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Recovery from a drug or alcohol addiction is a journey, destination and way of life. It’s also a big achievement, one that consists of many smaller but nonetheless significant accomplishments. These countless milestones are anniversaries to remember. They are what make a recovery lifestyle so worthwhile, and are one good reason the month of September is now an annually celebrated National Recovery Month.
Celebrating these sobriety anniversaries can deepen and renew a motivation to stay sober by helping you gauge your progress in recovery. This article will therefore introduce readers to the types of anniversaries that mark critical progress in recovery, from key points of time in treatment and recovery—be they public celebrations or more privately experienced moments—to important measures of how far you have come in attaining life skills that support your recovery.
Many sobriety anniversaries are significant points in the journey that can pertain to anyone in recovery and are often widely recognized as such in recovery circles:
There are also the less predictable thoughts, feelings, sensations and associations that are unique to your recovery story in particular. They are, in the words of one recovering addict:
“little moments which are sprung on you out of the blue and which, therefore, don’t come preceded by the attendant levels of anxiety which an obviously significant milestone on the horizon (say a five or ten-year anniversary of sobriety, for example) always carry with them to some degree… They are insignificant only insofar as they generally go unnoticed by others around us. They are our own private, personal milestones—signals not to others but to ourselves that we are getting better.”
Examples of this more personal sobriety anniversary can include:
These are only some of the many milestones that, while maybe not accompanied by much public fanfare, are significant, nonetheless—because your personal celebration of recovery would not be complete without them. While they may not find their way into someone else’s recovery story, they are the critical details in yours. They therefore deserve to be treasured and remembered.
Finally, the attainment of certain life skills that support your recovery is another type of anniversary to remember in recovery. This type of anniversary has less to do with important points of time in the passage of your recovery (be they public or private), and instead relates to the successful mastery of a particular goal or skill. Examples might include:
Some key anniversaries in treatment and recovery have already received mention, but there are others. For example, treatment milestones that are more specific to clients at Beach House Center for Recovery include:
These key stages measure progress in the development of healing connections to people, purpose and passion, the three critical ingredients of recovery that direct our approach to drug and alcohol treatment at Beach House Center for Recovery.
There are still other anniversaries worth remembering and celebrating in recovery from drugs or alcohol. One way to conceptualize and identify these milestones is via the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA’s) Recovery Support Strategic Initiative. This framework for recovery identifies four major dimensions that support a life in recovery. They include (quoting SAMHSA):
Other anniversaries to remember are those that celebrate progress in one or more of the above dimensions. What they look like concretely will vary from one person to another, but their general parameters—better health, a stable home environment, deeper purpose and connection to a wider community of relationships—are what define them as important milestones in recovery.
