365 Days of Hope: A Daily Guide Through the Recovery Journey

By Susan Parry-Jones

For survivors of traumatic experiences like abuse, the goal is to forget. But like a beach ball that we try to hold under the water, things keep bubbling up. We get triggered. Memories wont fade. The past refuses to stay in the past.

Recovery is a personal journey towards wellness that involves intense workallowing pain to surface, allowing grieving to occur, and learning new ways of looking at ourselves and our pasts.

365 Days of Hope is a refreshingly honest book that is like taking a walk through the recovery journey with a friend beside youoffering insight, support, and encouragement because he or she knows the journey.

Set out in 365 stand-alone sections, this book builds from basic ideas about finding support and learning how to take care of yourself to dealing with gritty issues like identity, sexuality, grief, and becoming your own hero.

It helps survivors learn skills like learning to use positive affirmations and managing negative self-talk.

It is practical and thought provoking and invites readers to participate in their own recovery process.

We all need a little hope, and this book is about providing survivors of abuse with 365 days filled with hope for their own recovery journey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: Dec 14, 2015
• ISBN: 9781452531700

Susan Parry-Jones

A survivor of child sexual abuse and a social worker, Susan Parry-Jones dedicated her life to helping others. But it wasn’t until her life fell apart some years ago that she finally began the recovery journey that would enable her to know and share about real freedom from the devastating losses of the past.

Book preview

1

Finding Support

Making changes in our lives can be very hard, but you have made the decision to start to think about change or you wouldn’t be reading this!

Congratulations!

Many of us find that it is easier to make changes when we are not doing it alone. We find we can move forwards in our lives more easily when we have support. We are going to begin by thinking about whether we have enough support in our lives and then think about how to increase our support levels.

♥ What does support look like to you?

♥ How can people around you show you support?

As you begin to think about making some important changes, think about the people surrounding you in your life right now.

♥ List the people you think of as supportive – friends, family, support workers, church leaders, professionals etc.

♥ For each person, list: 1. What sort of support they can offer - practical, phone calls, get togethers; 2. How much support they can offer, and 3. How effective you find their support – ie, how do they make you feel?

♥ Can you tell each person what specific things you are working on right now? Can you enlist their specific support?

♥ Do you have enough support or do you need more support than you currently have?

♥ Where can you go to gain more help – organisations/church/support group

We will be coming back to this issue frequently, making sure you have some good support for your healing journey, because nothing is more important in your life. This is your opportunity to heal.

2

What do you think of when you hear the word support?

Support can mean a lot of different things. It can mean:

♥ To provide the necessities of life;

♥ To give practical or emotional help;

♥ To take an active interest in or be loyal to something - like a

♥ sporting team;

♥ To establish the truthfulness or accuracy of something;

♥ To perform earlier than the main attraction (like at a concert);

♥ To act in a lesser role than the star (in a movie);

♥ To carry the weight of a person or thing.

Sometimes when we are looking for support all we want is a reminder that someone knows what we are going through. Someone knows that we are struggling.

We may not want answers, we may just need to know that someone is on our team. Sometimes we just want an opportunity to talk without judgement. A supportive friend with a cup of tea can mean so much to us.

Sometimes we need more - we need some practical help and sometimes, when life is overwhelming we might need someone else’s help to keep going - like when we are in the throes of grief and appreciate the kindness of a meal being brought over or someone shouting us to take-out. That kind of practical help is a great support many of us have known.

The kind of support that means the most to me when I am really going through it is like the last point in the dictionary list - to carry the weight of a person or thing.

Knowing that someone knows what I am going through and having them stand beside me helping me to carry that weight. This is a priceless support. Something I truly treasure.

What we need varies and what is important for us to figure out is how to identify what we need at any given point and to have the courage to seek it out and ask for it.

We need to learn how to tell those who are on our ‘team’ how they can best support us. Sometimes we may need to remind them that all we need them to do is to sit with us and not say anything - take us for coffee and remind us that we are not alone. Sometimes it is going to be a more active thing - we may need to ask them to give us a hand with something - like taking care of the children so we can get to a counselling session.

