If it sometimes feels like we’re at war in recovery, that’s a pretty good summation of the understanding of some of the difficulties and obstacles we find ourselves having to face and learn how to deal with. The problem for many of us in recovery isn’t that we lack courage, but that we don’t recognize that we even have it.

And we all know that it takes courage to face the unknown, especially when we haven’t had a very good track record of being able to do so without the help of our drug of choice.

That’s why we’re all here now, though. We did somehow find the courage to get clean and sober. And it couldn’t have been easy. Well, maybe some few of us were able to detoxify and skate through the lectures and individual and group therapy sessions without feeling too much pain, thinking that this was a whole lot easier than we thought. But the chances are fairly good that if that was what we thought was going on, we came smack up against reality in a very demonstrative way somewhere along the line in recovery.

The truth is that courage is a trait that lies deep within each and every one of us. It may take some time for it to surface, or, more accurately, for us to allow it to do so. But if we are truly motivated and determined to make good on our commitment to sobriety, we will need to allow courage to bubble up and help reinforce us sooner or later.

Being courageous doesn’t mean going forth recklessly, with complete and utter disregard for the dangers ahead. That’s not courage. It’s foolhardiness. Courage also requires a willingness to push through the fear, to endure what we must in order to move past the obstacle – the fear – and come out on the other side.

This is true in war and it is also true for those of us who have willingly embraced recovery.

But how, we may well ask, do we combine the two: recognize the danger and be willing to endure what we must? Isn’t that the $64,000 question? The answer may well lie in the support and encouragement of our fellow 12-step group members, our sponsor, our loving family and close friends, and our belief and interaction with our Higher Power.

It may also be, as it has been for many others, just something that we acquire over time, thanks to the unwavering support and encouragement of the aforementioned others.

Talk to old-timers in the rooms of recovery and we’ll learn that knowledge and self-confidence grows with continued practice: practice doing the hard work of recovery, practice perfecting solutions that work, practice living in the present in our chosen life in sobriety.

Don’t we find that we become discouraged when things don’t go as we had planned, or as we hoped they’d turn out? Of course we do. That’s human nature, and it’s no different for us because we’re in recovery than it is for any man or woman on the planet. We all have certain expectations. We all carry with us certain belief sets and a diverse set of life experiences. In short, we’re each unique. But we all have to make our own way in this life the best we can. To the extent that we learn how to face our fears and find the courage to keep moving forward will determine how successful we are in our life’s work.

It’s also important here to mention the necessity of balance. If we’re willing to endure whatever comes our way but lack an understanding of the dangers we face, we’re more likely to encounter more pain and suffering than we need to. There are a few terms to describe such an approach, including being a glutton for punishment, acting in a foolhardy way, or punishing ourselves because we don’t think we deserve anything good.

The first step in marshalling our courage is to understand what we’re facing, not just to rush forward blindly without a full appreciation for the potential or real danger ahead. Once we have a good understanding of the risks and dangers, the next step in summoning our courage is the determination we make that we will find a way to move through the fear, we will find a plan, and we will keep going because we know we have to – and we know we can do it.

Putting this into the most basic context may help. When we first entered recovery, we may have been so fearful that we thought we’d fall into relapse the first day or week. We got ourselves to the 12-step meetings and followed the recommendations and recovery plan we learned about and put together in rehab. We were scared, no doubt, perhaps even terrified. We knew the risks, but we did have somewhat of a plan. Would it work? We weren’t altogether sure, but we were encouraged and supported by others who cared about us. Armed with the knowledge of the dangers and being willing to do what it took to make it through our fear, we were able to remain clean and sober for that first day or week or month or six months.

This is recovery in action, with an emphasis on the action part.

When someone asks us to define success, what do we reply? Is it a term that we even allow ourselves to think about much or is success somehow an alien concept, one that we feel doesn’t, cannot, or will not apply to those of us in recovery?

There are probably as many interpretations of the word success as there are brands of coffee or toothpaste, maybe even more. The truth is that how each of us views success will vary from day to day, depending on our circumstances and the situations we find ourselves having to deal with.

In other words, there is no single definition, and no constant one, either. But this is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s a healthy indicator of our making progress toward healing.

