Literally Anything Else

When working with clients in early recovery, the question often comes up: “what can I do instead of using?”  In addiction, the substance or behavior comes to be the most reliable part of a person’s life - too reliable, as it turns outs.  Like a phone whose battery never runs out, the substance  is always available to fill the gaps between activities in a person’s life.  To occlude the downtime when questions about meaning, satisfaction, and self worth might arise.  Without the substance, a person in recovery finds themself suddenly and without armor exposed to all the painful and insistent questions that shape a life well lived.  And while those are great questions to expose yourself to, facing them constantly is not helpful or livable.  People need distraction, and the one I recommend most is Literally Anything Else.

It’s very easy to get caught up in ‘best practices’ for recovery, but it doesn’t really make sense to do so.  While there are certain rules of thumb I often find myself trotting out - sobriety is simpler than managed use being a common one - the reality is that getting clean is a personal journey.  There’s no one size fits all.  So while it’s easy to say that regular exercise has been shown over and over to support stable mental health, that may simply not be an appropriate recommendation for how to spend time in recovery.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run through a list of therapy-approved hobbies and time sinks thinking that surely one of these will work for a client just to look up and see them frowning disinterestedly on my couch.  Clients surprise me all the time: people who I’m sure would enjoy getting into bike racing come in one day beaming over the great time they had that weekend going bird watching.  A client I’m sure would love knitting brings in their weight belt to show off their new power lifting hobby.

Because as it turns out, when you’re exposed to those painful, persistent questions about meaning, satisfaction, and self worth, you learn new things about yourself.  You change.  You do the thing that your addiction was keeping you from the whole time: facing yourself as a creature whose time is running out.  It’s not an easy thing to do, not the kind of thing that a person can bear for long, and so it forces the issue: use again, or do literally anything else?