Mental Health and Sobriety vs Dependance

You may or may not be among those of us who remember the song by Stephen Shwartz that had the famous line, ‘the hardest part of love is letting go’. It can be a sad often painful feeling to have something that we are used to removed from our lives. How we deal with it directly affects our mental health. That feeling of butterflies that comes from emotional withdrawal or far worse, the physical wracking of the shakes that come from substance withdrawal. Why bulk all of these beautiful and destructive dependencies into one group? Because substance abuse often finds its trigger in hiding the emotional sensitivities that arise from the pain of other dependencies in life.

To expand on this further and hopefully clarify the intent here for us all, recovery involves and requires us to move on, to let go of many things in our lives that were wrapped up in a package of dependancies that included alcohol and/or other substances. These include people, habits, mannerisms, thought patterns, self doubts and ultimately the fears that are associated with each, that linger in the background or scream in our thoughts to no let go of our dependance, that which we are used to.

This is where by my school of thought, emotional growth is established in the same way for these dependancies as it was for deciding to longer want harmful substances. You analyze the s**t out of it. Play if forward, review the with or without it scenario, the costs and benefits, how it relates to your principal values and integrity in living your life. Allow your mind to be retrained, seeing the path forward to move on from past seasons in your life. Spring is nourished by the decay of past life that feeds the soil as is our life with recognition of our past lives and actively choosing our way forward.