Early Recovery

Recovery, What a concept. You know what generally is the hardest part of early recovery? It’s shutting your mouth and listening. Yes that’s it, accepting that you basically know squat about recovery, you may be educated and know about, economics, sports, the stock market and a whole range about all sorts of topics, however basically nothing about recovery. Or you would not be in early recovery. You have to “take the cotton baton out of your ears and put it in your mouth” as the oldtimers would put it, you have to take all your thinking and preconceived notions and stifle them. For early recovery is for learning about recovery from those who have achieved some measure of recovery, proven by years and years of being continuously clean and sober and creating a life out of the ashes of addiction. Early recovery basically put is like being back in preschool, kindergarten at best to advance you need to finish your first set of steps and celebrate a full year of being clean and sober, then you can move on.
Broken down the first step is about seeing admitting to your inner most self that you have a problem, steps 2 and 3 are finding a higher power or God of your understanding, steps 4, 5, and 6 is about learning who you really are. Steps 7, 8, and 9 are taking responsibility for you. The remaining steps are for continuing to monitor self, a deeper relationship with your God, and 12 helping others, these last three are also about emotional sobriety. The oldtimers used to phrase it as “trust god, clean house, and help others.”
After breaking it all down is recovery does not come overnight, it takes work, perseverance and time. We come in here ego maniacs with inferiority complexes, thinking we know it all and the truth is usually we are all alone trapped in a prison of our own making, however if we just get out of the way of ourselves, listen take suggestions there is a life better than anything we would have ever imagined, just waiting for us to go and grab it.
Remember God does not create garbage