Recovery: Is Recovery From Addiction Is Possible?

"The message of this book is that recovery from addiction is possible."(Shumway.pg 2). Recovery is an ongoing journey that requires a lot of attention and constant dedication and being sober is only the beginning. In this book experts Sterling Shumway and Thomas Kimball have laid out six principles that help along the journey, which are: Hope, Healthy Coping skills, Achievement and Accomplishment, Maintaining Meaningful Relationships, Unique Identity development, and Reclamation of agency. Using the two 's gathered research, personal stories and various exercises they unlock these principles and explain there complexity at a level of understanding for all the parties in an addicts life. Those who complete these principles become more

Hope tells you that healing and good lie ahead, it is possible to rise from the pain. But it is hard to hold to hope while pain is present so it is important to address possible sources like if you also have a mental illness, which is "estimated one out of every two people who struggle with addiction also have a mental illness disorder."(Shumway.pg 24) or if you are still recovering from trauma. Whatever source or combination sources of pain must be dealt with now or it will end up badly in the end. Hope is the key for early recovery and is the starting point to a long lasting recovery. At this stage you will also begin to create a relationship with a higher power, giving yourself to something greater so that it may help you along the

These choices are made by your new connection to yourself that you learned through the previous stages or principles. Also, through these stages you establish and intensify a relationship with your higher power that helps guide you through recovery and gets you to believe in something greater than yourself. Yet another aid that helps you along, be it god or whoever, they are intended to guide and be words of wisdom. This stage is much more than reaching a day to day goal like in the achievement and accomplishment principle, its exceeding that opening up the future creating bigger goals. You can achieve much more which really motivates you in your recovery and offers better reasons for you to continue living without drugs. Be careful, like in every stage pain left untreated can rob you from achieving reclamation of agency. Like in all of the stages pain must be dealt with face on, in order to fully grasp recovery and prevent relapse later