Do you have people in your life that you consider to be supportive? People you can count on to give practical or emotional help. People who can help you carry the weight of your burdens?

Sometimes what we most need is someone to help us find some support.

Enlist a friend who cares to help you find other supports. Many community organisations can also help with this – it’s a starting point and from there you may find other people and places that offer more of what you need.

Be active - go hunting - work out what you need and have the courage to go looking for it.

3

For the past four years I have been living on board a sailing boat. Sailing is an adventure I never saw myself involved with and it has certainly been something that has taken me way out of my comfort zone at times!

The biggest issue we face in sailing is the weather. Storms come and we can be buffeted. We always aim to be safely tucked away somewhere in a protected harbour if a storm is on its way, though weather forecasting is not an exact science and despite our best efforts we have on occasion been caught out - facing a storm at sea.

Sailing can teach us a lot about life. When we face unexpected storms on the boat we have to ‘batten down the hatches’. Literally! We have to sit tight, ride it out and wait for the storm to pass.

The words, ‘This too shall pass,’ for us, are quite profound. They are not just words, we have lived them! And in doing so it has come home to me in the clearest way imaginable, that it is resoundingly true! Storms come and they go. We face them having done our best to prepare, but having done all, we stand.

We stand and we wait.

Life throws things at us and we have to deal with them. Triggers, reminders of things we have experienced, memories that won’t fade. Stuff happens. We can’t isolate ourselves. We can cocoon ourselves so that nothing hard comes our way but then the isolation becomes a storm we face.

In sailing, thinking ahead about dealing with storms means you won’t so easily flounder when you face them. If bad weather is forecast we don’t panic because we already know what to do to prepare.

In our recovery we can prepare for ‘storms’. We can think through ahead of time what strategies we can use. We can plan to call our sponsor or counsellor. We can write. We can remember that this too shall pass.

One day’s storm is another day’s sunshine.

Try not to let overwhelming feelings consume you. Sit with them, remembering that they will fade. Try not to make big decisions when you are feeling stressed, wait until the feelings subside. If night time is hard for you, make a plan to have a friend call you to say goodnight. Take care of the storms before they come and trust them to pass when they do.

4

I have never been what anyone would call a ‘loner’ in my life. I have always had friends around me, been part of a network of people in various ways through church, work and sport and yet, I would have to say that for a large part of my life I kept very much to myself.

I had many friends but I was never free with them, I was never able to be fully me and talk about the things that were real issues to me.

I lived with this internal isolation quite easily. I had grown up like that. It felt quite normal to me. I had lived for the first 18 years of my life knowing deeply that there were many things one simply did not talk about and so even when I left home, it rarely occurred to me to tell anyone the things I felt or really thought.

There were a few people through those years that I shared more with but it was not until the day I first walked in to a recovery meeting that I ever felt wholly able to be open and share the depths of my angst.

Support is essential.

There are many ways we can ensure we have adequate supports in our lives or if we haven’t, find some! Friends can offer wonderful support but there are times we need more.

Having coffee with a good friend can sometimes be as helpful as a therapy session. We can be kind to each other and available to each other. We can do that awesome thing of telling each other the truth even if it is sometimes hard. We can stand beside each other when one of us is struggling and listen, hug, be present and we can offer support to make changes in our lives.

If you have not looked for some therapy for yourself, please consider doing this. Not because therapists have all the answers because they don’t. But a therapist can offer you the opportunity to explore thoughts, feelings and memories that are hard to talk through with a friend. For many of us, the therapeutic relationship offers us the best opportunity to process things we have gone through.

And never overlook the many good recovery supports out there. Groups of people who meet all around the world on a daily or weekly basis who are actively working on recovering from something.

Support is essential – make sure you have enough.

5

Recovery, as it is spoken of here, is an ‘Intentional Process’.

Beginning recovery was a pivotal moment in my life. I forever afterwards think in terms of ‘before recovery’ and ‘after recovery’.

