Quotes About Recovery

the core of addiction doesn't lie in what you swallow or inject—it's in the pain you feel in your head. Yet we have built a system that thinks we will stop addicts by increasing their pain. "If I had to design a system that was intended to keep people addicted, I'd design exactly the system that we have right now,

for each traumatic event that happened to a child, they were two to four times more likely to grow up to be an addicted adult.

Addiction is an adaptation. It's not you—it's the cage you live in.

extremely depressed people have become disconnected from a sense of the future, in a way that other really distressed people have not.

child abuse is as likely to cause drug addiction as obesity is to cause heart disease.

One friend told me that she always knew her depression was lifting when she felt her sense of time expanding again

Depression isn't a disease; depression is a normal response to abnormal life experiences!

To the prohibitionists, Hannah is a failure, because she continued using drugs. To the Portland, she was a success, because she knew she was loved. One day, a very senior government minister came to visit the safe injection rooms, and to meet the addicts. He asked Liz: "What percentage of people who use this place would you consider to be write-offs?" She paused and looked at him, trying to figure out how to tell him that the answer is none.

Stop thinking only about individual recovery, he argues, and start thinking about "social recovery.

The damaged 10 percent, by contrast, are the only people we ever see using drugs out on the streets. The result is that the harmed 10 percent make up 100 percent of the official picture. It

I have been around a lot of addiction in my life, and I knew what I was feeling—the addicted person's craving for the thing that numbs their nagging sense of hollowness.

In our normal lives, many of us try to seek relief from distraction simply by crashing—we try to recover from a day of overload by collapsing in front of the TV. But if you only break away from distraction into rest—if you don't replace it with a positive goal you are striving toward—you will always be pulled back to distraction sooner or later. The more powerful path out of distraction is to find your flow.

The goal was to offer the patient two things at the same time. The first was an opportunity to describe the traumatic experience—to craft a story about it, so the patient could make sense of it. As this experiment began, one of the things they discovered almost immediately is that many of the patients had literally never before acknowledged what happened to them to another human being.

Choosing to put a chemical into your body should not be a crime, and being addicted should not be a crime. Instead, all the money spent on arresting, trying, and punishing addicts should be transferred to educating kids and helping addicts to recover.

In the drug war, we guarantee addicts will find it almost impossible to work again, by marking them with the scarlet letter of a criminal record. After the drug war, we will make it easier to employ recovering addicts, with subsidies—because we understand this will keep them from relapsing more effectively than the threat of being caged.

A compassionate approach leads to less addiction.

I contrast this evidence with the evidence from Portugal. More people used drugs, yet addiction fell substantially. Why? Because punishment—shaming a person, caging them, making them unemployable—traps them in addiction. Taking that money and spending it instead on helping them to get jobs and homes and decent lives makes it possible for many of them to stop.

Joel Nigg] believes you can only ethically give out drugs if you are also at the same time trying to solve the deeper problem.

His goal as a doctor was always "trying to identify what happened in the past" of an addict that made them find everyday life unbearable, and to help them overcome it by offering compassion and helping them to build a good life as an alternative. Now they were asking: If this is the goal of all good doctors, why can't it be the goal of government policy?

Until the day that "the Great Judge proclaims: / 'The last addict's died,'254 " the poem said, "Then—not till then—may you be retired.

De todos modos, seguimos pensando que podemos curar la depresión por la vía conceptual. Yo lo veo más sencillo. Primero arreglemos lo fisiológico. Sal. Muévete».

Human beings only become addicted when they cannot find anything better to live for and when they desperately need to fill the emptiness that threatens to destroy them,

a form of grief—for our own lives not being as they should? What if it is a form of grief for the connections we have lost, yet still need?

Addiction," he said, "is a disease of loneliness.