Building your Personal Recovery Plan:
How Do We Recover?
Recovery is a process of becoming free from the need to medicate our relationship to the world we live in. It can be characterized as having five phases:
1. Identify.
We identify our core attachments to tobacco and the relationship between childhood, family and addiction.
2. Share
We share our feelings with someone we trust (group) as we become more comfortable experiencing our emotional life, removing the need to protect ourselves from our feelings.
3. Grieve
As we grieve the loss we recover the ability to be ourselves. This process is unique to each individual. Long term, non-judgmental support is very helpful. This process is on-going and natural and leads to deep healing.
4. Reset Identity Markers & Move On
To fully recover we reset what is still hurting and develop new survival strategies that work for us over the long term. We develop new identity tools and put them in working order. What works we keep, what doesn’t we discard.
5. Patterns & Framework
This healing pattern can be repeated many times as each core issue is processed through to closure with no more unfinished business. It is useful to have a broad framework for overall recovery.
Build your Support Network
It is very important to develop a support/sabotage chart of family members. Families are a systems which develop deep bonds and attachments over time. The same applies to friends and co-workers.
SUPPORT
Watch this video to help you get started filling in your Support Matrix.
The essentials of building a support network and recommendations regarding the level of support you might need.
ACTIONS
The following charts develop a profile of family/friends/colleagues or classmates in order to identify which friendships represent your best opportunity for recovery.
Journaling:
Keeping a journal is an extremely effective recovery tool which provides an external access point to our unconscious drivers. It it you can record all your essential experiences including your dreams, your setbacks, and stumbles, lessons learned and your own internal sabotage patterns.
ACTIONS
Your journal is for you and you only. Give it a try.
You don’t have to be a great writer. Keep it simple.
What’s Next?
Build the Action Plan
As smokers, we tend to utilize tobacco smoking as our prime coping tool. We need to identify which core areas of our survival strategy will be significantly impacted by our recovery program and take steps to have a plan ready to deal with these areas.
The number of smokes we inhale is not the real issue. It is our relationship to them that really matters.
By doing this self-assessment, it will arm you in a skillful way to achieve your true goal, to be come a happy non-smoker.