But let’s go back to our first days in recovery and what, if anything, we thought about success in relation to our new life in sobriety. It’s more likely than not that we felt that if we did achieve any measure of success, it would be a long time coming. We probably felt that we had a whole lot of word to do before we could count success as a result.

We were probably right, at least on one account. The fact is that we all started at the beginning. We all struggled with various demons, desperate to put our addictive past behind us, focused and confused about what we needed to do to help us gain traction in recovery, and all the time worried that we just might not make it after all.

Sometimes these feelings were fleeting, while at other times, they were more or less constant. Think about being newly sober. What did that feel like? For some, it was no doubt a frighteningly new experience. Others may have welcomed it but didn’t quite know how to handle it. What would our new daily routine be like now that we were no longer dependent on our daily fix, whether that was alcohol or drugs or compulsive gambling, overwork, overeating, compulsive sexual behavior or some other "drug of choice"?

Yet here we are today and mostly the better for our efforts in those early days. Some of us reading this, though, are just embarking upon our recovery journey. No matter at which point we find ourselves, newly sober or long-time sober, success is a term and a concept and a reality that we need to plant firmly in our minds.

Okay, admittedly, this won’t be easy for everyone. And, truth be told, we all struggle with our ideas about success, what constitutes success, when we achieve success, and even how we know that we have been successful in this endeavor or that task.

The support, encouragement and recognition of our friends and fellow 12-step group members, our sponsor, our loving family and close friends certainly helps. When we reach certain milestones in recovery, such as our first 30-day point being clean and sober, our six-month point, our one-year anniversary, we are acknowledged and congratulated for our achievement. This is, indeed, a cause for righteous celebration – of the sober kind. We fought hard, in many cases, to get to this level of accomplishment, and that, for us, should constitute success.

After a while, say, many months and/or years in effective recovery – meaning we’ve maintained our sobriety without relapsing and have realized many of our goals – does the concept of success still matter? Do we ever reach the point where we feel like there’s nothing left to achieve? What if we aren’t satisfied with where we are and what we’ve been able to achieve? Are we destined to be miserable for the rest of our lives, to constantly yearn for what could have been?

This is the danger of complacency, and of settling for less that what we really want in the first place. Somewhere along the way we probably listened to that negative inner voice in our heads telling us that we don’t have what it takes to get "there," or that we don’t deserve to be successful. Even if we chide that pesky monotone and get busy doing some worthwhile task, the nagging thought that it might somehow be right may still linger. How do we fight that and keep moving forward toward new goals?

It is an ongoing process, to be sure, and one that every individual in recovery learns how to deal with in his or her own way. Suffice to say that the motivation to succeed never really goes away. It may subside for a time but, just like a nay-saying voice telling us the opposite, our positive instincts and firm commitment to keep making progress in recovery will surface again – if we let it, encourage it, nourish it and do something about it.

Gotta love Coach Lombardi, right? Even if we’re not avid football fans or never heard the legendary coach’s name (uh, what planet are we living on?), the straight-talking, much-loved American football coach had a lot of pretty profound sayings that hold as true today as when he first uttered them.

Case in point: there’s no shortcut to achieving success. When we’re embarking on our recovery journey, we’re likely well aware that it’s going to be a lot of work. Some of that work will be painful, even agonizing, to a certain extent. After all, this is probably all-new territory for us and likely entails a lot of self-discovery that we’d really rather avoid. Such is not the recommended course, however, if we truly want to achieve effective and lasting sobriety. We have to know ourselves and our shortcomings before we can design a recovery plan and get to work on it.

Ah, but wouldn’t it be so much easier if we could just skip to the end and not have to go through all the interim steps? Sure, it would be easier, but it wouldn’t be honest. And it also wouldn’t last. When we by-pass the necessary steps in a healing process, we engage in self-defeat.

Think about someone who suffers a broken leg. The cast is applied and the body’s natural healing process begins to take place. Suppose the individual is anxious to resume daily activities hampered by the broken leg now ensconced in the cast. He has the cast removed, maybe by cutting it off himself. Of course, this is definitely not according to the doctor’s recommendations. And the prospect that the leg is anywhere close to being healed is virtually impossible. What is the result? The person attempts to walk on the leg, play football or resume whatever activity was so all-consuming that it led to his taking off the cast in the first place. More likely than not, the break is exacerbated, may need to be re-set, and healing will now be a much longer process.

