Things People Don’t Tell You When You Choose Recovery *TRIGGER WARNING*

There are so many quotes revolving around recovery, and we may feel that recovery “SHOULD” be easy once it’s done it’s done and we don’t ever have to deal with our habits again. However, that is far from the truth. This post isn’t meant to discourage you from recovery- the aim of this post is to increase awareness of what the recovery process actually looks and feels like, so you can be more aware in your approach to it.

Let’s begin.

Recovery is a continual effort, a continual choice you have to make. Life is filled with choices every single day. Recovery is a choice you have to make day in, day out. You made the choice to begin recovery- good job! But now you have to make the choice every single day to continue on your recovery path. Recovery is a life-long journey, not a destination.

Stemming off from point number one, the urges can continue to come back, months and years into recovery. You’ve used self-harm as a coping mechanism for so long now, your brain has become accustomed to resorting to it immediately after a negatively viewed incident has happened. It helped meet our needs at the time. Our brain has been trained for so long to use it. It’s now time to retrain it again, and that takes a lot of time.

You may have long associated your scars and wounds as part of your identity. But once you’re on the recovery path for a while, and as the scars and wounds begin to heal and fade, you may feel lost. You may feel like you’ve lost yourself or a part of yourself, because you’ve built your identity up for so long to revolve around the physical ramifications of your coping mechanism. It feels so hard to let that part of you go free again. But it’s so important to, otherwise, you won’t truly recover and break free from what’s been holding you back for so long.

Recovery is difficult- no doubt. Sometimes, we may plateau and become resistant to moving forward. There are many reasons for that, and during these times, it’s really important to try to find out why. Is it because you’re scared of taking that leap into the new world? Is it because something has come up during your therapy? Has something come up in your life that’s affecting you and making you feel different emotions?

It takes a lot of hard work, self-discipline and determination to change from self-harm to more positive coping techniques and mechanisms. It is stated as a general guideline that it takes 5 positive coping techniques to negate the 1 negative one. And doing it just once doesn’t count, we have to actively choose the positive over the negative every single time.

Even when in recovery, there will still be a part of you that misses self-harming. You may miss how it felt, the normality of your routine, knowing exactly what to do when something bad happens. You may miss knowing there is something you can always rely on to give you that boost you need, whenever you need it. There is a part of you that never forgets self-harm as a coping mechanism, but there’s a bigger part of you there that is able to choose recovery over reverting back to your old self. You have to find it, believe in it and trust it.

Embracing your body takes a lot of hard work healing and a lot of time. Having to see them day in and day out as reminders of your past can make it extremely difficult to heal from it and to move on. What makes it more difficult is when you see people staring, or have people ask directly to your face.

Sometimes, it’s easier to relapse than to choose recovery. I’m sure you can think of reasons why by now. Recovery is a conscious decision that requires so much energy from you to ensure you will not revert back to your previous self. As human beings, we are accustomed to choose the path of least resistance. Relapsing is that path.

We might feel guilty for not self-harming. We might think that it’d be easier to just do it. We might feel guilty for letting self-harm get to this point, guilty for having to recover. Guilty for letting the self-harm part of you down, for not choosing it anymore. But remember that guilt is short-lived, and it was conditioned. We can condition our response now to feeling positive for choosing recovery and happy for continually choosing recovery. As with everything in life, it takes time.

It gets worse before it gets better. To properly recover, we need to dig deep into ourselves. We need to notice and acknowledge what’s made us feel this way and what made us choose self-harm in the first place. We need to revisit our trauma and our negative memories, and we need to first work through them. Only then can we fully heal from our past and choose recovery with certainty.

Recovery. The choice is yours. But I hope you do pick recovery, and I do hope you will continue to choose it, every single day. Know that there are others out there who have been where you are, who are ahead of you on that path, people you can look up to. Know that there are others out there who will support you and help motivate you to choose the positive. Trust the process, trust yourself that you can and will make that decision every single day.