We’ve heard the advice often enough to stop reliving our past, but it doesn’t seem to penetrate our consciousness at times, does it? When we’ve been through some gut-wrenching experiences, faced extraordinary pain, much of it due to our addiction, it’s really tough to forget about that and move on. None of us is immune to painful memories of things we’ve said and done that have brought harm to others. All we need to do is to listen to the stories related in the 12-step rooms to realize that we’re not alone in this regard.

That still doesn’t make it any easier, not when the past comes up to hit us smack in our face. Maybe it’s someone from our former days of using that suddenly shows up on our doorstep, finds us on Facebook, or calls us on the phone wanting to chat. What they really want is to entice us back into our using behavior, since, if they haven’t committed to sobriety themselves, they may very well just want to see us back in the fold with them.

Maybe we weren’t paying attention to that part of rehab where, during relapse prevention training, we were given advice and strategies on how to deal with such situations. Maybe we heard it, but it didn’t sink in. Perhaps we just went along with the role-playing exercises, all the while allowing our mind to wander elsewhere, like the first thing we were going to do once we got out of rehab.

We always wind up paying the piper in the end. If we’ve taken shortcuts, if we haven’t paid attention to the coping mechanisms, tips and recommendations that have worked well for others, what have we got for ourselves in our recovery toolkit? It’s likely a bit thinly outfitted. We may have one or two things that we’ve been able to use to help keep ourselves clean and sober, but when push comes to shove and something a little tougher comes our way, we may find ourselves at a loss for what to do.

All we can do then is head back to the drawing board. We need to re-learn what we didn’t think it necessary to learn well the first time around. This may not mean that we have to go back into rehab. We could pick up tips and strategies by applying what we hear in the rooms of recovery or go through with our therapist (if we have continuing care or aftercare), or discuss with our 12-step sponsor.

The reality is that the past is a serious roadblock for many of us in recovery. It is especially thorny for newcomers to sobriety, those who are still raw and vulnerable and haven’t had much practice yet in living this newfound life in recovery. But painful reminders of the past can occur to any one of us, whether we’ve been newly sober or have been effectively sober for years. Since we never know when some reminder of our past will crop up, it is a good idea to be prepared for what we’ll do when and if it does show up.

Of course, if we’ve suffered trauma, PTSD, domestic abuse, childhood sexual abuse, violence or natural disaster, we may need continuing professional help to overcome these horrific memories. One evidence-based (meaning, it has been proven effective) therapy is Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (or EMDR). This therapy helps us deal with and move past crippling memories, flashbacks, nightmares and other terrors that prevent us from maximizing our forward progress in recovery. The good news, besides the fact that EMDR works, is that it doesn’t take forever to work. We can begin to see improvement in a matter of weeks. This may be something worth considering, if we truly want to get past the past and start living in the present.

Even if we don’t suffer from PTSD, trauma, or some of the other items mentioned, we each likely have some memories that we’d really rather not revisit. How can we face what we’ve done and move on? For some of us, acknowledging the pain and our part in it, especially where what we’ve done has harmed ourselves and others, and making a conscious effort to forgive ourselves, will allow us to move on. Of course, we do need to take responsibility for our past actions and to make amends to those we’ve harmed where and whenever possible to do so. If we don’t make amends, there’ll always be that rift in our recovery, that chasm that we didn’t deal with.

Once we put the past behind us, it has no sway over us any longer. The past doesn’t define us. What we do in the present is who we are, and we can choose to be who we want to be by doing the work we know we need to do – here in the present.

Now here’s a novel way of looking at the past and putting it into perspective. And, let’s face it, having any sort of perspective is something that many of us in recovery have a pretty difficult time doing, isn’t it?

But when we come right down to it, every journey has a beginning. We can’t arrive at a destination until we take the first step, right? When we get to a fork in the road, that’s a choice we make, and we can look back and possibly see the origin point of our journey. But, then again, maybe not. We may have made so much progress, traveled so far down the road, that where we started from is just a distant memory.

Still, it was a beginning. Starting where we did in the past, wherever that was, led us forward to the point where we are today.

What about a terribly painful past, filled with horrific memories and traumatic experiences? What about a past where we caused a great deal of harm to others, willingly or unconsciously, as we were mired in the self-destructive behavior patterns of our addiction? Even then, the past proved to be a beginning. If we hadn’t gone down that road long ago, we might never have chosen to go into rehab, might never have given ourselves the gift of life by choosing sobriety.

Yet we did. The past, once again, was but a starting point to our journey.

Getting creative about it is a good way to think about beginning something new. We may not know yet exactly where we want to go or precisely how we’re going to get where we think we want to head, but we do know that we want something good and positive for ourselves. Even those of us who’ve never had much success in life, are low in self-esteem or have accumulated a whole litany of bad habits we’re trying to change have some sort of hope for change.

The truth is that as long as we can conceive of a different life, even opening ourselves up to the possibility of a new life for ourselves in sobriety, we can achieve it.

