I’ve Already Tried Everything. Why Would Deeper Recovery Be Different?
In the last article, we looked at the experience of having stopped the addiction and still sensing that something important has not changed. For many people, the natural response to that feeling is to work harder at recovery—to attend more meetings, deepen a spiritual practice, return to therapy, become more disciplined or recommit to the practices that have already helped. After years of doing that, however, the suggestion that there might be another level called “deeper recovery” can understandably raise a skeptical question: What could possibly be different about this?
You May Already Be Working Very Hard at Recovery
If you have been in recovery for a year or more, there is a good chance you have already put a great deal of effort into changing your life.
You may have gone to meetings, therapy or treatment. You may have prayed, meditated, journaled, read books, taken inventories, made amends and worked hard to become more honest, generous, responsible and aware of how you affect other people.
You may have spent years paying close attention to how you are showing up in the world.
So when someone starts talking about “deeper recovery,” it makes sense that you might feel skeptical. You may hear those words and imagine another process, another set of practices, another level of commitment and another demand to work even harder than you already have.
You may already feel exhausted by how much effort recovery has required of you. The thought of taking on another process may feel more burdensome than hopeful.
When Recovery Becomes Self-Monitoring
For many people, recovery gradually becomes a practice of self-monitoring. You watch your behavior, your choices and your relationships. You ask yourself whether you are being selfish, whether you are being honest enough, whether you are contributing more than you are taking, whether you are cleaning up the messes you made in the past and creating fewer of them today.
Along with that can come another kind of monitoring: How are people perceiving me? Can they see that I have changed? Do they recognize how much better I am doing?
Underneath much of this effort can be a deeply held premise: something must have been wrong with me if I resorted to addiction, so recovery requires me to work on whatever is wrong with me until I finally get it right.
That premise can keep a person focused for years on managing what shows up on the outside while paying much less attention to what is actually happening on the inside.
The Shift From Self-Management to Self-Awareness
Deeper recovery begins with a shift in where you place your attention.
Instead of primarily monitoring how you are behaving and how others may be experiencing you, you begin to monitor your own inner experience. You become curious about the thoughts, emotions, body sensations, urges and impulses that are occurring right now.
You might notice that a thought has appeared, followed by another familiar kind of thought. You may become aware of an emotion, a tightening in your chest, an impulse to act or an urge to escape. Rather than immediately interpreting the experience, you simply notice what is happening.
Developing the Neutral Observer
I call this developing the Neutral Observer, which means learning to witness your experience with the kind of curiosity a scientist might bring to an experiment. The scientist pays attention to what occurs and becomes interested in what the observation may eventually reveal.
This way of paying attention can be surprisingly different from the self-monitoring that many people have practiced throughout recovery.
Even Meditation Can Become Self-Management
The difference becomes especially clear with practices such as meditation.
Prayer and meditation are highly valued in 12-Step recovery, and many people have practiced one or both for years. Someone may meditate ten minutes every morning and evening, or perhaps an hour every day, and still wonder why deeper recovery would be any different from what they are already doing.
The important question becomes the purpose of the practice.
Meditation can become another way of trying to regulate yourself, improve yourself or make sure you are doing recovery correctly. When that happens, it can become part of the same self-management system you have already been working so hard to maintain.
When the purpose of meditation, or any practice of presence, becomes greater awareness of your own experience, something begins to change. You are developing the capacity to notice yourself with greater curiosity and less evaluation.
Reclaiming the Present Moment
As you do that, you may begin to experience a little more space around what you are feeling. You may notice some relief or relaxation simply because you have named what is happening without immediately interpreting it or deciding what you need to do about it.
That is where the shift from self-management to self-awareness begins. As you become more able to notice your experience without immediately evaluating or changing it, your attention returns to what is actually happening within you right now.
In that process, something else begins to be recovered as well: access to the present moment.
That may sound simple, especially if meditation and mindfulness have already been part of your recovery. Its significance becomes clearer when presence is understood as the beginning of a much larger movement toward becoming more aware of yourself, learning to know yourself more deeply and eventually developing greater trust in yourself.
Deeper recovery begins there.
As attention begins to shift from managing yourself to becoming aware of yourself, one of the first things you begin to reclaim is access to the present moment. That may seem like a small thing, particularly if meditation, mindfulness or prayer have already been part of your recovery, but presence becomes much more significant when it serves as the place from which you begin to notice, know and eventually trust yourself. In the next article, we will look more closely at why recovering the present moment may be one of the first important movements into deeper recovery.