It was profound and central.

If my life had fallen and broken it would have split along that line.

It was huge, substantial and marked in massive red letters in my mind!

It forms a dividing line because who I was before recovery is not who I am today and recovery - the process of allowing myself to heal from the trauma of child sexual abuse - is the reason for that change.

Before I began recovery, I would have said I was doing ok. I had grown up, got out, left the situation of abuse and tried to live my life. I had married, had a family and kept walking on. But the reality is, I was simply stumbling in the dark, still just trying to survive. Still just trying to get through another day without the memories hurting me too much.

I began recovery in desperation. I needed to try and work out why I was willing to accept crumbs instead of love, why I was unable to understand what I wanted or needed. I began recovery unintentionally. I went to a meeting because a friend suggested I might find it helpful. I had no idea when I entered those rooms that evening that my life was about to begin properly for the first time. I had no idea I would find in that group of people, so many who would share my pain and help me begin to process the grief I had never allowed myself to feel.

I didn’t intend for embark on the recovery journey that night but from that night onwards I took every breath conscious of the process of recovery unfolding within me.

Recovery became my life’s work.

Wherever you are at in your own journey I would encourage you to take the time to actively work on your recovery.

Take however long you need, but don’t wait for it to come to you. Go out and find it. Find what you need to do to leave the past where it belongs….miles away from you!

6

When I was a child, struggling in a family that seemed to only notice my existence if someone needed something from me, I felt insignificant and unimportant. I spent most of my childhood trying to find something I could do that would please my parents, make them love me. I excelled at school, I became an excellent runner and won almost everything I entered, I played music and wrote songs, I worked hard at school and got top marks and behind everything I did was a longing that something would be the magical thing that would make me loveable.

That’s the silent message I had picked up you see, that they weren’t loving towards me because of some failing in me - something I wasn’t doing - or being. I was a good girl. I did what I was told. I thought that would make them happy. But nothing ever seemed to work.

I had accepted a message - sometimes subtle and sometimes very overt, that I was responsible for all the things I was going through - and somewhere along the way I began to see myself as the problem - I began to feel like there was this dark ugly thing inside me that attracted all the yuck into my life.

This concept I carried that I attracted horrible things into my life sank in so deep. It took root and flourished in my young heart so that by the time I got married and had my family it was like a vine that has wrapped itself all around my heart.

Recovery allowed me to begin to get at those false beliefs I carried and begin to weed them out. I began to replace the false ideas I had accepted with the truth that I was not to blame and that none of the abuse was ever my fault. I began to get healthy.

It’s never too late to go back and think about where your ideas about yourself have come from. It’s never too late to make changes and to get yourself a new foundation! Get the excavator out. Do the demolition, and begin to build again on a better foundation - allow the truth to be what informs you - allow the truth to be the basis for your life and what you believe about yourself.

7

Do you ever feel as though God has let you down?

Most of us would likely have had times when we declared our open hostility towards God for having allowed the situations we have found ourselves in. And when abuse, especially child abuse, is a factor in your life, well it’s easy to see why.

I remember after 9/11 hearing a lot of discussion about where God was during that horrific event. And after the Tsunami that wiped out parts of Indonesia on New Year’s Day a few years ago people would say, ‘Where is God in all this?’ and ‘Why doesn’t he stop it’?

Common responses were, ‘It’s a judgement’ or ‘It’s for the greater good’.

Everyone had an opinion, and many blamed the God they didn’t even believe in for the disaster. But I heard one commentator suggest that God was there, beside each person, holding each hand, touching each quaking heart, whispering peace to each terrified soul.

I don’t have the definitive answer, but I can offer my own view.

As a child I had no faith in God. Our home was devoid of faith. People of faith were seen as morons with no brain. But I used to sit on the sea shore, watching the vastness of the ocean before me with a profound sense that there was something much bigger than the tiny painful existence I knew.

I was not permitted to attend religious instruction at school but I was curious and would often sneak in, hoping my parents never found out.

