The Cutprice Guignol

When it comes to recovery, where does the line between focus and obsession fall?

It’s a question I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, and something I’ve touched on a little writing about eating disorder recovery accounts – the strange grey area that lies between a healthy focus on recovery and an unhealthy obsession with it. Over the course of my life, I’ve been or am in recovery, in one way or another, from a few things – alcohol abuse, eating disorders, self-harm. And in every case, there has been a moment where I’ve realised that my recovery has swelled to fill more of my life than I want it to, and that’s a problem.

In the early stages of recovery from almost anything, you need to be, quite frankly, a little bit obsessed. Whatever you’re getting over, there’s a good chance it has taken up a decent amount of your time, energy, and headspace. You have to stop up the holes where this negative behaviour entered your life, and that takes a hell of a lot out of you – for a little while, your life has to be built around recovery, forming new routines, building new habits, bracing yourself against the urge to relapse or return to what you knew before. If you’ve been dealing with some major issue that you’re in recovery for, chances are you picked up that problem for a reason, to fill some gap in your life or mind that’s now suddenly empty again: the easiest thing to fill it with, when I quit, seemed like recovery. It was healthy, right? I was focused on doing better, not doing worse.

But when you dedicate so much time and effort into these new habits and new routines, into leaving behind the old, negative behaviours – which, to be very clear, I think is a good and positive thing – there often comes a point where your life is as much built around not doing something as it was around doing it. I found myself identifying with these problems really deeply, just in a different way – I went from being someone with an eating disorder to someone in eating disorder recovery, someone who abused alcohol to someone who was sober, but each title was in equally bold font in my mind. My life had gone from the pursuit of this shit to the pursuit of not doing it, but I still felt constrained by that focus – instead of the freedom I’d wanted from recovery, I was just as much building my life around this stuff as I had been before, now, just from a different angle. Using became as big in my life as not using, doing as big as not doing.

But allowing recovery to become the focus of my entire life, my thoughts, my actions, always left me feeling closer to relapse than trying to truly move on did – obsessing over it in the long-term kept the door open for those behaviours to sneak back in again. I could convince myself that, if I was thinking about it all the time and going to such lengths to avoid it, then maybe I was just better off doing it in the first place. If it’s going to fill my life one way or another, what difference did it make if I was doing it or not? Evidently bullshit, but it was easy to convince myself it wasn’t when I was searching for reasons to go back to the way things were before.

And, for me, real recovery has looked like shifting away from this obsession with these behaviours. Which has not been easy, or quick, or consistent. It’s not as though you can ever just switch off those parts of your brain completely, and even now, there are times I have to be on guard for things that might push an unwelcome button in my brain and nudge me back in the direction of picking that shit up again. But actually making a concentrated effort to fill my life with things other than recovery – once I had that solid groundwork in place – has made the biggest difference in actually allowing me to move on in a meaningful way.

I would love to hear what’s worked for you in terms of dealing with addiction, recovery, and sobriety – did you find yourself identifying with recovery? Was it harmful for your long-term wellbeing? Let me know in the comments (and feel free to drop your own experiences with recovery too!).