It will take dedication and a whole lot of work, though. Nothing will happen just because we want it to. That’s the stuff of magic, and recovery, while it may seem miraculous, isn’t magic. There are steps to take and crises to weather and strategies to learn. We need experience learning how to live sober as well as how to begin to enjoy life without the use of drugs and alcohol to numb our pain.

We need to learn how to be with people, to make new friends, to find life worth living and living well.

None of these are just going to happen automatically. The knowledge that we will gain is something that we will need to work hard to acquire. Some things will come easily, while other lessons will be tough ones to learn, as in how to right a fractured or damaged relationship with loved ones or family members. Some reparations may be particularly tough to do, as we may need to do substitute amends due to the death of the person whom we’ve harmed or for another reason. We cannot find ourselves a failure in what we attempt to do even if we don’t succeed the first time out.

One secret of recovery that others share in the 12-step rooms is that we help ourselves when we learn from our mistakes. It isn’t a failure as long as we do find knowledge as a result. That doesn’t mean that we have to like not achieving our goals. It should help motivate us to continue our pursuit of them, or to change them if what we’ve learned points us in a direction that may be more workable or desirable, given our new-found knowledge.

Here’s another little secret. Today is tomorrow’s past and helps pave the way for yet another beginning. Think about that for a minute. We will always have a past behind us. Every day we go to sleep and awake the next morning means we’ve experienced another past. And we’re about to experience a new beginning.

If today didn’t turn out the way we’d planned, or we found that we needed to do things a little differently, we have a ready-made plan of sorts for how to approach it tomorrow. Recovery is a step-by-step process, lived day to day, every day for the rest of our lives.

One thing most of us in recovery know, especially if we’ve overcome significant physical and psychological challenges, is that health doesn’t always come easily. Those of us who have spent many months and years wasting away in addiction have had a lot of ground to cover in getting our health back to some semblance of normalcy. Granted, many times we became disillusioned, fearful that we’d never be able to climb back into a state of healthy living. It just seemed too distant, too tough to achieve. We couldn’t see how it could happen, given the depths to which we had sunk.

But we kept at it, encouraged by our doctors, our therapists and counselors, supported and encouraged further by our 12-step sponsor, fellow group members, and, of course, our caring family members and loved ones. While we may have started out on our long and difficult path toward healing, we managed to make progress. Sometimes that progress came in fits and starts. Other times, it may have seemed to be effortless and without pain.

Why do we think that is? Let’s look at the desire to heal. Putting it a little more succinctly, and in terms we may more easily associate with healing — when we wish to heal, that’s more or less half the battle. We have to want to heal, really want to become whole again and overcome any physical or psychological condition we may have, before we can actually begin to heal.

Look what happens to people who have given up hope. They may believe they are on death’s door from cancer or emphysema or any number of diseases and medical conditions. Couple that with addiction and continuingly deteriorating living conditions, lack of support from friends or family, and it’s no wonder that their health goes into rapid decline.

Now, take the individual who has what doctors and medical experts have deemed to be an incurable disease, with virtually no hope of survival. Some of these very individuals on their so-called deathbeds have made remarkable recoveries, much to the astonishment of attending doctors. The will to live, the fervent wish to heal, cannot be underestimated nor taken for granted. We cannot possibly know why some individuals who are in states of unimaginable suffering, who are near to their last breath, manage to come out of it and make progress toward becoming healthy once again.

But the fact that it does happen, and it happens more often than we know, should be encouraging to those of us who are having difficulty in recovery. We need to remind ourselves that wishing ardently to heal is the first step toward taking the actions necessary to spur our actual healing. We must want to heal beyond anything else, before we can begin to heal.

What about healing from the wounds of our addiction? Maybe it isn’t a life or death medical condition that lays waste to us, that keeps us embroiled in the vicious cycle of relapse and rehab and doing it all over again. Maybe it’s that we haven’t yet fully committed to sobriety. Maybe we haven’t admitted that we are addicted and honestly realized that we do, indeed, want help to heal.

Once we come to this realization, we are on the right track toward actual healing. Wanting to heal has to occur before we can begin to heal. But wishing to heal won’t ever take the place of doing the hard work of recovery. If all we do is wish we could heal, we’ll simply remain in a state of perpetual discontent. We’re far more likely to relapse as well, since we’ve done absolutely nothing to jumpstart our recovery. Translate that to mean, we haven’t taken any action to change our lifestyle into one that is more conducive to our sobriety.

Good health in recovery is more than just physical and psychological health. It’s also adopting and maintaining a healthier lifestyle, learning how to change our attitudes and beliefs, and to embrace the life of recovery. These are absolutely things that we can achieve, but, once again, we have to first want them with all our heart. That burning wish will spur us on to make the necessary changes, to take the required actions and to begin to heal at a pace that may very well surprise us.

Miracles do happen, but most of the time, they require our full commitment in order get off square one and really take shape.

