Mental Health Affairs

There is an undeniable mobility to recovery. Moving forward in your path to health and healing requires inertia. From the rate of recovery, the speed and velocity required to push life past setbacks, to identifying a sustainable pace, it is a space and feat that requires a high level of self-awareness and knowledge of your diagnosis. Depending on your diagnosis, trauma history, and triggers, you will need to know how to lock on to a path that will hurl you towards better health and avoid relapse. This is a tightrope; walking the line requires discipline, wisdom, and life experience.

While having a solid clinical prowess can help frame your weak points and strengths, only learning from lived experience will honestly forecast how you will respond to stressors and how quickly you rally back from pitfalls and risk of relapse. Unfortunately, this means a period of trial and error. Doesn’t sound very clinical, but it is very clinical, as testing and applied experiential knowledge is most certainly a part of the clinical picture. Sometimes, we need to see what works and doesn’t work before we can forecast the future from historical experiences.

So, how can we understand the mobility that moves our recovery along in better terms? Mobility is movement. Above all, the energy pushes us past holding patterns in our recovery in which people stagnate and feel trapped without progress or hope. These can be the most frustrating moments in our recovery. We just don’t seem to progress from week to week. Mobility makes progress possible. But mobility itself isn’t progress. It is the mechanism that drives progress forward.

Think of a car, and it’s the engine. The engine moves the car along from point A to point B. But depending on the course and direction the driver takes, the car’s journey can have several outcomes. The car can safely reach point B and experience movement toward its goal. Or, the car can crash on its way to point B and not reach its destination. This is the stagnation, holding pattern, and deferred progress I was referring to, which all depends on the knowledge, skills, wisdom, preparedness, and all things which push back against the risk of relapse.

As drivers in our recovery or ship captains, we must avoid pitfalls if you prefer that metaphor. More importantly, we must truly understand how far and how much we can push and continue moving forward in our recovery without burning out our engine or, worse, getting injured. I have experienced several injuries and mishaps along my path to health and healing. But no injury so devastating that I couldn’t keep moving forward. Why? Because I got to know my weak points very well. I learned that when I am collapsing, to sit down and take a seat before hitting the hard cold pavement of relapse and heartache.

Finding the energy to move forward in recovery can be difficult. Severe symptoms can carry lethargy from medication side effects or, even worse, setbacks from poor decision-making and cognitive distortions, which can form from delusional systems that can become fixed or solvent depending on the condition. With all these obstacles in your path to healing, finding the right course to avoid pitfalls can be problematic. Each successive setback can be even more demoralizing. This is understandable, but not a license to stop walking the path to health and healing.

So, I recommend a few things to move mobility in the right direction:

1) Learn your limits

2) Plan for the worst at all times

3) Know your weak points and nurture your strengths

4) Tally your victories and each marker or indicator you are making progress

5) When you succeed, prepare to lose ground unless you get to know the mobility and momentum required to keep moving forward

Learning limits constantly remind you how far you can psychologically and physiologically push your body before accumulating negative feedback or outcomes. Not being mindful of this can lead to the worst of relapses. Keeping in mind a great stretch, this awareness of your limits can be limitlessly fruitful in avoiding potentially harmful and challenging problems in your path to health. Keeping in mind that charting your victories, however small, is not only motivating but clinically helpful in raising your awareness of what works and what doesn’t in moving the healing momentum along.

Finally, always remember, Hope is never truly lost until you stop believing in recovery today!