Abraham Lincoln is quoted as saying “You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.” Recovery is a responsibility to yourself and the life you are living on the thriving end of surviving trauma. As someone recovering from trauma, you have a responsibility to yourself to feel your feelings, confront your fears, and overcome challenges. Life can be a struggle, even in trauma recovery. After working so hard to survive and laboring in treatment to learn how to thrive, it is easy to want everything to be easy. Unfortunately, life doesn’t always work that way. More unfortunately, you can’t just skip the struggles when they come up.
Skipping the struggle can be the very first domino falling over in a succession of problematic and increasingly damaging actions or behaviors. Take, for instance, someone whose trauma has manifested through addiction. Some form of stress and challenge arises in their life with which they feel they cannot cope. Rather than struggle through the difficulty, experience the pain in its fullness, and gain the critical wisdom necessary for building strength and resilience, they rely on old programming and choose to skip the struggle. Drugs, alcohol, sex, shopping, exercising- whatever the addiction- it provides the relief necessary to get rid of the pain.
Only, there’s a problem with skipping the struggle to find relief from pain. People will go to great lengths just to avoid taking responsibility for the uncomfortable feelings associated with the struggles life can present. The amount of energy and time invested in skipping the struggle actually creates more struggle. Pain is momentary and relief can be a lifetime. When you skip the struggle, the relief is momentary, but the pain continues lasting. Until you learn to stop skipping the struggle and walk through the pain, you stay on the desperate search for momentary relief, an inadequate solution to a long term problem.
Recovery is a relationship you are building with yourself. If you cheat, you can’t expect the relationship to continue working the way it has so far. What you don’t know is that the struggle is where the good stuff is. The more you skip the struggle, the more life lessons, experiences, and tools you skip out on gaining. Through struggle comes strength. With strength comes resilience. With resilience comes recovery.
At The Guest House Ocala, we welcome everyone who has experienced trauma and, as a result, is suffering from addictions, mental health disorders, or other manifestations. Our programs are custom tailored to the specific experiences and needs of each client. Everyone has a story. Change yours today. Call us at Call 1-855-483-7800.