When I Envy the Newcomer

After many years of recovery I can still feel shame when this happens. And it happened again just this week: A man in my home group celebrated 6 months and he was glowing. His life was transformed, he had found a deep faith in his Higher Power, his surrender was total; he had completed his step work and was quoting the Big Book. His “share” was more lecture than personal story, but still I bit.

I was jealous. 

I know better. I knew better. But I could feel myself become envious and annoyed. I knew that I should be happy for his newcomer’s pink cloud and his new life but my own smallness revealed my envy. After all these years and all this work—I’m still trying to surrender, have absolute faith, and be a perfectly perfect person.

I know, I know.

This is also why I wrote “Out of the Woods”. In this book I talk about the awkward things, the difficult things and even the embarrassing things that can happen to us in long-term recovery. Envying a newcomer is just one of them. 

It is times like this that I wish for regular meeting for people who have ten or 15 or 20 years. Not to leave other people behind but to be able to say,  “Does anyone else feel like this?” and to laugh at something like my envy of the newcomer. 

I know better. You know better. We all know better. But still.

I’m know that I did exactly what he did when I was new to recovery. In fact, I was the young woman bringing recovery literature to my family Thanksgiving dinner and passing it around like hors ‘dourves. 

So you’d think I’d have more compassion.

But what I know now—and what I have written about in “Out of the Woods” --is that life happens to all of us, and that we need those pink clouds and happy days to give us the ground under the harder parts of our recovery. And as we stay in recovery a long time those harder parts will come on their own.

My red-faced humility is this: When I hear those newcomers speak of their rapidly transformed lives and the perfect, lasting peace that recovery has given them, I still want what they have. 

That’s why I keep coming back.

Relapse is Worse in Longterm Recovery

I just love Renew Magazine—it’s all about recovery, treatment options, recovering people, with many surprising angles and approaches to recovery.

This week I read a piece in Renew by Tracey Dee Raub about relapse and it literally made me sit up and slow down. In the first paragraph she says the 90% of recovering people will have at least one relapse in the first four years. That’s scary. And maybe—here in Out of the Woods land—it’s just scary for folks we know…but here is what is scary for those of us with 10 or more years: “Those who move into long-term sobriety have this daunting reality to heed: People with more recovery time are less likely to return to a program of recovery after a relapse than those who are new to recovery.”

Ok—that is daunting. If we relapse we don’t go back…we suffer, struggle and die or even worse, don’t die—just live miserable lives again.

I do not want that Sam I Am. No I don’t.  

The article goes on to describe why people relapse: S.L.I.P.-- Sobriety Lost Its Priority. Raub did some great homework for this piece. She has powerful statistics on relapse. She quotes Deni Carise from Phoenix House who says that, “The predictors of relapse in substance abuse, diabetes, asthma and hypertension are all the same. With all of them, if you don’t take the medicine and you don’t follow professional guidance, you will relapse. The top relapse predictors are the same in all four chronic illnesses. And the more sobriety you have the less likely it is that you will survive a relapse.

Remember that AA quote that says, while you are sitting in the meeting your addiction is over in the corner doing pushups? Turns out it’s true and statistically valid.

So I am bookmarking this article to re-read every month. I haven’t thought of my addictions as illnesses in a long time but I’m back, and I want to stay back. Looking at the relapse stats for folks with longtime recovery has given me pause.