Recovery as a process
Trust the process is a remark that lacks enough nuance to fully stand up to the complexities of stress, trauma, and recovery.
Trust is a lot to ask. Our personal histories might make it difficult to trust anything that does not contain certainty. There’s no certainty about the exact outcome of this process; only that it has the potential to lead us toward something different.
I won’t advocate for people to trust the process, or even like the process … but I will invite them not to ignore the process.
We like to try and make sense of the unknown. When we think about the potential outcomes of recovery, our minds naturally try to make things feel more obtainable. It might imagine a version of us that is cured, fixed, or fully recovered. Or just a version of us that feels better than we do now.
A beginning and an end (is there an end in recovery?).
The curious thing here is that in the effort to fashion an obtainable outcome, our minds create a chasm between where we are now and where we’re going. This leaves us with an unimaginable, impossible leap to make between here and … somewhere completely unknown. It’s unobtainable, but the middle place is not. We can easily find ourselves in the middle because it’s where we live. It’s where life is unfolding, now.
The nitty gritty of the middle is where much of recovery happens. In the everyday, moment-to-moment ways we relate to ourselves and others.
To conclude this short post, I’ll share a concept I was introduced to recently which helped to ground me in my own process of moving toward the unknown:
Coddiwomple: to travel purposefully towards an as-yet-unknown destination.
The keyword here is purposefully—it’s in the how. We have agency and control in the how.
It’s about how we exist in that middle space. How we reconnect with ourselves when old patterns of disconnection come up. How we soothe ourselves when we’re brought into past experiences of isolation or helplessness. How we relate to ourselves when we act imperfectly. How we take baby steps outside of our old patterns.
Purpose, for me, brings a calming quality to the idea of a process. It reminds me that we can act with intention. It’s not a passive thing we must surrender ourselves to. With purpose, perhaps it’s not the process we are being asked to trust, but our own role in engaging with the process as it happens.
