Trying to Heal From the Outside-In and Why Drug and Alcohol Treatment Is Backward
For nearly 14 years, I've helped individuals navigate the complex landscape of addiction in order to achieve recovery. Nicknamed "The Casual Counselor", my approach is unconventional but undeniably effective.
Go to virtually any drug and alcohol treatment program, and you’ll be introduced to a framework built around completing a checklist of external changes in order to achieve “recovery.” We are told to structure our days, friend groups, and how we are altered and influenced by the company we keep. We are told to adopt an exercise and healthier dietary routine, to “clean up” whatever exists beyond managed care, getting rid of paraphernalia, substances, or bottles possibly left behind where we will be returning.
Stuff like that. Lifestyle change. Building our schedule around self help meetings, awkwardly trying to seek out sponsors and mentors to hold our hands through those early, difficult months. Medication compliance. Journaling. Keeping a gratitude list or a dream diary, and on and on forever.
Make no mistake, these structural adjustments are excellent! Lifestyle change is vital. Changes and rearranges create the stability needed to survive the chaos of the early days.
Here’s the thing, though. As important as it may be, lifestyle change is just one side of the medallion of recovery and the flip side is the heavier side, because the truth, for everyone, proves that every person in long term recovery confronts this hard truth, you cannot heal an internal wound with an external glow up.
Don’t get me wrong! I’m all for getting that haircut, buying the shoes, building the body so we start seeing the contours of sinew in our mirror, manicures and pedicures, vacations. Why?
Because they make us feel good! They give us a lift. Real healing, long term, emotional recovery demands that we lean into the direction of down. The stuff deep down inside of us. The yuck. The hurt. The wounds. The unmet needs. The propaganda and fucked up conditioning that we’ve been filled with, the shortcomings of our parenting.
Yeah. All that and more! That which does not make us feel good, but unless or until we confront it, will fester and grow inside of us like a malignant tumor, permeating just about every element of “self,” from our esteem to how we behave in relationships, which will manifest misery, guaranteed, and on and on forever. Sorry.
Lasting, whole self recovery never happens from the outside in. It can only happen from the inside out. When we first step onto the path of recovery, rearranging our lifestyle is what we want to start with, as a deep dive into the hardest stuff will inevitably harm us in all of our raw vulnerability.
We need to get ourselves into a healthy and steady rhythm of decision making, day to day. A tempo we can keep up with. We trade sleepless nights for early morning jogs. We swap triggers for actionable choices to re regulate when our overwhelm is rising.
This external “scaffolding” is incredibly important. It serves as guardrails so that if we begin to drift off the road to recovery, we have some effective barriers to protect us from rolling off the highway into a fireball in the field.
We’re dealing with visceral cravings, feelings we’ve been numb to for years. Decades, even. So. Much. Pain. Discomfort beyond measure. The scaffolding gives us something to lean on when we’re floating in the massive void left by the loss of our coping tool. Our source of relief.
But if we stop there, and maybe I’ll write my next article about it, we’re likely to become someone whose life was saved by the external fixer upper, but a project that was never able to help us rebuild the life inside of us. The mess of the internal world often makes the external mess look like a dance in the daisies.
Read more from Joshua Bennett-Johnson
Joshua Bennett-Johnson, Licensed Counselor & Owner of JBJ Counseling
After working for 7 years in an amazing clinic, I launched into private practice in 2018. I love my job. I can say that without reservation. Watching people rebuild their lives is something that is worth more than any dollar amount.
