Finding our way can be pretty tough sometimes, right? It most certainly is a whole lot different than when we were deep into our old addictive ways. Then, our solution to whatever was bothering us at the time was pretty much a no-brainer. We just succumbed to the urge and that was that. Never mind that we didn’t wind up solving anything. We didn’t care, not as long as we were numbed to the pain or the stress or the incessant piling up of bills and problems.

Now, however, we are face-to-face with reality. And it is both a blessing and somewhat of a hindrance – at least, it seems like an obstacle to begin with. We need to tread slowly, to find our way in fits and starts, accumulating knowledge and experience along the way. That we have access to others who have previously headed down this path is a plus and it is one benefit of our participation in the rooms of recovery that we really should take advantage of.

First of all, no one has all the answers, but together, we find workable solutions that can prove helpful to all. Maybe what we hear and learn in the rooms doesn’t really apply to us right away. But if we allow the ideas and suggestions to sink in and we begin to think about how we may be able to modify them and tailor them to fit our own circumstance and situation, we may very well find that we have discovered something new to try.

This is at the core of how we develop and build our foundation in recovery. We try suggestions, implement strategies, and then weigh and balance their effectiveness. Yes, we will need to discard some solutions along the way. Either they didn’t quite fit what we needed to address, or we perhaps needed some additional element that we didn’t apply or know to include, or they worked before but no longer prove effective.

This process is well known to inventors. It’s called trial and error. Whether our obstacles or problems or difficulties are of major or minor importance, how we arrive at workable solutions follows more or less the same process. We try something. If it works, we note that suggestion or solution as effective and keep in handy to utilize again.

If it doesn’t work, or works somewhat but not as well as we’d like, we move it into a different column as a technique that may need revision. We probably won’t write "No Good" next to it, if we’re actually monitoring how well our recovery toolkit techniques work as we should. That’s because there may come a time when that particular technique may prove to be a workable solution to perhaps yet another issue, problem or obstacle that’s yet unforeseen.

How do we know if we’re making progress? What if it seems like everything we try winds up being no solution or, more precisely, not a workable solution for what we’re dealing with? Put it this way. Every step we take, every action we put forth helps us in our search for workable solutions. We should know this truth: Nothing will come our way if we sit back and do nothing. Action actually means that we have to do something. There’s no solution, no miracle that will simply drop in our laps and we don’t have to do a thing.

So, we try different techniques. We keep some sort of reckoning or notebook on how well this or that strategy worked. It’s also good to make note of when it worked, and under what circumstances it worked, as well as if it was some kind of modification of what we tried before.

Most of all, however, we need to look upon this entire process as one that’s positive and signifies a significant step forward in our overall healing process. For that is just what learning how to take proper care of our new lives in sobriety gains us in the long run.

We also need to recognize that we won’t have all the answers overnight. It may take us many months to feel comfortable in our skin, so to speak, to feel more or less confident that while we may not succeed each and every time with a particular strategy or technique, we have enough solutions to try out or modify or add to in our recovery toolkit. We know we can find a way, because we’ve been able to do so before. This gives us the courage and motivation to keep moving forward, trying out new suggestions and implementing new strategies as we learn about them or figure them out for ourselves.

Maybe we begin to finally realize that there is some method to this recovery process after all. We just need to keep on doing what we’re doing, maintain a positive outlook, and realize that everything we do helps us become who we want to be in our new life in sobriety.

Hope and joy. Are these words that are missing from our vocabulary? If we’re in recovery, hope and joy certainly should be part of our life, but so often we find that they are emotions that we’ve not permitted ourselves to feel. Why is that? For so many in recovery, especially during the early days, weeks and months of sobriety, it’s tough enough just to get through the day, let alone think much about being happy or ever finding hope, let alone joy.

In fact, if we were to conduct a survey of newcomers to the 12-step rooms, asking them if they felt hope or joy, the response would pretty predictably be few to none would express such positive inclinations. This is not to say that the newly sober individual doesn’t feel some profound sense of gratitude or relief that he or she is now clean and sober. That is a normal feeling, although it’s frequently accompanied by simultaneous fear, uncertainty, guilt, shame, and even dread.

