Recovery

Recovery is a word that once had an almost talismanic meaning, a power that seems to have faded. It has become folded in with the easily-used jargon of what it sometimes called Recovery Inc. That is not a cheap shot but the media-dubbed term for the wide range of recovery programmes out there, everything from the broad spread of 12-Step versions to juicing detox programmes. It is a huge machine, and I am not trying to undermine it in any way. Well-known programmes save lives every day, important numbers of lives.

The point I want to make is that a lot of us now put ourselves into so-called recovery processes without actually having decided that we want to recover. It is just another process that has to be gone through, and so the power has gone out of the word.

The burning desire to really recover is where the power lies, and it is what this post is about.

We have diluted the important truth of recovery—the profound wish to return to a normal physical or mental state after, well after what? In theory it is after anything that has taken us out of the normal state. But in practice most of us don’t even start out from this odd conceptual idea of the normal state, normal meaning balanced, healthy.

What is normal?

If a child has been sexually abused, if their entire sense of themselves in the world has been defined by an early experience of this kind of human corruption, then how do they return to a normal state if they had never experienced one in the first place?

There is such a lot of media chat about all of the many and varied levels of mental disability and scarring caused by sexual abuse at any stage. But there is a certain judgement in this, with its implication that ‘we’ who are commentating are the normal ones, passing judgement on the emotionally disabled.

We are all disabled in different ways. And we all expend much of our life energy trying to hide this from others who are equally disabled. It’s not so much the blind leading the blind, as the crippled hiding from the crippled.

The risk of putting that generic point is that it could be read as sweeping us all together into the lazy and dangerous statement: ‘Oh, we’re all damaged goods, so we just have to deal with it’. No, the point of putting what I did is that the partial, or marginal damage in all of us should make us all sympathetic, indeed empathetic, to the profound wounding in those who have vast damage to take on. We should be able to admire their survival and back their recovery rather than falling back on our need to label, box, and reject the profoundly abused as ‘too hard to deal with’ in order not to have to face the underbelly of our own human condition. We don’t even realise we’re doing it, but one of the most common phrases in use is: ‘Oh, she’ll never get over that…’ as if we have almost lost our faith in our ability to recover, to heal.

Abuse controlling the story

So, recovery becomes dependent on our belief in it, in our power to heal ourselves, to take back our story. By this I mean that someone who has been sexually abused becomes controlled by their abuser, and by the story of their abuse. It gives their abuser a terrifying power that grows bigger all the time, blowing them up into figures of absolute power, and rendering the abused powerless. Recovery requires accepting and understanding the impact of these entrenched stories. It means understanding that we, the abused, the victims, have to find a way to stop our lives from being controlled by a story that happened at a point in our lives that is over.

We have to find a way to take responsibility for the truth that we are the ones still giving the story the power to control us, all day, every day.

This is a very hard truth to acknowledge, and huge support and a very dependable routine are vital in this process (this earlier post covers the five vital pillars of recovery and good mental health).

Our disabilities, our wounds, our entrenched mental stories are part of the map of who we are. To recover means finding the power to face them, fearlessly, and to accept that they are a part of who we are, the markings on our map that we have to learn to navigate. Trying to pretend that they are not there just gives them more power, the chance to lead us away from the real journey of our lives, our story, not the story of what someone else did to us. And perhaps the most important thing of all to know is that recovery is possible, and when it comes it is like being given back your life. Nothing compares to this.