I was seventeen when a girl in my class at school became a Christian. Suddenly I was confronted with questions I hadn’t even known I even had and I began to be desperate for answers.

My journey to faith was born in those moments on the beach when I felt comforted by the rhythmic pattern of the waves. When the smell of the salt spray was like a warm embrace. When the timelessness of the ocean would whisper hope to my jagged and bleeding heart.

At 18 I knew I had never been alone.

My faith has been my anchor since then. Sure there have been storms. Some of such a magnitude that my anchor has dragged and I have found myself in uncharted territory and had to find my way back. But I have known, since that first awakening, where to look for help and from whom.

I have never accepted the notion that God allowed my abuse, or any other abuse, for the common good. Or because it was in some way good for me.

God made a world and gave the occupants a free will. We have made of that what we see. Stuff happens. People make choices. Many of those choices result in the abuse and neglect that hurts us. The wrong, the bad, the painful. These are not at His hand but at the hand of broken damaged people.

Blaming God and railing at him for the terrible things that have happened in our lives is as useful as a small child being angry with their mother because they fell off a swing. They are forgetting who it is who wants to scoop them up and wipe away their tears.

Did God allow you to go through what you did? Or was it from him that hope came to you, or how comfort seeped in? Was it he who stood beside you, unseen and silent, but there nevertheless?

8

Who are you?

Our identity when we are young is attached to the things other see and say about us. There comes a time when we must look at ourselves and decide who we shall be in their eyes.

This week we are going to focus on our identity, our sense of who we are in the world.

♥ Take a moment to think about yourself.

♥ Write a description of yourself as if you were talking to someone who makes no judgements, offers no criticisms. What words would you use to describe yourself?

♥ Think about some of the difficult times you have faced in your life. What did you do to get through these times?

♥ Do you realise that these things are your strengths?

♥ Rewrite these things as ‘I’ statements – ie If you reached out for help, write ‘My strength is that when I struggle I reach out for help’.

9

Who do you think you are?

I remember as a young girl, doing something wrong, and being asked this question. When we hear it again as adults it comes with a tone doesn’t it. A sharpness. A challenge that makes us want to justify what we think or feel.

Implicit in that question, as I remember it from childhood, is the idea that I have carried my whole adult life, that I am no-one. Nothing. Unworthy of whatever is on offer. Unimportant. Of no significance.

I grew up with this belief etched in my soul.

I knew it more than I knew any other thing in life. It was a given and I was unshakable in my belief.

But what I have learned is this - IT WAS A LIE. All of it. It’s all wrong.

You and I didn’t just happen by chance. We are not the result of some cosmic joke, or an accident or mistake. We were created with purpose, on purpose, with intention and design. We were created for a life. For a reason. And because of that we know that we have worth. We have value. We have significance. We matter.

For victims and survivors this is a hard subject. I struggled so much with this in past times, and still sometimes do lapse into moments where these feelings try to grope their way back in. But what I have learned is that we have to reprogram our minds. We have to weed out the wrong thinking and plant seeds of new thoughts. We have to nurture them and let them grow. We have to weed and pull out wrong thoughts as they come back, and most of all we have to stop watering the weeds and allowing them to grow.

What we think about ourselves impacts on everything. It’s time to check what your view is based on and begin to start weeding out the lies.

10

Have you ever had a moment when you felt as if life as you knew it was suddenly, and without warning, completely over?

I woke up one morning nearly twenty years ago with some clear ideas about what was happening in my life, only to find that everything had come crashing down around me as if an earthquake had hit and wreaked havoc in my entire life.

I suddenly found myself facing the bleakest future I could have imagined. And it had come out of nowhere.

It felt as if my life was ended. Just like that. Everything I had been working towards was gone. Everything that mattered. All broken. Shattered into tiny pieces.

I didn’t know how to take the next step, let alone think about continuing to live.

Looking back, my life only really properly began after the events of that day. Until then it was like I was sleeping through my own life.

It’s so often like that. What feels like the end is really an amazing beginning.

What made the difference for me was recovery.