After all, early recovery is a time of great uncertainty. We haven’t been down this road before or, if we have, we may be doubly fearful of slipping up again. We may doubt our abilities, our convictions, even our desire to remain sober. Even if we’re clear that we want to do all that it takes to maintain our sobriety, that doesn’t mean we’re at all sure about what to do when, where, and under what circumstances.

In other words, hope and joy are pretty thin, at least in the beginning days of recovery.

Yet look at how far we’ve already come. We made it through rehab and that was certainly a tremendous achievement, one that we may never have believed possible. We did it and we should feel some measure of hope and joy as a result. It wasn’t luck and no one gave that to us. Sure, it involved detoxing and going through therapy, and we may not have liked certain parts of rehab, but there’s no denying the result of all that effort. This is a great beginning.

And that’s just it, a beginning. Now, as they say, the real work begins. Okay, so we are somewhat happy or at least pleased that we’ve made it through rehab and are now entering recovery. So we could say that we have hope that’s more or less strong (probably leaning toward the less strong, but nonetheless there, albeit buried under fear, uncertainty and a few other conflicting emotions). Still, this is a good thing. It means that we have something upon which to build.

And recovery is very much a building process. While it would indeed be miraculous if we could just walk out the door of rehab and have everything all figured out, it doesn’t work that way. We are embarking upon a lifelong journey of recovery, one that will be filled with choices and opportunities and obstacles and problems and issues along the way. The more we learn, the more we’ll grow. The more we grow, the more we’re likely to fill up our reservoir of hope. When hope begins to bubble up in us, the likelihood that joy will someday follow is a fair assumption.

One point about hope and joy that needs mentioning is that we need to give ourselves permission to feel these positive emotions. If we don’t allow ourselves the option to be happy, to feel any sense of optimism about our future, the result will be predictable: we won’t feel hope or joy. In order to get to the point where we’re able to discern feelings of hope and joy, we have to go beyond allowing for the possibility. We need to actually desire to have these feelings.

While we’re busily engaged in doing the work of recovery, it’s not necessary or even advisable to sit around and focus on when or how we’ll feel joy or hope. Just give ourselves permission to feel optimistic about our recovery efforts, do the work each day to the best of our ability, and let the emotions find us when we are ready.

And we will be ready. Each success, each goal we accomplish, each day in sobriety is a milestone, a celebration of victory. These incremental successes will begin to fill up our plus-side, our achievements in our recovery journey. In this case, the more we have the better. Over time, we’ll find that we’re not worrying or concentrating on the when and where and how we’ll feel hope and joy. We will be experiencing it in our daily lives.

When we first embarked upon our journey of recovery, we likely felt a mixture of fear, dread, confusion, anxiety, hopelessness and guilt. We may even have felt shame and any number of other emotions. One thing we were pretty sure of, however, was that this was some new kind of experience, one that we weren’t altogether sure we could handle – even though we chose this life of sobriety.

We also probably felt awfully alone. That was the single-most terrifying aspect of this journey that we didn’t know quite what to do about. We had learned during treatment that we don’t recover alone, that others are integral in our recovery, as they are in their own, but that really didn’t sink in at the time, did it? In fact, we may be well along into our recovery journey and still harbor some lingering belief that we’re still in this alone.

The solution to this fear and unnecessary anxiety is to begin to believe in the strength of solidarity. These are two words that are totally appropriate when discussing recovery, since strength is something we all can use and solidarity means we have something in common with others, a shared goal and similar experiences from which to draw understanding, compassion and learning.

The tough part is trying to convince ourselves that the words have meaning. After all, we’ve all said and thought a great many words in the past that didn’t hold up under scrutiny, not even when uttered to ourselves in the privacy of our homes. In other words, pun intended, we may have said them, but even we didn’t believe them.

