This is fresh in my mind, so I'm going to talk about it for a moment. Things that we want vs things that we need. I hear this all the time working with people in the recovery community "I need to figure out my life", "I need to get sober", or the ever-popular "I need to get my shit together". I get it. I've been there personally. Pretty much everybody I know who's in recovery from substance use disorder has said one of these things, or a variation of these things, at some point in their journey to finding recovery, including myself.
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Something I'm also very familiar with is what's commonly said after giving opportunities to the people I quoted above. Opportunities like getting them to inpatient treatment, or without getting too detailed, checking off every single box that's been provided as a need... only to get the offered solution shot down because "I don't want to be that far away", "I don't want to be away from my kids", "I don't want to be in a program that long", "I don't want to lose my job", etc, etc. "Need" has been replaced with "Want".
"You can't always get what you want, But if you try sometimes, well, you might find, You get what you need" —The Rolling Stones
Now, to some people, some of these may sound like good reasons. They're putting their kids first! Holding employment? That's so responsible of them. But they start looking a lot more like excuses when you realize that our addiction is going to take away our kids eventually. It's going to take us down a road of suffering much longer than any treatment program lasts, and there will always be a job you can get somewhere. Absolutely always. The brutal reality is that not everyone makes it into recovery with their lives, and your kids will be much better off missing you for the period of time you're in treatment rather than missing you after your funeral.
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This is a rather heavy publication this time. But I got a stark reminder of these things today and how I was while "trying to get my shit together" before getting into recovery for the last time. It wasn't until I dropped every single pre-conceived idea of how I wanted recovery to work and submitted myself to programs that had proven results with long-term recovery, if going all in, that I even began to gain some traction on anything that even remotely looked like "getting my shit together" and started to transform into something that couldn't be characterized as being a "dry drunk" or "white knuckling" situation.
As long as you hold something over your sobriety and recovery, be it pride, loved ones, or creature comforts, you're going to sabotage yourself back into using faster than you could ever realize. And this is coming from real-world lived experience.
Choose what you NEED today, before losing it all by reaching for how you want it to look. Your life depends on it.
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