RECOVERY: Rebooting the Brain

There are many stages of recovery, but at one time or another, everyone is slogging down the road to recovery and it can be a rocky, pothole invested path with dangerous curves.

At some time or another, often many times in one life, you are in the process of recovery or healing.

Trauma takes many forms, addictions come in all shapes and sizes and chronic stress whittles away at the brain to engage physical symptoms throughout the entire body.

No one is immune and at various times in one's life, maladaptive, dysfunctional thoughts, feelings and behaviors become allies in impairing quality of life. The very neural structure of the brain is directly affected by trauma, stress and addiction, whether through the constant influence of negative external stimuli or your own faulty subconscious cognitive processing of experiences, the changing neuroplasticity of brain structure is an ongoing event.

Recovery is the process of rebooting the brain to shut down electro-chemical currents and prune out defective circuits, while reconstructing and reformating neuro-circuitry that promotes more adaptive and healthy thoughts, feelings and behaviors.

Recovery requires you effectively cope with your impatience and find a way to gain comfort with the process, because the time it takes is dependent on the extent of your trauma, addiction or stress.

In modern western society, where the quick fix to suffering is paramount, failure to get comfortable with the process of recovery may result in further escalation of symptoms by replacing one addictive behavior for another, seeking immediate relief through self-medicating substances or becoming excessively over-medicated by a psychiatric profession that idolizes prescribed pharmaceuticals as the chief means of dealing with trauma, addiction and stress.

Recovery is not linear, but intermittent and takes time, because time heals all wounds. 

There will be good days and bad and just when it seems the bad days are behind you, PAWS (Post Acute Withdrawal Syndrome) will rear it's ugly head for a protracted period, demanding a return to the addictive behavior, a return to dysfunctional protective mechanisms or conditioned/programmed anxiety reactions.

I've experienced recovery episodes that took weeks to reboot and others that took years and each time it was my impatience that resulted in relapse and the need for more time to heal.