There’s no getting past what we feel. Emotions are often strong, quite frightening at times, especially in early recovery when we’re still raw and vulnerable. What we need is stability, routine, the regimen of sameness that we can count on. We also need people in our corner who understand what we’re going through because they’ve been there before themselves. We have all that in the 12-step rooms of recovery. That is, we have it if we take advantage of what’s being offered to us in the rooms. First, we have to show up. We don’t have to do anything other than that, to begin with.

Over time, we will become more accustomed to being in the rooms. It will become more comfortable. We may even strike up a few friendships. We will definitely learn things that will help us as we begin to navigate our new life of sobriety. And isn’t that what we all want? We are indeed embarking on a journey that is quite a bit unknown to us at this point. We’re eager to find any help we can along the way.

As we begin to feel more settled in the rooms, we will likely find that what others have to say rings true in our minds. Some of the accounts others relate may be somewhat similar to what we went through or are going through right now. We may even be inclined to give credence to some of the solutions that they found worked for them, vowing to try some version of them out ourselves.

Fast forward a few months or years and we undoubtedly will look back upon our early days of recovery as but the first step in a growth process, one that we had no inkling would take us where we find ourselves, but one that was remarkable and life-affirming nonetheless.

Living each day in such a way that we gain strength and self-confidence will pave the way for us to display these admirable traits to others. Along the way, newcomers to the rooms may begin looking to us to help them find their own way in recovery. It’s not that we’re counselors, but more like true friends and colleagues, each working to help the other in this new life of sobriety.

What more can we ask of recovery than to greet each day as an opportunity and to share our wisdom and encouragement with others, knowing that we are traveling the path of so many that have gone before us? Standing together in recovery can indeed be a glorious journey. It will definitely prove that we are not alone.

What happens in recovery if we’ve got a game plan, have put forth our efforts, only to see it fall flat? What does this say about a) our action plan, b) our efforts to achieve our goals, or c) our overall chances for recovery?

Actually, what it says about all three of them is that they may need a little bit of revision. Well, maybe point c doesn’t need revision, only how we look at it. What do we mean by any of this? Let’s take a closer look.

Plans are made to be changed. This is a fact of life in recovery, and it’s time that we get used to that and start thinking about plans as in a constant state of revision. This doesn’t mean that our initial plans were flawed. They could have been, but that’s very much a subjective judgment. What may seem flawed or invalid or worthless by someone else is not the same thing as feeling that way ourselves about what we have pledged to do. So, we didn’t achieve success in this first go-round of the plan, or the second or third. That still doesn’t mean that the plan didn’t have merit. It may mean that we skipped a few steps, or didn’t recognize there were interim steps, or decided to take a shortcut instead. Get back to the basic plan and go through it carefully to see what we may have missed, intentionally or inadvertently. Is it possible to re-do the actions, to improve upon the plan, to eliminate parts that are obviously not working and replace them with elements that have a greater probability of success? It’s certainly worth exploring, isn’t it?

What about the amount of effort we put into our plans? In addition, what kind of attitude did we bring with us as we implemented the plans? If we went about it only half-heartedly, are we at all surprised at the less-than-desirable outcome? Not very likely, since we do know that we get out of things what we put into them. If we’re constructing a house and only pound the nails half in, the structure won’t be very sound and may very well collapse. If, however, we pay attention to our work and strive for consistency with each and every nail we pound (liken this to each and every action we take toward our goals), we are both putting in the appropriate effort and we bring a healthy attitude along with it.

Suppose that we put a great deal of effort into our plans, came into it with a good attitude, and we still didn’t achieve our goals? This still doesn’t mean that there was anything wrong with our approach, maybe just that another method may work better for us. Perhaps at another time, what we already tried and didn’t work will work better. We are always changing in recovery. As we learn new things, we become stronger and more self-assured in our abilities. We’re better able to see transitions that emanate from the body of knowledge we’ve attained and can more readily see how this approach versus that one may work to our benefit.