That’s when my life began.

I committed to recovery and began to come alive. As if I had been in a coma and was finally emerging. Recovery didn’t give me my life back, it led me to a place where I was able to begin a much better one.

That’s when my life began.

I committed to recovery and began to come alive. As if I had been in a coma and was finally emerging. Recovery didn’t give me my life back, it led me to a place where I was able to begin a much better one.

11

What I learned in my early days in recovery was that when we have experienced abuse or trauma in our lives when we were young, it is most likely that will not have dealt with it in the most healthy way possible!

I dealt with the abuse I was living with by pretending it wasn’t happening to me. I would allow myself to ‘disappear’ when he cornered me - think about walking along the beach, try to smell the salt spray on the wind, try to feel the wobbly pebbles beneath my feet, listen for the sound of the waves crashing down in anger on the sea shore - I would try and picture myself sitting there peacefully afterwards and I would imagine the serenity I would know as soon as he was done…..and that helped me to get through it. Afterwards I would go to the beach and pretend I had been there all along. As if the abuse had happened to someone else. Someone who was not me.

It was a good coping strategy when I used it - it helped me survive the seventeen years of abuse I endured. But after I was finally able to leave the family home, I took the strategy with me. It had become how I dealt with pain and anything hard.

In recovery I realised that I wasn’t trapped in an abusive home any more with no other capacity but to pretend it wasn’t happening! I began to learn to handle things differently and one of the things I learned is that when you are not a trapped child you can walk away.

You don’t have to find a way to live with abuse.

You can simply leave.

Oh my. Now THAT really changed my life!

Children are incredibly resilient. Child survivors are amazingly resourceful. But when we are no longer children we don’t have to keep using those childish ways! It’s time to re-assess. Time to look at other ways we can manage.

Many of us have used drugs to help us numb our pain, eating disorders to try to find an area of our lives we can control, techniques like avoidance and denial to push the painful feelings away. But those ways no longer serve us do they? We know it but we keep doing the old things because they are comfortable to us, they don’t require us to think in different ways, they don’t make us work hard. We slip into them like putting on a pair of old worn gloves.

But it’s a new day and it’s time to try out new ways. Adult ways. That’s what recovery is all about!

12

There came a day, after a couple of years in recovery, when the topic of ‘Fear’ came up. I sat back, waiting to listen, not feeling that this was a subject I would have a lot to contribute about. I have never considered myself a fearful person.

I was quite detached about the conversation to begin with and sat, focused on the softly diffused light from the flickering candles, conscious of late-comers as the door creaked open and clicked shut. I went to the bathroom and returned, still thinking that this wasn’t a topic for my attention. But somewhere between someone talking about their fear of change and someone saying that fear felt like a darkness inside them, I began to get a sense of my soul asking me to answer its own question - Sue, what are you afraid of?

Sometimes it’s the question we don’t hear - the answer is already known to us if we listen to our hearts. Almost instantly I knew. I knew immediately what I was afraid of.

I was afraid of being alone. Afraid of raising my family alone.

After the meeting, over coffee I explained to my sponsor. I could see it so clearly now. I was struggling and despairing and trying everything I could think of to hold on to something broken because I was afraid of going it alone. I was terrified about managing my family and my life alone. And yet, to all intents and purposes I WAS alone! I was already alone almost all the time, and managing and yet scared of how I would manage alone! I couldn’t see it before, but that night it all became so clear.

I was raising my kids alone while being so deeply afraid of being left to raise my kids alone!

The broken thing was over. I knew it then - it had been over for so long already but I wasn’t willing to let it go.

How often we are prevented from making changes because of some hidden fear. If we knew what we were afraid of, if we could see the shadows that lurk in the recesses of our minds, if we turned the lights on, we would have less fear because so often the things we are afraid of are nothing - illusions - or like in my case, things we are already dealing with anyway.

What are YOU afraid of? What changes are YOU scared to make?

13

Learning new things can be very hard for us.

