Stuck In Your Addiction Recovery? FIX IT!!

What do addiction recovery and a flat tire share in common? You can stand around analyzing the problem, call your friends and whine about it, curse the idiot that dropped the nail on the road, OR you can get your spare tire and jack out and change it yourself. Guess which option is going to get you moving in a forward direction?
The same mindset applies to addiction recovery. Recovering addicts can choose to do what it takes to beat addiction and move forward with their lives or they can spend the rest of their days embracing the pain of the past and living in fear that their addiction is a big, bad wolf waiting just outside the door. Depending on the recovering addict’s personality type, it breaks down to two main types of people – those that cling tightly to the past for various reasons, which are known as forever “recovering” addicts/alcoholics, and those that want to put the past behind them and do what it takes to become fully “recovered”, former addicts. These two basic personality types include several other types, as well, which are as follows –
The Support Group Junkie
This type of person just can’t seem to get enough meetings under their belt. It’s meetings, meetings and more meetings that keeps the support group junkie sober. Whee!! AA and NA become Club Med for this type and the S.G.J. absolutely adores the social aspect of meetings. In fact, the 12 Steps become far more attractive to talk about for this type than the pesky business of actually working them. The S.J.C. is easy to spot. They’re the first one to raise their hand when asked if anyone would like to share their story with the others.
The Sobriety Time Calculator
The S.T.C. is damned proud of their clean time and wants the world to know it. They spend a lot of time posting their sobriety dates in Facebook addiction recovery groups so that the rest of us can applaud their superhuman accomplishment. Their posts generally read as follows – “Wow! I have been clean and sober for 27 years, 5 months, 4 days and 32 minutes! That amounts to 7 million minutes or 92 gazillion seconds!! Thank you, Lord, for showing me the way to the free online sobriety calculator!!”
The Dry Drunk
The D.D. is not a happy camper and he’s not afraid to show it. It’s not fair that other people can drink, but not him, which is a constant source of irritation for the D.D. He spends most of his time praising God for keeping him sober “one day at a time”. The D.D. celebrates his good fortune by quoting Big Book excerpts, including page numbers, ramming his recovery views down the throats of well-meaning, unwitting victims, and attacking anyone that dares to challenge his superior recovery knowledge and expertise. It’s easy to see why the Dry Drunk is the most loved and adored of all the recovery personality types. 
The Perpetual Twelve Step Scholar
This type epitomizes the “forever recovering” addict mentality. While most of us might spend a couple of weeks, at most, learning the principles of AA’s 12 Steps and then applying them to our own recovery process, the P.T.S.S. could write a thesis on each of the one sentence steps that would make War And Peace look like a Bazooka gum wrapper. Much like the Dry Drunk, the P.T.S.S. possesses the amazing ability to quote the Big Book, including page numbers, upside down and back to front while blindfolded. Ironically, this type never seems to get the memo about the spiritual awakening message that was the reason AA was founded in the first place. The devil’s in the details for this type, apparently.
The Recovered Addict
By far the rarest and most soft-spoken of the bunch is the R.A. He or she doesn’t spend a lot of time talking about sobriety dates, days of addiction past, or beating others over the head with their personal beliefs and experience. They’re too busy enjoying their alcohol or drug free lives to be bothered and often spend their time quietly helping other struggling addicts learn how to do the same. The R.A. appears almost invisible and must be careful not to tell the others his Higher Power cured his addiction during meetings, for fear of being shunned and ridiculed by today’s “forever recovering” victims of an “incurable disease” mob mentality… which is a complete 360 degree turnaround from AA’s founding fathers’ original message.
If you are currently struggling with addiction, you have the power to choose whether you want to spend the rest of your life as a fledgling, fragile recovering addict or learn how to become fully recovered and move on with your life. You can allow others to convince you that you are helpless over your addiction or you can become the captain of your own recovery vessel. Pick one.
For those that would like to beat addiction once and for all, there is a book called 3 Steps To Recovery that can show you or a loved one how to do just that. To learn more, please visitwww.3stepstorecovery.com.