“All changes, even the most longed for, have their
melancholy;
For what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves;
We must die to one life before we can enter another.”
~Anatole France
One of the key concepts for the wellness recovery
model is hope. Recovery is a reality and being able to direct and
live “your” life is the goal. A hopeful attitude combined with a healthy
perception of life’s difficulties, allows us to move forward and not slip
backwards, because life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Even
when we feel very hopeful, recovery doesn’t always happen according to plan.
Relapse into habitual patterns often occurs because we don’t reach our goals
fast enough.
Victor Frankl, the founder of logo therapy and Vienna
psychiatrist, who was also a Holocaust survivor, recalls in his book Mans
search for Meaning, the following story that took place in his concentration
camp. “One day a fellow prisoner confided to him that a voice in a strange dream
had promised to answer whatever question he wanted to ask. So he asked the voice
to tell him when the camp would be liberated. The dream voice replied, March
30th. The man awakened from his dream absolutely thrilled and excited — March 30th was only a few weeks away. Under the torturous conditions in the
camp, the man took the dream seriously, believing with all his heart that March
30th would bring salvation. But as the day approached and the news
reaching the prisoners remained discouraging, the man took sick.”
On March 31th, after the deadline and no
liberation, the man died. The physical cause of his death was listed as typhus.
But Dr. Frankl believes it was the sudden loss of hope, (the severe
disappointment) which lowered the man’s resistance to the infection. This
experience — along with many others like it
— convinced Dr. Frankl that if you have nothing more to expect for life,
you begin to lose life.
So be patient and concentrate on the good things in
life. We may not see a change tomorrow, next week, or even next month. But as we
look back we will see a new life has emerged. So we come to learn that the
beginning of hope is being able to visualize ourselves moving on beyond our
current conditions and circumstances. But the true experience of hope only
happens when we begin to address the core issues (our perceptions and choices)
for the first time.
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