Trauma recovery and marketing bullsh*t.

All meaningful trauma and/or addiction recovery is ultimately our personal project. 

It happens on our timeline. And we are ultimately responsible for it. 

Why is that important to say out loud? Er, in print? On the internet? 

Because there are people out there who really, really don’t want you to own you recovery.

These are usually people who are selling a product or service that they market as being necessary for you to recover. 

Sometimes psychotherapy is even marketed this way. 

(Scratch that. Psychotherapy is OFTEN marketed this way.)

There really are people, some of them therapists, who will try to tell you that you cannot recover without their product or service. 

What that tells me is, they don’t know how recovery happens in the real world. 

I hate to inform them, but people have been recovering from trauma and addiction since long before “psychotherapy” even existed as a field, let alone in the post-Freud form it does today. 

This matters because if we buy into their assertion that you can’t recover without their product or service, then access to that product or service becomes really important. 

And the truth is, many, many people don’t have access to the products or services that are being marketed as “essential” to trauma or addiction recovery. 

I’m writing this because I want you to see all this for the marketing trick that it is. 

Trauma and addiction chew people up and spit them out every day. Post traumatic disorders and addictions are killers if they’re allowed to just do their thing. 

If therapists and others market their products and services as the “only” way you can recover— if recovery is not your personal project, but their product or service to SELL you— then they get to put a price on your recovery. 

That is to say, they get to put a price on your life. 

It’s just not true. 

There IS no product or service, including psychotherapy or rehab, that guarantees our recovery from trauma or addiction. 

In the real world, our recovery is usually cobbled together from LOTS of sources. Sometimes therapy plays a role, for some people. Sometimes it doesn’t. 

I find it really interesting that the people who seem to advocate most loudly and consistently for the “essential” role of psychotherapy— often long term therapy the effectiveness of which is not easily measured—  in recovery tend to be the people or organizations that have the most to gain from people believing it. 

This blog entry isn’t going to do well. It’ll likely stir up certain voices who will tell me I’m trivializing the role of psychotherapy, rehab, or other products and services in peoples’ recovery from trauma and addiction. 

You can make up your mind whether that’s what I’m actually doing. 

For some people, therapy with the right therapist can be a turning point. 

For some people, therapy can keep them alive or in the game. That’s no small thing. 

But let me be super clear with what I’m saying here: your recovery is not dependent upon working with a particular therapist, doing a particular type of therapy, for a particular length of time. 

Your recovery does not depend on you being able to afford or access ANY specific product or service. 

Your recovery does not depend on you adopting a specific philosophy or believing in a specific religion or spiritual or metaphysical system. 

There are multiple roads to recovery from trauma and addiction, and you’ll probably need different approaches at tools at various points in your recovery. 

But the bottom line is: recovery is up to us. 

All healing is ultimately self-healing. 

All help is ultimately self-help. 

The care we need to make it through this is ultimately, unavoidably self-care. 

Anyone who says differently is selling something.