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Recovery Quotes
"Hope is not logical. It always comes as a surprise, just when you think all hope is lost. Hope is the cousin to grief, and both take time: you can't short-circuit grief, or emptiness, and you can't patch it up with your bicycle tire tube kit. You have to take the next right action."
55
"When a heart mends it doesn't let the same people in twice."
40
"Pain can cause us to learn no end of lessons, but without resolution there can be no healing!"
39
"The pain you feel is simply because you do not yet have the strength to forgive. But you will grow strong again, that is for sure."
39
"It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy."
38
"After a bad trip, don't carry your luggage on board the next flight. Stay grounded til you figure out a new way to travel."
37
"I will no longer mutilate and destroy myself in order to find a secret behind the ruins."
36
"There is hope for the alcoholic: God is able to deliver from this as well as any other addiction."
35
"I made sure to brush my teeth as soon as I was able. I even asked for a hair tie to pull my long, blood-red hair into a twist at the nape of my neck so I wouldn't have that 'freshly hospitalized' look."
34
"There is a period of one to two earth years that humans are to refrain from making big decisions. It's because you don't always make the best decisions when you are grieving. Those who make decisions in haste often live to regret them. You must move through the time of suffering, strengthening your faith and being willing to grow through the grief in order to be able to see things differently. As you grow, your blind faith will continue to open your eyes. You will see everything in a whole new light when you come out the other side of grief. Then you will be able to make very good decisions for yourself, better than ever, because of what you learned."
33
"I'd gotten on the piss and it had kicked me the fuck off. Hard."
33
"His face went somber for half a second, and then it dissolved into an absolutely wonderful and fearless laugh. The old Ronan Lynch's laugh. No, it was better than that one, because this new one had just a hint of darkness beneath it. This Ronan knew there was crap in the world, but he was laughing anyway."
29
"As with our colleges, so with a hundred 'modern improvements;' there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at..."
29
"Simply through the process of living life and adapting to change, you may have lost something which you once enjoyed or took for granted. Reclaim your power by speaking up, standing up, standing out, and taking action. Reclaim your positivity by surrounding yourself with happy and proactive people."
29
"You don't dwell on what you've lost, you just move on."
27
"Can you admit on here that you have an affliction for millions of other people to see? Then that is great and a huge step towards your recovery."
26
"It is not true that everyone is special. It is true that everyone was once special and still possesses the ability to recover it."
26
"I may just be on the outskirts of being okay."
25
"Anyhow, even though I might go out on a date with a boy, emotionally I just wouldn't be able to concentrate. I'd be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere else, like a balloon with a broken string. I'd be thinking about one unrelated thing after another. I don't know, I guess finally I want to be alone a little while longer. And I want to let my thoughts wander freely. In that sense, I guess, I'm probably still "on the road to recovery."
24
"Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are supposed to go."
24
"If I've learned one lesson from all that's happened to me, it's that there is no such thing as the biggest mistake of your existence. There's no such thing as ruining your life. Life's a pretty resilient thing, it turns out."
22
"The more severe the dysfunction you experienced growing up, the more difficult boundaries are for you."
22
"Your ability to make me feel like I was less than I was, took awhile to recover from. But after ripping my own self worth to shreds for so long, I realized that I wasn't less just because I was more than your inexperienced hands could handle."
22
"Somewhere in the sun-washed space between Southern California's hills of sand and the present desolate volcanic sprawl I was crossing, my legs had strengthened, but " invisibly " so had my will. The wisdom of my body had cultivated vibrantly since those sadness-drunken months after the rape when I'd felt so numbed by the hurt and shame that I didn't move further. No longer."
21
"There is a saying used in twelve - step programs and in most treatment centers that 'Relapse is part of recovery.' It's another dangerous slogan that is based on a myth, and it only gives people permission to relapse because that think that when they do, they are on the road to recovery."
20
"We know that you don't want to be a drunk and you don't want to be hooked on addictive drugs. You do it because you can't cope with your life without some sort of support, even if that support is damaging."
18
"You are NOT an abuse survivor or victim. Leave your labels elsewhere because they are no longer serving you."
17
"The scabs feel like I have a message on my arm. Something that needs to be read, urgently, by someone. It was only years later that I realized the person I had written that message to- the person who wasn't listening- was me. I was the one who should have been staring at that arm, and working out what the red hieroglyphics meant. Had I translated them, I would have realized those red lines read: 'Never feel this bad again. Never come back to this place, where only a knife will do. Live a gentle and kind life. Don't do things that make you want to hurt yourself. Whatever you do, every day, remember this- then steer away from here."
16
"One of the first actions we take at Passages is to ruthlessly scrutinize, always under a doctor's supervision and care, the specific necessity of any mind - altering or mood - altering medications that our clients are taking. As soon as any non essential drugs are out of their systems, the feelings they were trying to suppress usually emerge. When that happens, we can see what symptoms the client was masking with drugs or alcohol."
16
"For several days, I slept. Whether this was a necessary part of physical recovery, or a stubborn retreat from waking reality, I do not know, but I woke only reluctantly to take a little food, falling at once back into a stupor of oblivion, as though the small, warm weight of broth in my stomach were an anchor that pulled me after it, down through the murky fathoms of sleep."
15
"Perhaps that's the best way to recover, to return to the way things were before as quickly as we can. We won the Great Battle, so nothing needs to change."
15
"Those unexpected morality lessons provided by the trip had jolted me into some kind of action. It was time to jettison the past before the present jettisoned me. This was my first veiled attempt at recovery. Although perhaps I was just running away again. I returned to Glasgow, planning to say a final goodbye to Anne and get out of her life, but ended up drinking with buddies in the Chip Bar and never seeing her. I called her instead to say I was moving to London and told her she could have the house and everything else we owned, which wasn't much. I think she was as relieved as I was that I was leaving town for good."
15
"Another page turns on the calendar, April now, not March..........I am spinning the silk threads of my story, weaving the fabric of my world...I spun out of control. Eating was hard. Breathing was hard. Living was hardest.I wanted to swallow the bitter seeds of forgetfulness...Somehow, I dragged myself out of the dark and asked for help.I spin and weave and knit my words and visions until a life starts to take shape.There is no magic cure, no making it all go away forever. There are only small steps upward; an easier day, an unexpected laugh, a mirror that doesn't matter anymore.I am thawing."
14
"Many people look at their past and bemoan their mistakes. Those errors in judgment, behavior, hurting others, and the wrong decisions may be what consumes them now. It does not have to be that way, for recovering from a traumatic situation is all a matter of how we think about what happened. It is not so much about what happened to us as what we make of the circumstance."
13
"I can pretty much guarantee that you will at some point find yourself doing something that at one point you swore you'd never do. You'll do it for the sake of getting high, either directly or indirectly. Trust me. It will happen. You might think you know yourself better than anyone, but you have yet to become acquainted with your addiction. It will introduce itself in ways that you never thought were possible."
12
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