Recovery Calling – How Hope Can Lead You Away from Addiction
Hope Calling Those Ready for Recovery
Does it feel as if you have been living under a dark cloud for a long time? Do you see that alcohol, drugs, or some other addictive process is moving your life in the wrong direction, yet you seem unable to stop? Do you suspect that there is a better life you could be living? If any of this applies to you then please read on because we may have a solution to your problems. It’s called recovery.
Recovery Means Far More Than Getting Back to Normal
The word ‘recovery’ is defined in the dictionary as a return to a previous state, but this is not what we mean by it. The problem is that if our life was so great in the past, we wouldn’t have turned to alcohol or drugs in the first place. For us then, recovery is not about getting back to normal, but about finding a new way of living where we reach our potential, find deep and lasting peace, and develop a deep connection with other human beings.
We need to set the bar high if we hope to summon up sufficient motivation to change our life. Half-measures avail us nothing, as they say in recovery circles. It is the hope for a much better life (better than anything we’ve experienced before) that inspires us to devote ourselves to recovery.
You may be reading this and feeling a bit cynical. All of this talk about a ‘better life’ and ‘reaching your potential’ can sound like something from one of those annoyingly twee Facebook posts. Worse still, it can sound gimmicky and sales-market-ty. One of the causalities of substance abuse is often our imagination . We may have no problem taking flights of fancy when we are out of it on drugs, but there is a failure of our imagination when it comes to believing in a better future for ourselves. This is why one of the things we desperately need to recovery is our sense of hope and optimism for the future.
What is Hope?
“It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.”
Robert H. Goddard
Hope is the expectation that something good is going to happen in the future. If things have been going bad for you for a long time, the suggestion of a better future can sound insanely optimistic. Naive even. But, what if your experience actually provides evidence for a better future rather than against it? Bear with me.
You have to ask yourself ‘why’ have things been going badly for me in recent weeks, months, or years. Could it have anything to do with alcohol, drug use, or some other addictive behavior?
Let’s not be too judgmental here, but for the sake of simplicity, we will refer to the kinds of stuff we get up to while caught up in addiction as ‘wrong stuff’. If our life has been going badly then, wouldn’t this suggest that when we do wrong stuff it causes wrong stuff to happen to us. Wouldn’t it then be very reasonable to suggest that if we do ‘right stuff’ (the kind of behaviors that recovery is all about) then right stuff will happen to us.
If we do the wrong things then the wrong things will keep happening to us. If we do right things then the right things will start happening to us.
As you see then, our hope for a better future is not some naive wishful thinking. It is a logical and rational expectation, and we only have to look at our own life to find ample evidence for it (i.e. doing the wrong things takes us to a dark place).
Recovery Calling – Are You Ready For a Better Future?
You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.
William Faulkner
The past can act like an anchor that keeps pulling us back when we try to move forward. If this keeps happening, it is easy to understand why we begin to lose motivation and hope. We need something that is going to pull us forward, and this is where a recovery community comes in.
We like to think of Hope Rehab as similar to an airport where you get ready to fly into a better future (we even have a DC3 plane and airport!). Our team works as your ground crew to get you unloaded (removing old baggage), refueled (motivated), and provides you with everything you need to reach your next destination (a better future). We will get to spend quite a few tropical sunset together, staring out over the Gulf of Siam, before you are ready to fly off. Contact us today so we can start planning your getaway to the better life you deserve.
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