Recovery is a lifestyle that makes “life” possible.

We don’t recover from trauma or addiction by accident. 

Don’t worry— I’m not about to lay some trite “recovery tales work” spiel on you here. If you’re reading this, or remotely familiar with my work, you know recovery takes work. 

Recovery does take work— but it also takes planning. 

Nobody told me this. Which is why I’m telling you this. 

Recovery isn’t an event— it’s a lifestyle. To really succeed in recovery, you need to think of  it as a lifestyle— one that needs to be thoughtfully, purposefully maintained. 

We don’t fall into any lifestyle worth nurturing by accident. 

To live the recovery lifestyle, we need to design our life around recovery. 

We’re not going to be able to think and do things that are inconsistent with recovery, and live a recovery lifestyle. 

To live a recovery lifestyle we need to make time for recovery and devote resources to recovery. 

To live a recovery lifestyle we need to limit or avoid, to the extent that we can, people and others influences that are hell bent on dragging us away from a recovery lifestyle. 

I’m not saying that recovery is what you have to think about all day, every day. Speaking for myself, I have plenty of things I want and need to think about OTHER than recovery. 

What I am saying is that making time for recovery can’t be left up to chance. 

The truth is, recovery is what’s going to let you do all the other things you want to do with your life— whereas, make no mistake, trauma and addiction want nothing more or less than to take over your life, consume every scrap of your attention and energy. 

How do we develop and maintain a lifestyle? Not by doing one thing, one time. 

We develop and maintain a lifestyle with our habits and rituals. 

We develop daily patterns that support our lifestyle. 

We set aside time every day to do things that sustain and develop our lifestyle. 

We don’t, actually, need “perfect” tools or skills, or resources to live a recovery lifestyle. There are plenty of people who have successfully recovered from trauma and/or addiction with imperfect tools. 

We do, however, need to utilize whatever tools, skills, or resources we DO have access to, consistently. 

Lifestyles are defined by habits and rituals. We know we’re living a lifestyle when the goals and prioritize of that lifestyle become not what we think about all day, every day— but rather, they become the lens through which we think about everything ELSE all day, every day. 

That means consistently asking ourselves the simple question: “is this going to support or sabotage my recovery?” 

We need to ask that about choices, opportunities, and people. 

If I want to know how successfully someone is living a recovery lifestyle, I’m less interested in their skills, tools, and resources than I am with their habits, rituals, and the people they’re surrounding themselves with. 

Profound breakthroughs in trauma therapy are great— but you don’t need profound breakthroughs to sustainably recover from trauma or addiction. 

You need consistency. 

You need realism. 

You need structure to your day that will support you to stick with recovery, even when you’re sick of thinking about recovery. Especially then, actually. 

That is to say: you need to develop a recovery lifestyle. 

You don’t need recovery to be a thing you do— you need recovery to be the way you do your things. 

Don’t think about this project as a goal with an end date. Thank of this project, recovery, as a paradigm that will keep trauma and/or addiction from f*cking up every goal you care about.