Handling Emotional Ups and Downs in Early Recovery
For most people who go through recovery from addiction, the first few months and even years can be a disorienting time. After spending years using drugs or alcohol to cope, to make feelings go away, or to artificially supply certain emotions, individuals must go through a period of readjustment. Experiencing and coping with natural emotional highs and lows on a daily basis without resorting to substance use is a crucial part of recovery. Learning to feel again can be both difficult and very rewarding.
It is common for individuals in recovery to be extremely emotional. Especially in early recovery (the first few months to a year), recovering addicts often find that they cry (or feel like crying) easily and often. Others experience overwhelming surges of feeling at unusual moments.
Recovery is, in many ways, a process of decompression and catharsis. Addiction is accompanied by so much shame, guilt, denial, suppression of emotion, and dishonesty, and the recovering psyche seems to need time simply to dredge up and clear years of emotional debris. A known saying among recovering individuals applies to this process: “Time takes time.” There is no substitute for taking the time to work through recovery and its accompanying emotional turbulence.
In addition to simply dealing with normal day-to-day feelings, individuals in early recovery may experience other emotional challenges. Addiction is often linked to other unhealthy behaviors, such as dysfunctional or harmful relationships. Many individuals in recovery lose relationships with friends and even family – the friends and family who facilitated or participated in the addictive habits. At the very least, most recovering addicts must make significant adjustments in personal relationships in order to safeguard their recovery; addicts must learn to balance their own needs with the needs of others.
The recovering individual may also experience intense emotions such a guilt or sadness as they face the irresponsible, reckless, hurtful things they did while using. They may also be frightened or overwhelmed as they begin to address memories of childhood or early life trauma which may have led them to use in the first place.
Many recovering addicts have a difficult time accepting that negative emotions are natural and healthy. Many enter recovery with an idyllic vision of kicking their addictive habit and never feeling bad again. However, in order to be truly healthy, the recovering individual must accept that problems, conflicts, and negative emotions are a normal part of life – and attempting to avoid them completely leads to the mindset of a substance abuser. The key to recovery and healthy function is not to avoid problems, but to learn to cope with them and address them constructively.
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