Recently, I’ve had many chats with a close friend recovering from a compulsive disorder. While I won’t claim to understand everything he talks about, I am more than happy to chat through things with him and hope that my thoughts are in some way helpful. Among the things I myself take from all our discussions are the parallels between recovery from his disorder and TBI recovery.
A major part of recovery for my friend is accepting a higher power can help us recover, but also learning to give up control to that power. (Recovering alcoholics may know these as Steps Two and Three of the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.) This may seem difficult to believe, but recoverers from compulsive disorders experience more control over their compulsions by wilfully giving up on having control! That idea’s not a simple one –I think it took me some proper thinking to even start to get it – but please bear with me while I talk through what I think it shows for TBI recovery.
With this idea in mind, I thought through my TBI recovery and realised I’d touched on it in my post, Having Faith I Will Figure It Out. In the post, I describe how I keep myself going by having faith that, sooner or later, I’ll work out a way of solving, or at least of significantly reducing, any problem I run into. Sometimes I think me working it out comes from getting a sign – in the post, Listening to Your Body: Sweating and Cravings for Salt, I wrote about how I (eventually) realised one sign: my body was showing it was lacking salt by giving me cravings for salty foods. Maybe my giving it up to a higher power is accepting that, whatever issue comes along, I’ll be given a sign about how best to deal with it.
On the question of fatalism versus freewill, I fall very much on the side of free-will: while I believe a greater power might give me a sign as to the right way, I believe it is entirely up to me to follow it. Please let me know if you agree or have any thoughts about my attempting to reconcile fatalism and freewill for TBI recovery.
Furthermore, this is not a simple subject: like I said, I still think I’m figuring it out. I also think it’s critical to the daily decisions we make in our recoveries. Please feel free to comment on here if you any further questions on it. If you’re wondering about something, no doubt others are, too.
Cheers,
Mike