Not everyone engages in such self-sabotage on a conscious level. But the truth is that we all know someone who’s done something foolish like this, or we recognize the tendency in ourselves to avoid doing certain things because they’re, well, just too much work. We’re open to the possibility that we’ll discover some shortcut that gets us to the end point quicker and without as much effort.

Maybe we’ll get away with it once or twice or even more times than that. But we know inside that we’ve taken the easy way out. We may even recognize that we didn’t get the most out of what we were trying to accomplish. If we’re not being honest with ourselves, if we haven’t truly committed to sobriety, maybe we don’t care that we’re just going through the motions.

Is it any wonder, then, that some of us slip and relapse? If we shirk our responsibilities and don’t do the work required, how can we expect that we’ll be successful in maintaining our sobriety? Again, we might get lucky, from the standpoint that we get right back up and devote our energies to doing what it takes to resume our recovery journey. But some of us may not be so fortunate. We may need to go through rehab again, or, at the very least, seriously examine what we’re doing to undermine our recovery chances.

It all goes back to doing the work. We can skip around some of the Twelve Steps, but we can’t avoid them completely. If we find ourselves continually avoiding something we know we need to tackle, it’s a sure sign that we need help navigating this particular area. What’s holding us back? Is it fear of failure or fear of success?

Only we can answer the question, just as only we can do the work required to better ground ourselves in recovery. If we value certain goals we’ve identified for ourselves, we simply have to be willing to put in the time and effort to achieve them. In this case, the winning season, the end goal, requires that we roll up our sleeves and tackle the issues as best we can. Focus on recovery and do the work and success will follow.

One thing we know quite a bit about is how bad things have been for us in the past. During the worst moments of our addiction, we likely felt as if we were at the bottom of a very deep pit, one that we felt incapable of climbing out of.

Sometimes, we may feel that way still.

Despite all the eloquent words and reassuring comments from others, when the feeling of having hit a wall comes upon us, there’s nothing like it, is there? We want to run away and hide, to do anything to get out from under that terrible feeling. Nobody else can know what we’re going through, isn’t that how we feel? Even if others say they understand, how can they? They’re not in our shoes. They can’t know what it feels like?

If we find ourselves falling into this trap, that’s just our rationalization talking. It’s our inner voice that’s trying to summon us, calling us back into our old addictive ways. What we need to do is learn how to recognize this voice, and give it the boot. Don’t listen to it, for if we do, we’ll just find numerous reasons why we can’t go forward in recovery. We’ll find ourselves saying things to ourselves and others like, "It’s too hard. I can’t make it. I never thought it would be this difficult. I don’t have it in me. You don’t understand…" and on and on.

What a lot of hooey. On the face of it, sure, everyone has problems. There’s not one person in the rooms of recovery who hasn’t thought about how tough this is, this new life of sobriety. We each have our challenges and issues, and, yes, some of them are fairly specific to our individual circumstances. That doesn’t mean that they’re any less rough than the experiences of others, however. Far from it, in fact. If something causes us a problem, then it’s a problem until we learn how to deal with it. That’s the way life goes, and it’s the same thing in recovery.

We will learn as we go how to deal with this or that issue, challenge, obstacle or opportunity. In fact, the more we can look upon experiences that we previously thought of as problems and think of them as opportunities, the more we’ll find that we’re growing.

Of course, in the middle of a huge problem, none of this is going to come top of mind. While we’re struggling to get through some extraordinarily tough issues, for us, at least, all we want to do is make it through. That’s where the advice from recovery experts to keep on going makes a lot of sense. We do want to get past this and somehow learn something from it. Even if what we learn is that our best course of action is to avoid that particular person, place or thing in the future – that’s knowledge that will prove beneficial in our recovery journey.

Sometimes what we’ll learn as we endure a rough patch is that we are more capable than we’ve given ourselves credit for. It was a tough thing to go through, to be sure, but we did it. We didn’t fall apart. We didn’t resort to using again. We kept our resolve, even though it may have been the most difficult thing we’ve ever had to do.

