Recovery takes time, but it happens. We need to be patient with ourselves.
Living Clean, Chapter 4, “Sex”
Some of us came to NA hoping for a quick recovery, just as we had recovered from the accident and gotten over the flu quickly. We wanted to put addiction behind us and then move on with our lives. A mixture of hope and denial convinced us that detoxification would fix us. Our experience told a different story. We had been able to stop using occasionally, but we could never stop for good. At some point, we realized we needed more than a temporary stop and mustered the patience to stick with the “just for today” mentality.
We approach our lives and ourselves in our daily lives, as the Core Text suggests. We strive for progress, while being careful not to expect perfection. Persevering requires us to be patient with the process and with ourselves. Recovery is ongoing for people like us, not something we can look at in the mirror. We see ourselves as recovering, not recovered, addicts.
Practicing patience requires us to be more forgiving of ourselves. We strive to cultivate generous and encouraging thoughts, rejecting the harsh internal dialogue that tells us, “I should be better than I am now.” When we measure our progress against some unrealistic standard of comparison or, even worse, when we compare our insides to the outsides of others, it’s no wonder we end up feeling like we’re not good enough. We focus on finding satisfaction in the pace of our progress. Patience serves as a bridge to much-needed hope, faith, and humility as we learn to trust the process.
We will need all of these spiritual principles and more as we navigate the minefields of our past with the Twelve Steps and the guidance of a supporter. Trauma and abuse have long haunted many of us, so we learn to be patient with ourselves as an expression of love. We begin to understand our past without allowing it to define us. All of this takes time—time that is available to us because we are learning to practice patience.
I invite patience to help me find satisfaction in my progress and access the strength I need to continue my recovery.