It’s important here to talk about the challenge of setting realistic goals for ourselves in recovery. Begin with small ones that we’re more likely to be able to achieve without superhuman effort. Why reach for a goal that requires a broad knowledge or skill base when we’re first starting out in sobriety? That’s just setting us up for failure. It’s okay, and advisable, to have long-term goals that require us to stretch, and to craft action plans that can serve as stepping stones or building blocks toward the ultimate realization of that long-term goal, but not to jump right to the end and expect to be successful without first doing the required intermediate steps.

So, let’s summarize: We go into recovery with the full realization that we’ll be doing a trial-and-error process for some time until we become more grounded in the principles of recovery. We give ourselves permission to learn from our set-backs, even our mistakes, and adopt a strategy of constantly refining and revising our goals to keep them manageable and on track. And, we frequently revisit our action plans and our goals to ensure that they’re in sync with our long-term objectives – and that they serve our recovery efforts well.

If we adopt this kind of mindset and proceed accordingly, we are likely to enjoy continued success in our recovery efforts.

"I just don’t have any patience." How often do we find ourselves muttering these words? It really isn’t that we lack patience, however, but that we’ve failed to exercise our ability to ride things out or consciously allow time to pass. It may also be that we’re a little too judgmental, always anxious for things to get done our way and in our sense of how long it should take.

Maybe we need to cut ourselves and others some slack. After all, if something isn’t done immediately and to our liking, that doesn’t mean that the other person is ignorant or not trying. Think of the situation in reverse and we are the ones who are attempting to do something while another person with perhaps more experience in the area looks on. How do we feel when we’re in that situation? We want the onlooker to be as patient as possible, don’t we? Isn’t that much more conducive to our being able to finish the task with some measure of success?

It is also true that we learn from our mistakes, and those of others. This accumulated wisdom resides within us and serves as a perpetual source of helpful tips, techniques and strategies, even minute bits of data that we think we’ll probably never recall. The storage bin in our mind is actually an endless and inexhaustible server constantly working to bring forth necessary facts and figures and processes as we need them.

Using the computer server analogy, let’s think about how sometimes the server needs maintenance. Even a computer that we’re using may need to reboot after an error. This doesn’t mean that what happened is a fatal error, although those do happen from time to time. Still, there are repairs that can remedy that. It’s the same way in recovery. We make a mistake, but we learn from our error. We perform a self-reboot and restore our system to harmony. We know how to avoid such a mistake the next time we’re presented with the same or similar circumstance, don’t we?

Naturally, we have to have some store of patience in order to recognize that the same situation is recurring and to sort through the filing cabinet of our mind to come up with a solution that’s worked for us in the past, or some strategy that we learned about in our readings or heard others talk about in the rooms of recovery. Once we’ve retrieved that information, we can then go about putting the advice, tip, strategy or solution to work.

In this way, patience and wisdom are linked and it is both natural and self-sustaining. Let’s take another look at patience and wisdom and how both work to help us heal.

When we first embraced recovery, it all seemed too new, didn’t it? There was so much for us to learn that we felt more or less intimidated and cowed by the enormity of what we didn’t know. We also likely felt the burden of our addictive past, in the form of recurring nightmares and flashbacks, overwhelming cravings and urges to use, perhaps compounding health problems as a result of our addiction.

We may have even felt like we wanted to return to those old using ways, just as a means of coping. After all, using was what we knew. We may have stumbled once or twice in the early stages of recovery, until we found our footing. Not that this didn’t take time, and patience, and wisdom. See how they’re all interconnected?

If learning how to be patient seems like too tough a proposition, try tackling it in increments. For now, just think about today. What is it that makes you anxious or to feel like you have to hurry up and get this done right now? If it is getting to your 12-step meeting and getting it over with, tell yourself that this is something that you really want to do – as opposed to something that you’d much rather not do. Create a positive association with going to the meeting and your feelings toward it. After all, you are getting better and it is a direct result of learning new things, meeting new people and becoming more confident in your abilities to remain clean and sober.

That’s patience and wisdom at work. Give yourself time to become more accustomed to taking things as they come. Curb your self-critical tongue and thoughts and allow yourself the possibility of learning something new. Over time and with practice, you will begin to realize the benefits of the two companions, patience and wisdom.