We act out of habit, out of what is familiar. For many of us, making any kind of a change can be very difficult. Many of us have a fear about doing things differently, a fear of failure, a fear we will let others down, a fear we won’t get it right - and what happens is paralysis. We are too scared to stay as we are and too scared to move forwards!

Stalemate!

My home is a boat and for the last nearly three years I have been travelling around Australia with my family. We move slowly and make lots of stops, and many of our stops are lengthy. We like to really explore, get to know a place, meet new people, catch up with old friends who are there, pick up available work.

One of the things I have observed in my family as we have travelled is how we all react differently to change.

Some of us are keen as mustard to depart a place, always thrilled to be setting off, eager for the next place, eager for the new, loving the adventure of the traveling in itself. Some of us, meanwhile, love the visiting of new places but the traveling less and so seem to take longer to be ready to go, need to explore more, take it in more. And then of course some of us have issues with getting used to a place, liking it, feeling at home and comfortable there and kind of wanting to stay while at the same time longing to leave!

I guess this is how life is for many of us. It’s a constant to-ing and fro-ing between staying in our comfort zone and leaving it to explore the new.

Staying in our comfort zone often feels easier in the moment than the challenge of learning something new, but change is an essential part of life!

Moving forwards to avoid change is futile - life is changing all around us whether we like it or not. Sometimes we have to just go with the flow, accept the change and let go.

Sometimes we need to back off and practice acceptance and just stop resisting.

14

At one point in the process of my recovery I began to think about what I might have been like if I had grown up in a healthy family. If I had not learned about sex before I was five, if I hadn’t had to try and process how to comfort myself after rape at twelve and thirteen and so on.

At the time I was the mother of a four year old daughter, a nine year old daughter and another who was fifteen. I was watching them one day and reflecting on their different personalities that started me thinking about what restoration might really look like.

I believe that in recovery we can become who we were always meant to be. I believe that if we do the work we need to do, that with the help of God and his grace, we can become the persons we were created to be.

This is a mystery to me and I can’t claim to understand all its ins and outs but I see it’s veracity in my life every day.

Having these gorgeous daughters really helped me in the process of letting my true self come to the surface.

I related to different aspects of their personalities. One of my girls has always been very neat and organised, a trait I often complemented her on. I knew I was like that too but the self-talk I had around that was to do with being fussy, bossy and nit-picky. I began to appreciate that part of my own personality instead of seeing it as a fault. I allowed this process to occur in other ways and in other elements of my personality and began to feel as I could literally see more of who I really was without all that judging and condemning.

Coming to understand myself was deeply liberating. Allowing myself to blossom, enjoying who I was instead of only highlighting all my faults and failings, was like a breath of fresh air. I felt like a butterfly about to be born and it was the most amazing sense of coming alive!

I look back now and it’s like I am looking back on a different life. I once felt so lost and confused in the world, and now, while I still have tricky moments, for the most part I am much clearer about who I am and who I always was buried beneath that pain and sorrow.

Many of us find that our sense of self is deeply tied to the abuse we have endured but when it becomes more fully linked to recovering, an amazing thing begins to happen.

Our identity begins to emerge – that person we might have been had abuse not taken over.

15

Recovery

There came a time when we committed to recovery. We made a decision that we were going to take the time to once and for all clean out the mess our internal world had become, turn on the lights and seek out every nook and cranny and not stop until we had dealt with what we found there.

♥ When did you begin your recovery journey?

♥ What have been some of the areas you have had to work on in your recovery journey?

♥ What tools have you found useful so far? Do you find yourself returning to these tools again and again – or do you find different things help you at different times?

♥ Where do you consider you are at in your journey?

♥ Is there something you particularly want to work on at the moment?

♥ What steps do you need to take to achieve this? What help do you need to enlist to make that happen?

16

Recovery is a process.

It holds within it the seemingly opposing ideas of letting it all go and fully embracing it. Ideas of staying with the pain and moving forwards. Ideas of falling apart and being more fully held together.

A wise man once said there is a time for everything, a time to be born and a time to die, a time to heal and a time to cry.

