Northwoods Recovery: The transformation beyond sobriety

From the outside looking in, one might get the impression that Northwoods Recovery meetings are merely a rest stop for those wayward souls making their heavily burdened way down to hell. 

That view will only hold up till attendees takes their turns to unload.

At a previous meeting, a new acquaintance was awarded his thirty-day's clean and sober key tag, as always generating heartfelt congratulations and the usual demand for clarification: “Tell us how you did that!” To which he cheerily responded “It was easy! I just had to change everything.” 

Of course the rest of us got a good laugh from that; every recovering addict is all too aware that nothing about finding and maintaining sobriety after a long, crazy stretch of active addiction is the slightest bit easy. But I don’t believe our newest key tag holder’s statement got the second part quite right. First, real sobriety must be achieved- a far from easy task- and when maintaining that, everything else will begin to change, seemingly of its own volition. 

I really didn’t have the slightest idea what Recovery would mean in the way of changes to the train wreck my life had been; I only knew I’d been given no choice but to change. Substance use had become a thing of the past. Until now doing dope had literally been my whole life, so I was unable to envision an existence without the cornerstone of that drug use. But I had made an unshakeable commitment to do exactly that. 

And because my new sobriety was being rigidly maintained- reinforced by almost daily Recovery meetings- everything else now began to change. Embracing sobriety kick-started an unanticipated spiritual transformation. The changes occurring in my material world were only a reflection of the inner change that had taken place; a daily reaffirmation that life had changed in remarkable ways.

Real, long-term sobriety can’t help but bring about a purifying transformation in the lives of its practitioners. While actively using, every aspect of an addict's life revolves around his or her substance use; take that away and an entire way of life is gone. But then, without the suffocating burden of drug dependence, we’ll breathe new life into what had been spiritually dead.  

Once spiritually transformed, we begin to incorporate that change into daily living, and are free to pursue the other temporal changes that serve as proof:

We Do Recover.