Six Challenges Later in Addiction Recovery
There will always be challenges even with the best recovery.
Key points
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People in later recovery face different challenges from those early in recovery.
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Mistaking monotony for boredom may lead to seeking chaos, threatening sobriety.
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Pride can mask evolving cravings, making them harder to recognize and manage.
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Rigidly sticking to one recovery method may ignore changing personal needs over time.
There will always be challenges in recovery because challenges are unavoidable facts of life. It doesn’t matter how long someone has been in recovery; there will always be challenges along the way. The challenges later in recovery may differ from those early in recovery.
In the world of addiction treatment, there tends to be more focus on challenges early in recovery. Everything is new, different, and disorienting. It makes a good deal of sense to attend to these challenges because many people early in recovery don’t have their feet under them yet. Relapsing or slipping may be much closer at hand for them.
Later in recovery when people have more experience addressing cravings, navigating tricky social situations, and facing challenges without addictive substances and behaviors, relapsing or having a slip may seem a more distant option.
While a slip or relapse may be more distant and less likely, it isn’t impossible. Here are six challenges that people in long term recovery may experience.
Six Common Challenges in Long-Term Recovery
Complacency: We take our recovery for granted and become more passive towards it. We may act like Julius Caesar who claimed after a quick military victory, “Veni, vidi, vici,” which means “I came, I saw, I conquered.”
The assumption is there won’t be significant challenges at all or any challenges will pale in comparison to having conquered our addictions. If you believe you have already won the biggest battle, you may may be ill-prepared for what may come next.
Monotony: In recovery, our lives are on a more even keel. We may have left the drama cycle of offend, repair, repent, and repeat behind us. There may be a wishfulness for excitement. But we may start to mistake chaos for vibrancy and excitement. When we equate these with fun, we put our sobriety at risk.
Hubris/Pride: It is understandable that we are proud to have worked or lived ourselves into recovery. It requires an enormous amount of effort and dedication. When paired with gratitude and appreciation for how others have helped us on our way and all that recovery has brought us, our pride isn’t troubling.
Our pride becomes dangerous when we begin to tell ourselves that we are not the sort of people who would relapse. Some of us may say, I’ve got too many years under my belt. Others may say, I have put in every fail safe there is because I am always prepared for what may come next. Our pride may lead us to believe that we control far more than we actually do.
Our pride may make it more difficult to recognize how the character of cravings may change the longer we are in recovery. Early in recovery, cravings may feel like a mugger that appears out of nowhere. In long term recovery, the cravings may be more like a long con man.
They may be like the Sirens of Greek mythology who lured sailors to their deaths by singing songs all about the heroic past and future glories of the sailors. Transfixed, the sailors crashed into the shoals and were killed or were shipwrecked but so captivated by the songs they didn’t eat.
Dogmatism/rigidity: A person may begin to tell herself, This program has worked before so it will continue to work. We assume that past performance guarantees future results. Ironically, we may become more committed to a program than we are to our own recovery.
A dogmatic view about what does–and even stronger–must work for us makes it harder to see how much we have changed. As we change in recovery, what we need in recovery may change as well.
Expectations/Desert: Not in dry land sense but in the sense of something that is deserved. We may become so attached to the number of days/months/years sober and how hard we have worked that we start to think that we deserve not to work so hard. We may expect others to constantly validate our choices and behaviors. When they do not adequately do so, we may begin to feel resentment not just towards particular people but to the fact that we had to do this work in the first place.
Faulty vision about the past and about the future: We may begin to rewrite or romanticize using days the longer they are in the rearview mirror. We fail to heed the warning on the side mirror that “objects are closer than they appear.” Even in cars that now beep and buzz when something is in a blind spot, we may begin to ignore it the more often we hear it. We may even turn off that safety feature. With our past use of addictive substances and behaviors, we may reframe them as not all that bad.
When we look to the future, we may assume that having some drinks, placing a few bets, taking a few hits will not negatively affect the present. We put on some rose-tinted glasses as we image a perfect rosy future where we will keep everything we have gained in sobriety while being able to engage in behaviors that in the past came at great cost. We forget that everything is going so much better because we are not using/drinking.
Neither a slip nor relapse is inevitable when people cherish their sobriety. People protect what they cherish when their actions spring from honesty and gratitude, which are cornerstones of recovery.
