Recovery vs Discovery

I recently taught a Creative Codependence class in Calgary and was briefly swept into a debate about the appropriateness of using the term “recovery”, as in, recovery from codependence. The debate centred around whether recovery was better suited to use with physical issues, i.e. recovery from a broken leg, rather than emotional ones.

I define recovery as beginning the moment we come out of denial from our addictions. That is, the instant we realize that our behaviour, whether it be drug addiction, workaholism or codependence (the “addiction to looking elsewhere…” Whitfield, 1991), is no longer serving us in a way that we want to be served. Of course, that means recovery has many stages. We can, for example, walk away from our realizations and sink back into our addictions but for me, that initial awareness is never lost – it is the beginning of recovery. It may take us years to do anything about it but once we open our eyes to how a behaviour is not serving us anymore, the innocence of denial is lost and we are in the first stages of recovery.

And from what are we recovering? We are recovering from having lost our sense of safety: the inherent safety that is our birthright and measure of who we are. Said another way, the stronger our sense of internal safety, the stronger sense of Self; and we can lose sight of that sense through factors such as abuse, poverty, and violence.

Addiction is the act of trying to gain back that safety, albeit in a dysfunctional way. We try to escape our situation by looking outside of our self not only for safety, love and validation, but a sense of who we are.

The other side of the debate held that “discovery” would be a better suited term. The proponents of this word suggested that recovery implies fixing, as if we were broken and needed to be mended. We are not broken, they suggested, we are whole, its more about discovering who we really are – discovering our strengths and value: our intrinsic wholeness.

In reflection, I see that “discovery” also works well in the framework of Creative Codependence. The main premise being that the tools we used to become codependent can be the tools, slightly reframed, that help us in recovery. For example, if as children, we looked to find safety (acceptance, love, validation, it all fits here) in keeping our parents happy, we may have developed a caretaker part of ourselves. If this part was successful we may have carried it forward to adulthood, over extending ourselves to others in the hopes of getting our needs met. However, if we reframe these skills we can use them to become, as an example, successful healthcare practitioners because of our ability to empathize and predict and satisfy the health needs of our patients.

The key is to find balance between what we learned as children and how we use those skills today: learning how to take care of self while drawing new boundaries that respect our self. Underneath it all is the discovery that safety (love, acceptance, validation) lies within, and not outside of who we are.

So, really, recovery from codependence is about re-discovering the tools of childhood: recovering what was lost with the discovery of new ways of being. A nice handshake of the two points of view, yes?