If we’re being honest with ourselves, we made it through with a little help from our friends. If we were cognizant of the immense support and encouragement of our sponsor and fellow 12-step group members, we likely took advantage of this incredible network. Just being around others who have gone through some pretty horrific experiences and came out successfully on the other side is a kind of encouragement that we’d never be able to come up with on our own.

Beyond that, the shared sense of purpose is a tremendously uplifting part of our overall recovery process. Keep in mind that each day only has 24 hours. When something is seemingly intolerable, endless or painful, whatever it may be, if we can keep going today, for 24 hours, tomorrow will be different. We will have made it through a day, despite all our fears that we couldn’t. We may not have the solution after 24 hours, but the situation, the circumstance, will look and be a little different.

Ask for help from others where and when we need it. But do keep on going. It is, after all, the only way that makes sense, the only way that we’ll continue to make progress toward our goals in recovery.

I can’t do it. I’ve never been a success. Recovery is just too hard for me. There has to be an easier way. Are these statements sounding familiar? At one time or another, most of us in recovery have uttered some version of them, if not to others, then to ourselves. So, we’re all in good company here. Feeling overwhelmed, uncertain, doubtful and even fearful of what lies ahead is normal.

Doing something about this defeatist attitude is what separates success in recovery from failure – or less progress than should be realized.

The truth of the matter is that there’s no single blueprint that everyone in recovery can follow and achieve guaranteed success. If there’s one point we know for sure, it’s that there are no guarantees at all in recovery. Some individuals whom we believe have it all together may slip and fall back into their old addictive ways. Others whom we think don’t have a prayer of staying sober manage to adhere to their sobriety commitment. Go figure.

Should this cause us alarm? Should we instead believe that recovery is a bit of a fickle master, deciding to descend upon some, but not others? Is recovery something that’s always out of reach?

Nonsense. We will always get out of recovery exactly what we put into it. True, there will be periods where it seems like we’re attaining less success than we had hoped, but maybe there’s a good reason for that. Maybe, just maybe, our efforts left something to be desired. It could be that we attempted to take a shortcut here and there, eager to achieve the final result and hoping that we’d get away with skipping this or that steps just this time.

What do our recovery efforts say about us? That we’re diligent, hard-working, conscientious, committed and hopeful? Or, that we’re mistrustful, resentful, jealous, and dubious about our chances of success? If we find ourselves in the former camp, we have a greater likelihood of realizing our goals. We’re likely happy and on our way to being well-adjusted, successful individuals in recovery and life in general.

If, however, we’re of the mind that nothing we do will make a difference, if we’re anxious and jealous and not willing to put in the time to do what needs to be done, our recovery will look like the stalled process it is.

Stalled doesn’t need to become permanent, however. We can get back on track with our recovery efforts, pick up the challenge and redouble our efforts to do the work that’s required.

For some of us with little to no experience with any type of success in any of our efforts, and especially those who have been addicted for many years or with co-occurring disorders and/or other medical conditions, this may seem like a herculean task. With nothing on the plus side of our accomplishments, so we believe, we may find it easier to give up and give in, rather than continue on in recovery.

Giving up would be a tremendous loss. We’ve already come so far getting clean and sober. Why give up now? There’s got to be a reason why we feel like we cannot go forward, or that we don’t deserve to be happy and sober at the same time. It could very well be that we need further counseling, maybe another stint in rehab, maybe just a good talking-to ourselves to get back doing what needs to be done.

Start by talking over what’s going on with us with our sponsor. If we’re continuing to have difficulty, feel like we’re not making any progress or are in danger of relapse, strongly consider going back into counseling, either through aftercare or continuing care, if that is still available to us as part of our recovery program. If it isn’t, ask for recommendations for counseling services on a pay-as-you-go or reduced rate basis. If we really want help, we will be able to find it.

Bottom line: Remember that we have absolutely no idea who we are if we continue to berate ourselves and find fault with everything we do. We will begin to see glimpses of who we are as we do the work of recovery. The more we do the stronger and more appealing our self-image will be.

One final point is worth making. We’re all capable of doing incredible things. The only way to know the person that we want to become is to start by doing what we can do – today.