Being a peer recovery coach I get to talk to a lot of people. Many of these people I talk with in the car. One thing that we do at 217 Recovery is give people safe rides to and from recovery services. A lot of the rides we do are to inpatient treatment centers, detox facilities, or sober living homes, and then home from these places as well. Safe transportation for people in recovery is something that we're passionate about here.
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We do these rides with people as trained peer recovery coaches so we can help guide people through the unknown and anxiety-inducing parts of life in early recovery. We get to hear a lot of life stories, and we also get to hear many reasons, or excuses, for why people relapse/return to use. Using the term excuse might sound harsh to some people. But, being a person in recovery who struggled with substance use disorder for more than a decade and a half, I can tell you it doesn't come from a place of judgment. It comes from a place of having the lived experience. I personally used any and every excuse, calling them a reason to return to use at the drop of the smallest stressors life would toss at me. So I understand.
"The day you take complete responsibility for yourself, the day you stop making any excuses, that's the day you start to the top." —O. J. Simpson
But I got hit with some difficult situations recently. When someone gives you an excuse for returning to use, you have to consider the mental/emotional condition of the person you're talking to. That really matters. But when you're talking to someone that's full of complaining or not taking accountability for themselves... an argument with your girlfriend man? Really? I mean, I've been there. But, I also know that when I was there, I wasn't really in it. I wasn't ready to give up the drug and really didn't want it yet. "It" being a life of wellness and recovery. I wasn't serious about living a life centered on wellness. For people with this lived experience, you gain the ability to sense this in others.
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But what about someone who returned to use because of a sexual assault? What about the person whose heart is destroyed because their new baby died in their arms? These are life-shattering events that I can't even imagine going through. Now, I don't believe that we have to return to use or that there's a good reason to do so in any situation...but I can tell you that some people have made this decision after going through shit that some of us can and never will be able to imagine.
And I'd like to take this moment to remind people to have compassion especially when you're in contact with someone dealing with something so far out of your wheelhouse. That compassion might just be the thing that keeps them going another day.
Until next time.
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