Quotes About Recovery

When we allow ourselves to feel these painful feelings, give them an accurate name, and when we share the grief with safe and supportive others over time, we are able to complete our grief work and thus be free of it.

Furthermore, people like Marcus can over-estimate the degree of threat or mis-read visual cues such as facial expressions, resulting in an inability to modulate emotional pain. Imagine what will happen when he experiences a situation in early recovery that reminds him of the old trauma. For example, if his male supervisor at work gets angry with him, Marcus' brain has learned to go into a "fight or flight" pattern, which leads to another angry outburst.

An important part of successful recovery is learning to accurately name what happened for us and the components of our inner life as they come up for us, including our various feelings, and learning to tolerate emotional pain without trying to medicate it away.

They are often in a shame-based system, which attempts to cover over and even destroy the True Self.

The way out is to surrender, and then to become, gradually, a co-creator of life. This is where the spiritual aspect of recovery comes into play as a powerful aid. Attendance at and working 12 Step recovery programs such as Al-Anon, Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, ACA/ACoA, CoDA, and Overeaters Anonymous and others are helpful. Other spiritual paths may also be helpful.

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.

Ashley tried to speak. Tried again and still could not find the words. Finally she wiped her eyes, pressed her ear to my chest, and whispered. 'Give me all the pieces.

Maybe piecing is continual. Maybe the glue takes time to dry. Maybe bones take time to mend. Maybe it's okay that the mess I call me is in process. Maybe it's a long, hard walk out of the crash site. Maybe the distance is different for each of us. Maybe love is bigger than my mess.

Maybe broken is what happens before you become unbroken.

living with a broken heart is living half dead, and that doesn't mean you're half alive. It means you're half dead. And…that's no way to live.

I guess sometimes it's got to hurt before it can get better." I nodded. "Hearts are like that.

You and I... we never really finished our conversation, but I can tell you this... living with a broken heart is living half dead, and that doesn't mean you're half alive. It means you're half dead. And... that's no way to live.

Broken people just need piecing back together.

grow back. It's not a lizard's tail. It's more like a huge stained glass that shattered into a million pieces, and it's not going back together. Least not the way it was. You can mush it all into one piece, but that doesn't make it a window. That makes it a pile of broken colored glass. Shattered hearts don't mend and they don't heal. They just don't work that way.

You unhinged your body from an opium addiction with a book?" She smiled. "Not just any book. A series of thirteen books by one author. I've read them twenty or thirty times each." "You've read one book twenty or thirty times?" "Actually, I've read thirteen books twenty-seven times.

But time does heal. Not like we think it does, not like we would—from the front—but more from the back or side or someplace we can't see it coming. It bubbles up beneath and rises all around.

Dummy #3, the man with the cut Achilles

I guess sometimes it's got to hurt before it can get better." I nodded. "Hearts are like that.

Kids are like a spring, or a Stretch Armstrong. No matter how many times they're passed around, passed off, and passed on . . . they snap back." He spit through his window. "Hope . . . it's the fuel that feeds them." He shook his head and spit something off the end of his tongue. "God forbid the day they stop eating it.

We, all of us, have been affected by war, hurricanes, drought, economic hardship. The result is a disease—an epidemic—called 'hopelessness.' It's carried on the air around here, and I am fighting it." My

No gone is too far gone.

Sometimes we have to sing through the scars. Sometimes a song is the only thing that heals the broken places in us. Only thing that breaks the chains on the heart.

Memories surfaced and flashed before my mind's eye—the hospital, tear stained nights, never-ending days, loneliness so deep I thought I would drown—and maybe sometimes I wanted to. I flung open the doors of my mind, dug them out of their holes where I'd hidden them from Maggie, and pretty soon ten pads turned into twenty, and all the beauty and wonder—and yes, even ugliness—of my life stared back at me. The mirror told no lies.

Wishful thinking, that time might heal—it seldom healed anything, only making scars that were often tender to the touch, and ugly.