Quotes About Recovery

The nature of love had totally escaped her until now. She had thought that if you lost it, you could never get it back, like a stone thrown down a well. But it was like the water at the bottom of the well, there when you can't even see it, shifting in the dark.

Loss does different things to different people. Some fall apart. Some, like the Finder, rebuild. I have done both. I have crawled under my table and refused to come out. I have covered myself with thorns and tattoos. I have planted a garden, reached out to my neighbors, begun to write down my story.

Child abuse in all its forms has always been with us and it is still widespread today. But only recently have the victims started realizing what has been done to them and talking to other people about it. Subjects rarely touched on before are moving into the foreground of discussion, a discussion which opens up new perspectives of greater fulfillment in life for very many people.

I want to live my own life, to be at peace and not to think all the time about how they hit me and humiliated me and almost tortured me.

This is an astounding statement, because I know of literally no one who suffers from psychic symptoms and seeks treatment for them without having at least been beaten and humiliated in childhood.

Throughout their later life, these people will have to deal with situations in which these rudimentary feelings may awaken, but without the original connection ever becoming clear. The connection can be deciphered only when the intense emotions have been experienced in therapy and successfully linked with their original situation.*

Compulsive substance addiction can have disastrous effects because it blocks off the path to genuine emotions and feelings. The drug can supply feelings of euphoria that reanimate the creativity scotched by a cruel upbringing. But the body will not tolerate this self-alienation for the duration of an entire life.

Then, however, comes 'the work of forgiveness, which is apparently necessary if one is to heal. Many young people who have AIDS or are drug-addicted die in the wake of their effort to forgive so much. What they do not realize is that they are trying to keep the repression of their childhood intact.

The true source of her illness was the unfulfilled longing for communication, the deprivation of genuine contact with her parents and boyfriend. Her refusal to eat was the sign of this deficiency. Ultimately her recovery was possible because Anita realized that there were people who could and did understand her.

Maybe it's an addiction, she says, but she looks around her at meetings and she can't help thinking that meetings are good for people. They make people feel everything isn't such a muddle.

When I was raped I lost my virginity and almost lost my life. I also discarded certain assumptions I had held about how the world worked and about how safe I was.

Like a medical procedure,' Ruth said. 'Intricate surgery is needed to patch up the planet.

By the time I was eighteen, she had sat me down and detailed her alcoholism, its onset and aftermath. She believed that by sharing such things I might be able to avoid them or, if need be, recognize them when they occurred. By talking about them to her children, she was also acknowledging that they were real and that they had an effect on us too, that things like this shaped a family, not just the person they happened to.

Oh sweetheart, do you really think if you seal it up, that the pain's gonna go away?

Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain.

All of them are gone except for me.. And for me.. Nothing is gone.

Try to breathe, he said, and for the first time the only thought in my head after an instruction like that wasn't Fuck you. I breathed.

Like someone who has survived a gun-shot, the wound had been closing, closing - braiding into a scar for eight long years.

But I had made contact with a different planet from the one my parents or sister lived on. It was a planet where an act of violence changed your life.

Healing begins where the wound was made.

The crushed teapot in the rubbish of the bulldozed house will sing in your ears forever.

Living with an alcohol problem is just like living with an abusive partner. It leaves you physically battered, destroys your confidence and self-esteem, yet makes you feel perversely dependent on your abuser. The only difference is that you can walk out on drink any time you like and no one will try to stop you.

Being a smoker can never get better, only worse.

Knowledge is not necessarily enough to beat the nicotine trap.