How Rock Bottom Prepares Us For Recovery

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When we “hit rock bottom,” we reach a point in our addiction experience where we realize that we can no longer keep going the way we've been going. We can no longer sustain the ways in which we've been living. Our addictions and mental health challenges have gotten out of control. We feel desperate. We feel powerless. We feel like we won't survive. Ultimately, each of us discovers that we have to pick ourselves up out of the ruin, and it can be some of the hardest work we'll ever do in our lives. We have to make serious changes. Many of us have catastrophic life experiences, tragedies, or huge personal regrets that prompt us to hit our rock bottom. They serve as the catalyst for major life destruction, and therefore transformation. We feel like we've fallen as far as we could possibly fall. We feel like there's no way our lives could get any worse. Things couldn't get any harder. After hitting rock bottom, we look back and view that experience as the point in time after which things were never the same again. How does hitting rock bottom prepare us for our recovery?

We're Scared Into Action

When we hit rock bottom, we're pushed to our breaking point. We feel fed up with the ways in which we've been living. We feel fed up with ourselves. We're exhausted and depleted of energy. We feel hopeless and defeated. We know we have to make important life changes, and we have to make them now. For many of us, our rock bottom scares us straight. We immediately recognize how much we've been endangering our lives and our well-being, and potentially the well-being of others. We see firsthand, often in shocking clarity, just how much we've been self-harming. We can feel as though reaching our breaking point literally breaks us, and we finally see very clearly the parts of ourselves that need to be shed, the things we need to break off and eliminate in our lives. We're scared into action, knowing we have to take steps forward if we want to get better.

Our Lowest Point

For many of us, hitting rock bottom in our addictions means realizing we have become so self-destructive, so self-hating, so careless with our safety, so reckless, that we could easily lose our lives. We might overdose, or drive drunk. We might put ourselves in dangerous situations. Others of us hit rock bottom with our mental health issues and have a severe depressive episode or breakdown. We might experience acute panic attacks or suicidal thoughts. Many of us feel as though we're hitting rock bottom in both our addictive patterns and our mental and emotional well-being. We experience a great deal of suffering. We get hit with the fact that if we want to live, we have to save ourselves.

The Catalyst for Change

Hitting rock bottom prepares us for our recovery because, for many of us, it is the catalyst for our sobriety, the motivation behind our recovery, the final straw that pushes us to get sober. Many of us feel that if we hadn't ever hit rock bottom, we might just continue on with our addictions, coasting along the way we were, functioning relatively normally. We wouldn't feel any inclination to get better because our well-being had yet to be so intensely compromised. We were doing fine, so we became complacent in our addictions. We were managing to get away with things, and so far we hadn't had any catastrophic or life-changing consequences. Without hitting rock bottom, we might continue to be nonchalant and carefree about our addictions, not thinking they pose much of a threat to us. Conversely, we might know full well how serious our addictions are, but because we've been getting by in our lives, we justify our addictions and our dependence on our drugs of choice. We tell ourselves they help us to destress, to be calmer, to be happier, or more sociable. We give ourselves all kinds of excuses and justifications as to why we shouldn't get sober. Hitting rock bottom is the wake-up call many of us needed to know we actually do need to get sober if we want to be happy, healthy, and at peace.

Resilience and Strength

When we go through such a transformative experience, we're shown just how resilient and strong we are, in very tangible ways. We're shown our tremendous capacity for self-healing. We know that if we can survive hitting rock bottom, we can do anything. If we can heal from our addictions and mental health issues, there isn't anything we can't do. We begin to believe in ourselves more. We have more faith in ourselves and our recovery. We tell ourselves that if we can survive rock bottom, we can bite the bullet when recovery gets hard and manage to keep ourselves sober.

Mentality Shift Towards Self-Love

Hitting rock bottom changes our entire perspective on life and our mentality on our relationship with ourselves. We develop whole new outlooks and ways of operating in our lives. We recognize that some of the most profound changes we've ever made have been a result of having hit rock bottom. One major perspective shift that many of us experience has to do with our feelings of self-worth. Once we hit such a devastatingly low point in our lives, we realize we can no longer room for toxicity, negativity or unhealthiness in our lives. We no longer want certain relationship dynamics in our lives. We no longer want anything that triggers us into self-harm and self-destructiveness. We feel stronger and healthier. We feel more empowered. Sometimes we feel more in control of our addictive impulses, like the urges got knocked out of us when we hit rock bottom. We love ourselves more. We love our lives more. We love ourselves enough to save ourselves and to never allow ourselves to get back to that painful place again.

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