“Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief.” --Cicero

Nowhere else in my life have I ever experienced friendship and fellowship quite like what I have in the sober/recovery community.  Never once have I felt someone be jealous of me for a sober win or celebrate one of my setbacks.  No one has ever done anything other than root me on and share their guidance, hope, and love. 

Nowhere else is such valuable knowledge about how to live life successfully so freely given.  Nowhere else have I seen people rise above differences in religion, race, class, region, nationality, sex, gender, and political belief.  No one, in my view, does a better job of finding commonality, of lifting people up, and of providing encouragement without judgment.

Addiction is something that inherently disconnects us from our fellow men and women.  We tend to withdraw into ourselves.  We avoid those who love us most because we know their disapproval will cause us to have to make the uncomfortable choice between our drug of choice and our loved ones.  Many of us would not choose family over our fix.  And so, after living in hopeless isolation from those who truly care about us, we enter sobriety sometimes with the feeling that we are now truly alone.  We are often estranged from our family and friends and we have not yet found the sober community that will foster us and teach us to re-enter society.  That’s a scary time.

What we invariably find, when we look for it, in early sobriety is a group of people living in joyful recovery who will drop what they are doing at a moment’s notice to help.  That comes in many forms.  It can be a place to stay, a chat on the phone, or an encouraging word but the root of that support is love.  It is love in a way that love is meant to be experienced.  It is our hope and support.  It is our care and concern.  It is our encouragement and our advice.  Those in recovery are marvelous practitioners of the unconditional love we often hear about but rarely experience.

Cicero’s quote above, Dear Reader, perfectly describes the way we in recovery support and encourage one another. We celebrate each other’s successes and we provide comfort and counsel in each other’s hardships.  This is a testament to the power of friendship to help us heal through the scourge of addiction and the confusion of early recovery.  

Beyond that, the support provided by those in recovery to those in early sobriety provides a special kind of hope to the newcomer.  That is the hope that the newly sober person can too, recover and that his or her trauma and experience in addiction can serve a greater purpose of commonality with the next person to arrive.  We who have lived in addiction are unique in our ability to listen without judgment and to guide without disdain.  We have what people who have not lived that life lack, which is the ability to understand how good people can make bad and irrational decisions in the throes of active addiction.  That ability make us the perfect people to guide the newcomer and perpetuate the healing wisdom and comfort we ourselves were provided by our forebears in sobriety.  That makes us an active part of the legacy of healing that has rescued so many of us from the snapping jaw of addiction.  That makes us heroes in every sense of the word.