Episode 133 -- July 22, 2021

Help for the Recovering Heart

Before starting recovery, most of us were reluctant to ask for any kind of help. Perhaps we could not admit that we had a problem, or we thought we could get sober by ourselves. While some of us may enter recovery on our own, having even a little help will make the journey easier. Even if we accept this, we are often stumped with questions: How should I get help? Do I really need more help if I am already in recovery?

In her book The Recovering Heart: Emotional Sobriety for Women, Beverly Conyers helps us explore emotional sobriety, or healing, by addressing behaviors and feelings. Although this book is written for women, this excerpt will likely resonate with any of us in recovery.

Conyers discusses how people in recovery can seek support from various sources—including our sponsors, therapists, and others—who help us deal with emotional confusion, manage our feelings, and begin creating a new story of our life. She shares the benefits of having at least one other trusted person to talk to—the biggest benefit is not being the only person in our head.

This excerpt has been edited for brevity.

One of the strengths of Twelve Step programs is that they offer an instant community. As women with addictions, we learned to see ourselves as different, as social outcasts. The experience of getting high was in itself intensely solitary, an activity that turned us inward even in a crowd. Regardless of how social our initial use of substances may have been, addiction ultimately led us to a lonely place. In Twelve Step meetings, we become part of a community. More important, it's a community that doesn't judge us, because its members have all walked in our shoes.

To get the most from our Twelve Step program, we eventually need to "work the Steps." These time-tested principles provide a systematic approach to self-knowledge and self-acceptance, promoting personal and spiritual growth. The intense self-reflection involved in "Step work" is best done with support from a sponsor—someone with a solid foundation in Twelve Step programs who is willing to listen and to share her own recovery journey. Our sponsor also helps us sort out how our feelings and experiences are related to working a good program and staying alcohol and drug free.

As valuable as Twelve Step programs can be, however, this path to recovery is not the only one. In some cities there are other mutual support programs, such as Women for Sobriety. If we're involved in a religious community, we may have a trusted clergyperson or spiritual counselor to guide us in exploring our feelings. Or, instead, some of us prefer to work with a professional therapist. Many therapists use cognitive-behavioral techniques (CBT) that help us replace negative messages with more accurate and self-affirming ones. Therapists can also evaluate us for depression, a clinical condition common in women with histories of trauma and addiction. Since alcohol and drug use is often a way of self-medicating, depression can become worse when we get sober. We may need medication—one of the many antidepressants now available—in addition to therapy to find relief from this debilitating medical condition. Whether we work with a sponsor, clergyperson, or professional therapist—and often, a combined approach provides the best results—it's important that we find people we can connect with, people who make us feel safe, valued, and respected.

This means that in a therapeutic relationship, we are allowed to set the pace. We are in charge of our own recovery. When we are ready to move forward, our sponsor or counselor is there to support us. If we need to stop or retreat, we are allowed to do so. If certain topics are off-limits, we are not pressured to explore them. If we reveal our hidden shame, we receive compassion and acceptance. If we bring up a difficult problem, we are not told what to do. Instead, we are encouraged to find a solution that's right for us.

Our sponsor's or counselor's job is to help us discover our own strengths and truths in our own time. Since personal growth is a lifelong process, it cannot be rushed. There is no timetable and no "right way" to do things. We may do all the Steps in a hurry and then decide much later to go back and dig deeper into some of them. We may visit a therapist off and on for years before we finally feel safe enough to talk about the deep trauma at our core. We may move forward at a steady pace before bumping against a door that remains firmly shut. We progress only as we are ready.

Yet, even if it seems that our progress is too slow or has stalled out altogether, the seeds of healing continue to grow as we give voice to our feelings in our recovery or therapeutic relationships.

Dealing with Emotional Confusion
One immediate benefit of working with a sponsor or therapist is that we learn how to deal with emotional confusion. As we know, learning to trust our feelings is an important step in building a clear personal identity. This does not mean that our emotions are always consistent. In fact, it is very common to have "mixed feelings" about something, or to feel a certain way one day and feel completely different the next.

Learning to Manage Our Feelings
Another benefit of talking things through with a sponsor or therapist is that we can develop skills to better manage our feelings. We begin to understand that while we can't choose our emotions, we can choose how we respond to them. If our partner leaves us for someone else, for example, we may feel like texting her nasty messages. But we can choose to do something nice for ourselves instead. If another driver cuts us off in traffic, we may feel like berating the person, but we can choose to let it go and not complicate the situation. If the thought of going back to school fills us with fear of failure, we can choose to go back anyway and develop a strategy for handling the workload.

Creating a New Life Story
A third important benefit of talking with a sponsor or therapist is that, through language, we can begin to create a new story of our life.

Most women in recovery from addictions carry around the internal message that "I'm bad. I'm no good." Earlier in the book, we explored how often this self-condemnation started in childhood as the result of trauma, and how we blamed ourselves for what happened to us. Then, when we did bad things during our addiction, our actions confirmed what we had always believed to be true. Somewhere along the way, the line between what went before and what came after the addiction got blurred. Our simple story became, "There's something wrong with me. Always has been, always will be."

To counteract this destructive message, we may be tempted to simply repeat affirmations: "I am a good person." "I am a loving person." "Good things will happen in my life." And certainly, there is no harm in telling ourselves those things. The trouble is, we're not likely to be convinced. Until we give new meaning to the old pain, affirmations are like papering over a hole in the wall. It looks good, but it won't stand up to stress.

To truly change our negative messages, we need to go back to the source, to examine the place where the pain began and understand it differently. Language allows us to do that, to challenge the stories we tell ourselves and to create a new narrative for our life. Instead of harboring fear and self-blame, we can learn to respect our ability to survive and assign responsibility for our trauma to where it truly belongs.

Letting go of the painful feelings doesn't happen automatically. Like the stages of grief, working through traumatic pain is a complicated process. It includes acknowledging what happened, bringing new understanding to the past, mourning what we lost or didn't receive, accepting that pain is part of life, and turning our energy toward the future. Navigating those stages takes time and work and emotional support.

For many of us, much of our life energy has been devoted to running from our inner pain. Like the ostrich that denies reality by sticking its head in the sand, we pretend that what we don't acknowledge can't hurt us. The exact opposite is true. By using our energy to suppress and deny our painful past, we continue to be controlled by it. Our beliefs, choices, and actions continue to follow the same old script.

To change the script, we need to change the words we use. That's what happens as we gradually reveal our self in a therapeutic relationship. We learn to challenge old labels and easy definitions. We find new ways to talk about what happened and use different words to define who we are. We let go of labeling our self as "bad" or "victim" and begin to celebrate our self as "strong" and "a survivor." And the meaning we give to our trauma and pain slowly changes from self-rejection to self-love.

With support from our sponsor or therapist, we have the power to rewrite our life story. In time, it can become a story in which the heroine emerges from pain, suffering, and confusion to become a stronger, wiser, more compassionate woman—a story in which the heroine is our self.

About the Author:
Beverly Conyers, M.A., is an editor and freelance writer who lives in New England. She is the author of Addict in the Family: Stories of Loss, Hope, and Recovery; Everything Changes: Help for Families of Newly Recovering Addicts; and The Recovering Heart: Emotional Sobriety for Women.

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