This Day in Recovery
This Day in Recovery offers a short, daily experience to help bring readers back to their spiritual center in the daily moments of struggle and questioning. A 2022 Silver Nautilus Award Winner in the Health, Healing and Wellness category...
The process of recovery has been one of slowly allowing strangers to become friends to become trusted confidantes.
When I first entered the rooms of recovery, I thought I had nothing in common with the people around me. Turns out that is a very common story. So many of us come in with preconceived notions of who seeks recovery. These prejudgments sometimes keep us from getting the help that we need.
As I kept listening, I kept hearing my truth and my story being told by others. I realized so many of us have common experiences. And how couldn’t we? None of us in that room was terminally unique. We all struggled either with loving others who lived with an addiction or with the symptoms and effects of our own addiction.
These strangers who I sat with slowly became friends. People I could call on when I needed help. Folks I could be honest with because they knew where I was coming from. As my recovery progressed, they became people who I would call in the midst of my struggles: people to be honest with, to pray with, and to ask for guidance in how to cope with what I was telling them about. These strangers are no longer strangers. They are me and I am them.
Note: As the Twelfth Tradition of Twelve-Step recovery reminds us, "Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities." The editors and authors of This Day in Recovery chose not to provide individual attributions in order to respect this tradition. This meditation appears for December 28 in that book.