Recovery is best described in 2 separate stages: early recovery, and long term sobriety. Let’s take a look at each.
Early recovery starts out a little bit before you even get clean and sober. You’re in the process of making the decision to change your life. Then you actually go through with the decision and take real action. This launches you into a roller coaster of an emotional ride that we can only describe as being a wild, up and down ride. Early recovery is like that. Your emotions are all over the place, because you are finally feeling them again (seemingly for the first time), and you are basically in shock from simply being sober.
Many people will spend this first part of their early recovery in a treatment center, and that is a fairly good idea for a number of reasons. For one thing, you will definitely benefit from having a safe environment with which to take your first steps towards a life of sobriety, without being tempted to relapse right away. Second of all, treatment can be helpful because you will receive a lot of addiction help from all of the peer support that you will get while in rehab. You will also benefit from the counselors and therapists there who can help to educate you about recovery and help guide you towards a new way to live. Early recovery is all about absorbing new information, and so you need to have teachers who can guide you in this early stage.
Long term recovery
Now contrast this early stage with long term recovery. In long term sobriety, you are no longer depending on your peer support group to keep you clean and sober like you were in the early stages. At this point you have probably learned quite a bit, you have a few years (or more) of clean time under your belt, and in fact you are probably actively helping other newcomers in recovery in some way. This being the case, what you have to do in order to stay clean at this point is not the same things that you were doing in early recovery.
The fact is that you have to change, grow, and progress as you grow personally in recovery. Anything less than this and you risk sliding back towards your old habits.
The real fact of the matter is that complacency is your biggest obstacle in long term recovery, so you have to take deliberate action on a consistent basis in order to keep growing. This means you need to form healthy habits that utilize sound recovery strategies, such as caring for self, helping others, and pushing yourself to grow in new ways.
