Meaningful Living

Starting life after drink & drugs is not just a question of putting the substance down. Abstinence or stable using is not the end, it is the means. The most important element in moving on after addiction is a meaningful life. 

Addiction by definition destroys life. It takes away health, family, money, relationships and worse. This happens slowly but by the end life has been reduced to a small, restricted set of activities that mainly revolve around the substance and little else. It's like a bad version of Groundhog day that has lasted into the years. When you come too there is a serious rebuilding job to be done. 

From the Pause. Recover. point of view we see this as a long term task. So if your new life is to be sustainable then it will have to be meaningful. Just as it took a long time for life to be destroyed, so it is not a matter of a few weeks to put it back together as if it were a jigsaw. There will also be obstacles and dark times on the road back, so if the goal is not meaningful then it will be so much harder to persist and sustain the progress. 

Meaning will come from engaging in certain kinds of activities that feel 'right'. This will be different for different people and so it is a question that needs to be asked from the the off, and the answer may change over time. What matters is that you find meaning that you can connect with. 

Sometimes an easy way to get started with this is simply to look back over the better times and see if you can find a pattern. As an ongoing task you can start a list with 'not' meaningful in the left column and meaningful in the right hand column. If you get up to 25 items in each column you are bound to start noticing some trends, and this might provide a start point for the new journey.