How many times do we find ourselves saying that we just want to be happy? Or that we’d do anything to be happy again? If we think about it, we’re probably all guilty of uttering these words, or some just like them. But the truth of the matter is that words alone will never bring us happiness. In order to feel happy, we have to do something.

That’s right. We have to take action. If we just exist, that is, going about our daily activities in a sort of a boring routine, that’s a kind of action, but it isn’t really living. Existence is breathing and continuing to breathe. We can exist and still feel dead, not happy. So the secret to finding happiness has more to do with the quality of our effort in doing something than just doing anything at all.

So, what we have here is a kind of conundrum. We need to do something in order to have a chance at finding happiness, and not just anything, but something meaningful and worthwhile. How are we to figure out just what that something might be? Yes, it can seem difficult to try to find our way through this maze.

On the one hand, we know we want to remain in sobriety. That presents its own challenges, but if we adhere to the recovery principles, do the work of the Twelve Steps, and approach each day with a new-found sense of purpose and optimism, we will be not only doing ourselves a favor, we’ll also be building a stronger foundation in recovery and bringing ourselves closer to finding happiness.

Accomplishment in a job well-done has its own reward: a feeling of self-satisfaction, an increase in self-esteem, and the glimmer of feeling really good about ourselves. This is the very beginning of happiness, when we can recognize and take credit for the good that we have done. If the action we’ve taken helps to bring about a better circumstance for others in need, so much the better. But when we’re just starting off in early recovery, we should stick to trying to help ourselves get better grounded in what it takes to maintain our sobriety effectively. We will learn as we act, and as we act and learn, we grow. As we grow, our self-esteem, our self-confidence and, yes, even our happiness, will increase.

But, just as the quote from William James indicates, all action may not bring about happiness. It is nevertheless true that there can be no happiness without us first doing something. We might say that we have to act in order to deserve happiness, but that would be putting too harsh a spin on it. We all deserve to be happy. But being happy is not the same thing as finding happiness. Maybe a better way to put it is that we should live our lives in a proactive manner, striving to do good at all times, acting to better the lives of others and, in the process, helping to boost our own reservoir of good-will as well.

Another important point to keep in mind is that we should stop worrying so much about finding happiness. Instead, concentrate on living today to the best of our ability. Give everything we’ve got today. Tomorrow will arrive without our help. Tomorrow we will awake to another day and it will be yet another opportunity, just like today, to live in the present, to take action, to increase the likelihood that we will find happiness and be happy.

Wouldn’t we love to wipe out the past, start over with a clean slate, leaving no record of the trail of misery and detritus we’ve left behind? Such is wishful thinking and we should acknowledge that right now. Furthermore, we need to recognize that it is physically impossible to go back and undo what has already been done. We don’t live in the past. We are not able to transport ourselves back there for a do-over.

Yet, how many of us continue to relive the past, day in and day out? We go over what we’ve said and done that has caused harm to others and ourselves, sometimes irreparable harm. We replay the past in our mind constantly as if in so doing something different will have transpired, a new outcome, a different past. All of this is a waste of time. We simply cannot cure the past.

What, then, can we do about our past? There really is only one answer: We have to live in the present. And it’s not just living that we need to do, but act. Action is what will change our lives. Action is what we do today.

There are, of course, two ways to look at action. There’s the action that will perpetuate the addictive patterns of our past. Then there’s the action that we choose to take to turn our lives around and help us to achieve lasting sobriety.

Note that we’re talking about choice and hard work here. There is no cure for addiction, no magic pill or incantation that makes it disappear. The reality is that we will need to work at our recovery. Sometimes that will entail making hard choices, while other times the going will be easier. We will become better at making the right decisions for our newfound sobriety as we go along, but such knowledge comes only through action. Sitting on the sidelines lamenting our fate won’t do anything but prolong our feeling of not being capable of achieving lasting sobriety.

What about those disrupting thoughts about the past that intrudes on us in the present and seek to divert our attention from the work we need to do for our recovery now? How can we rid ourselves of them? We can’t just block them out. That never works, for the pesky past reminders are still there waiting to inflict damage on us. The only way out of this dilemma is to acknowledge the past, admit to ourselves that, yes, we did do that, we did cause that harm to ourselves and to others. But then, once we’ve acknowledged our responsibility for our past actions, we reaffirm that we have made a choice to live a life of sobriety. We have changed, and we are steadfast and firm in our resolve to make a new life for ourselves, one that does not include drugs or alcohol.

Of course, acknowledge and accepting responsibility for our past actions does not absolve us from the requirement to make amends wherever possible. We may not be ready to tackle that step just yet, but we will be in time. It’s all part of the recovery journey and each of us approaches this step at our own time and pace.

Remember that we are not alone. We have resources. We have the support and encouragement of our 12-step sponsor and fellow group members, of our loving family and close friends. When we find that the past continues to cause us pain, talk it over with others who have been there before. There is strength in community and others are ready and willing to help us overcome this hurdle.

The past doesn’t have to be a barrier in our present. We live here now, and the past is just that, the past.