how many thousands of men and women have recovered from alcoholism. Alcoholics Anonymous World Services.
From Narcotics Anonymous:
Our disease involved much more than just using drugs, so our recovery must involve much more than simple abstinence. Recovery is an active change in our ideas and attitudes.
Narcotics Anonymous: 6th Edition Basic Text: NA World Services Inc.
Bill White noted the multi-dimensional importance of the definition used for recovery:
Defining recovery also has consequences of great import for those competing institutions and professional roles claiming ownership of AOD problems. Choosing one word over another can shift billions of dollars from one cultural institution to another, e.g., from hospitals to prisons. Medicalized terms such as recover, recovery, convalescence, remission, and relapse convey ownership of severe AOD problems by health care institutions and professionals, just as words such as redeemed and reborn, rehabilitate or reform, and stop and quit shift problem ownership elsewhere. It is important to recognize that rational arguments for particular definitions of recovery may mask issues of professional prestige, professional careers, institutional profit, and the fate of community economies. The answer of who has authority to define recovery will vary depending on the question, “define for what purpose?” Given that defining recovery could generate unforeseen and harmful consequences, efforts to define recovery should include broad representation from: 1) individuals and family members in recovery, 2) diverse recovery pathways and styles, 3) diverse ethnic communities, and 4) policy, scientific, and treatment bodies, including leaders of the major institutions that pay for behavioral health care services.
White, W. (2007) Addiction recovery: Its definition and conceptual boundaries. Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, 33, 229-241.
Recovery Review 