Recovery is a process and we move through different aspects of it.

At first we have to let ourselves see our pain. We have to let ourselves feel the depth of it. We have to open up our wound.

This leads us into grief and sorrow and more feelings as we let ourselves begin to experience and actually feel.

We move through these feelings and there is still more work to do, in understanding and resolving and making sense of what we have gone through.

It’s not a linear process. There are twists and turns and times we must go back and times when we realise we have only just begin to scratch the surface of what we are allowing ourselves to see and feel and times that we have to go back to the beginning and start again.

There is a time to come undone and there is a time to stitch ourselves back up. A time to cry and sit with the pain of the past and a time to pick ourselves up and declare boldly that we are not going to be victims any longer. There is a time to fall apart and a time to stand up and smile and realise it doesn’t feel the same any more.

This is the power, the gift and the delight of recovery and the end result is that we find ourselves not just roughly held together with tacking stitches, with little bits hanging out and little issues left undressed. No, this process leads us to a completely different place, where we are put back together but after the healing has been done, so we are solid, whole, together, complete and healthy.

Recovered.

Don’t be afraid to begin this journey, but do prepare yourself. Get some support, get some help and get moving.

You have carried this burden for too long, and now it is time to let yourself heal.

17

I am not the kind of person who runs around smiling and laughing all the time - my days have as many clouds as the next person’s, but I have always had a sense within me that no matter how dark the night, the morning will come.

I would not call myself a cheerful person as much as a hopeful person.

But what I have learned in my life is that I can take that kernel of hope and nurture it and watch as it blossoms into gratitude - and when it does I find myself to be more appreciative of everything I have, everything around me and life in general.

I know that many of us struggle with seeing the good things when so much seems hard. And of course it is that way. It’s quite ridiculous to suggest people who are really struggling should run around laughing. But the truth is, no matter how hard our life is in this moment, there is always something that isn’t so hard. Always a friend to support, a little loveliness in the day. There really can’t be a rainbow without the rain, and while it might be faint sometimes, it’s there if we want to look for it.

Choosing gratitude is like opening a door or cleaning a window. It allows us to see what was there all along - those little things that were obscured from our view because all we could see were the hard things. When we begin to choose gratitude we clear the way for our mind to notice the little things that can cheer us, we open our hearts to connect with the idea that all is not lost and instead of gloom, our life begins to be infused with hope.

18

Recovery is not a race. There are no winners and losers, no room for ‘He came in first’, no rewards for speed, or penalties for tardiness. And while there might be plenty of hurdles and leaps to be made, recovery is not a competition!

Recovery is an intensely personal journey and not something that can ever be compared with others. We all have our own stuff to work on, some more, some less! There is no time frame, no standardised peer-based projections of when you will be okay - it’s as individual a process as each person that begins it.

The thing about recovery is that it’s all about taking the steps we each, individually, need to take to make the changes we need to make so that we can walk with the well.

We make a huge mistake when we start comparing our journey with the journeys of others around us or we make the error of thinking that we should be this or that. It’s not an even playing field - we don’t even begin at the same times in our experience of life!

I used to wish that I had discovered recovery sooner - I thought I would have had less to work on and I would have had fewer mistakes to fix, fewer problems to sort through, fewer habits to alter - but it’s a nonsense! We begin recovery when we are ready for it and it doesn’t even follow that if we had begun sooner it would have been easier! We would have been different people, with less life experience and less capacity in many ways - but besides that - there is a truth in the idea that we begin things when we are ready to.

Recovery came to me as the last resort. I had tried everything else I could think of – by the time I began the program that I worked, I was willing to do whatever it took because I had literally run out of other options. I was ready to do whatever it took - because I knew there was nothing left.

Recovery is our own race. Our own journey. And that is all that should ever matter to us.

19

Sometimes when our lives feel very dark, and oppression is our closest companion, it can be hard to imagine that anyone cares about us at all.

I can remember as a young girl, walking on a lonely beach in England, on the south coast where I grew up, and feeling like the sea gulls