Stages of Recovery:
This world is designed to teach us, all things work towards that goal. It is not impossible to understand and conquer your behavior patterns. Patterns are established with the goal that they shall at some point, be disrupted. Patterns are made to be broken.
 
Begin to understand the rippling effects of your own behavior. When you think a thought it carries with it the negative or positive vibrations that surround it. Energy follows thought. Thought is energy. You have power that you are not aware of. You have power that you cannot see. So if you are engaging in negative thinking patterns, you are creating for yourself those negative experiences which shall follow from the thought patterns. If you are desire to change a negative pattern in you life, begin simply by changing the way you think. For action follows thought. By changing the way you think, you begin to change the way you act.
 
Cycles of Addiction Patterns:
Recovery gives us the ability to laugh at ourselves and at the world. It is through laughter all things will be reduced to their proper size. We will laugh at our failures and they will vanish in clouds of new dreams. We will laugh at our successes and they will shrink to their true value. We will laugh at evil and it will also shrink. If we learn to laugh we will never be poor. This then is one of nature’s greatest gifts, and we will waste it no more. Only with laughter and happiness can we truly become a success. Only with laughter and happiness can we enjoy the fruits of our labor. Laughter will be the maiden who serves us. Recovery is action. This is a program of action. Laughter is the utmost of all the greatest of wisdom. Our procrastination of allowing our good feelings is what has held us back. We thought we were born of fear and now we recognize this secret mined from the depths of our courageous hearts. Now we know that to conquer fear we must always act without hesitation and the flutters in our heart will vanish. Now I know that action reduces the lion of terror to an ant of equanimity.
 
How Do We Define Recovery?
How you define recovery is an individual statement of your truth, your goals, your meaning.
None of us got clean and sober because we wanted serenity. We didn’t even know what that really meant. If you are court ordered, or trying to appease your spouse/significant other, wanting to get the family off your back or for any reason other than wanting more from life and for yourself. It won’t work. Hopefully, while you are in process you will find the “Want To”. Because “Have To” is just putting your next time of getting high on hold.
 
Quandary of the Recovering Woman:
This is the exact reason I wrote a treatment workshop because I know you are terrified of coming out of hiding. We don’t want to put our children in foster care, we are fearful of losing custody of our children and we believe as society does that we are terrible people and “bad mothers”. Our spouses and significant others don’t believe we are alcoholic or addicts (sometimes it is because they use with us). We do get sicker faster, younger and our guilt and shame is beyond the words to describe it. It is our values that keep us stuck and sick. It is complicated because our families, interpersonal social issues are the most important thing in the whole world to us. We experience triple guilt when our personhood is grounded in our motivation to make and enhance relationships to others. This is our experience of satisfaction, pleasure, effectiveness and sense of worth is all of our connections with others. We are famine and we were created as the nurturer and caregivers of our world. Then when we do begin to look at what we are doing that causes us so much conflict, pain, abandonment, we learn its called co-dependency. More guilt and shame and we feel like we are running hard in a squirrel cage and can never get off.
 
 
Sobriety Self Talk Myth versus Truth:
 The inner journey is about a self-relationship first. The wonderful gift in that is you are the one who will climb to the top of your own mountain and look back at your “addicted self” and know that is what I did and has nothing to do with who I am. That was part of my journey that has made me and you who we are, we have nothing to be ashamed of. We all know that to strive for some semblance of acceptance, is the only true way we will be able to drop our victim stance If you say;” I am not a victim”, anytime prior to resolving the grief you have just re-victimized yourself by taking a martyr stance. The truth of our individuality is that every one of us is doing exactly what they want to do at any given time whether we realize it or not.
 
Women and Relationships:
 Challenge the stigma of weak willed, poor, uneducated, alone and know that your recovery can be free and for fun. The truth is look at the stamina, money, time, sacrifice, lies, manipulation, hard work, sad stories, and excuses for what they really are. I was able to feed my addictions but believed I did not have the wherewithal to do anything about it. We are survivors, we are strong, and other women would have folded long ago under the stress of multigenerational abuse, addictions, abandonment, and broken homes repeatedly. Take an honest inventory of the good stuff you have, you are the farthest thing from weak you can get. Our world offers free love, advice, championship, sponsors, and meetings every day of the week in every community around the world. Let us challenge those statistics and join together in a real women’s movement towards recovery. This is what these workshops are for, if you can’t afford treatment, afraid of exposing yourself because of the children and family, you can find a sitter to save your life and the future of your loved ones. Addiction is progressive; it is guaranteed to get worse, never better. The illness has definable stages in the progression but the invisible lines we cross into later addiction is unpredictable. Each invisible line we cross over we never can go back and do less drugs or alcohol or repair the damage. I promise you if it wasn’t better millions of us would not be in recovery now; we would go back to using.
 
Understanding the Issues:
 Let us examine exactly what it is that will allow for a dramatic, positive change in your life. We need to fully understand change and what it takes to change.
 
The way out of our bondage of addiction is to realize we have been trying, and trying within the boundaries of our own self made limits. The first step addresses this by speaking to our unmanageability. The good news is the discovery that it is our own self made limits.
 
There are two types of change:
 
First Order Change: Looks like change but isn’t change, it is behavior that leads to more of the same. The results remain the same because nothing changes. Like going to the doctors and not disclosing our using patterns and quantities. Like going to a marriage counselor thinking you need to work on intimacy or communication skills never discussing how much drugs or alcohol each of you use. Like going to church but the chemical dependency is the same. Continued denial of the core cause of our depression, marital instability, physical problems or/and financial difficulties is our chemical dependency.
 
Second Order Change: Leads to behaviors that work. Not only looks different, it is different. It now meets the maximum amount of needs with a minimum amount of pain. Second order change is a process.
 
Characteristics of the Recovering Woman:
 Many recovering women have found emotional healing when they begin to understand that it is their expectations of love, of where it was to come from that has caused all their loneliness, sorrow or grief. Our world said it should have been your addict mother, or your estranged father, your abusive grandfather so you feel empty and not of value. That is only one person in the universe and they didn’t know how to love you. Probably no one knew how to love them so they couldn’t give you what they didn’t have. Search for something that plants a seed for the beginnings of the work needed on forgiveness. Techniques and understanding of forgiveness is discussed fully in another chapter. When we carefully look at life for what it is, it may be a foster mom, best friend, uncle, counselor anyone who you knew, who loved and accepted you just for you, is somehow overlooked. We have fallen so far from valuing one another that hundreds of clients have shared with me that I am the first person who saw value in them and validated them as the people they were. How sad is that? I would love to challenge our world to tell the people they care about, and the people they meet to give a complement. It is like a ripple in a pond and you will never know how far your kindness has reached.