There are several ways a person can look at recovery. You can see your addiction as a serious disease and debilitating force in your life, and so recovery is seen as a healing process. It can be a means of avoiding serious legal consequences if your addiction puts your outside the bounds of the law. There are ways to view a solid recovery from addiction as a character improvement and personal victory for the ongoing betterment of yourself. All of these are positive perspectives to have on the benefits of addiction recovery. One that hits the heart the hardest however, rarely becomes a relevant factor until you see someone close to you or someone fighting addiction alongside you go down. When someone else takes the fullest extent of the consequences of addiction, that’s when you feel a rush of gratitude and pride that you dodged a bullet by getting clean.
The Disasters of Addiction
Addiction wreaks plenty of havoc on your health, relationships, career, and life but there are certainly some tragic ends that no one wants to meet. A serious drug addiction can land you prison, on the street, or in the grave if not curbed early enough. That’s where the real rubber hits the road. You can run from recovery for a long time, attempting to keep the balance of “functioning addiction” going as long as possible. But that luck runs out eventually.
People in recovery programs always have the realization as a sudden dawning, one that makes them realize just how close they came to death or incarceration. The end of a life due to an out of control substance dependency is truly tragic and something our society deals with on a daily basis. The National Institute on Drug Abuse reports over 60,000 deaths every year from overdose alone. That doesn’t account for the many other deaths associated with substance abuse, shared needles, and street violence.
Gratitude and a Second Chance
When you come to the realization, usually early in recovery, that you are one of the lucky ones, it puts your struggle to remain sober in a stark new light. It seems gut-wrenching and miserable to go through detox, withdrawal, counseling, and the endless avoidance of triggers and cravings to rebound from active addiction. But these struggles are nothing compared to the fatal, life-ending alternatives that are taking down vast swaths of the population struggling with substance abuse.
Take the opportunity today, in this very moment, and every single time your recovery seems bleak and hopeless, to acknowledge the others that didn’t make it out. Honor the struggle because it means you’re alive and still fighting. Offer your gratitude to the forces of the world that have led you to this point where you have the choice to live on and course-correct. You could have just as easily been one of those overdose statistics or free labor in federal prison.
This is your fight. This is your victory. This is your life.
If you’re having trouble with your sobriety and need assistance from addiction specialists, contact our recovery counselors at Hired Power at 800-910-9299 and let us help you stay on the path. None of us can afford to make those statistics of tragedy any bigger.
