What is National Recovery Month?
Every September, people living in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction are celebrated through National Recovery Month.
The month-long national observance helps educate Americans about addiction while honoring the hard work, dedication, and emotional courage represented by the choice to recover. Every day, brave, amazing people rebuild their lives after the many ravages of addiction.
National Recovery Month also shares a message of hope, that through programs like 12 Step, as well as through substance abuse treatment programs, miracles and change happen all the time. Every day, millions of people around the globe regain authorship over their own lives and find the path to experience freedom and joy in life again, through sobriety.
What does National Recovery Month celebrate?
National Recovery Month aims to notice and acknowledge the progress, milestones, and important gains achieved by those on the path of recovery.
For too long, addiction has been shrouded in shame, judgment, moralizing, and codependent confusion on the part of loved ones. At the same time, the deep and beautifully transformational path of recovering from addiction has mostly been misunderstood completely.
Millions of Americans are in recovery. Their stories are important, as examples and as inspiration for us all.
We can all learn from the wisdom, strength, and encouragement of those who have gone before us. For each human being still in the clutches of the heartaches of addiction, as well as for their loved ones, it’s important to hold the door of hope open and to remember that nothing is impossible in this life when we genuinely do desire to change.
All of this, and more, is honored with National Recovery Month.
What is the permanent tagline of this month?
National Recovery Month uses the tagline “Every Person. Every Family. Every Community” to encapsulate the heart of its message for Americans. This tagline shines a light on the importance of family members and communities as part of the cure for addiction. Recovery is a personal, familial, and community matter, and everyone can help.
What is the goal of National Recovery Month?
National Recovery Month’s primary goal is to spread awareness to Americans that there is a solution for substance addiction.
Secondarily, Recovery Month shares information about the most up-to-date evidence-based practices that have the highest effectiveness rates for treating addiction clinically.
Likewise, the campaign educates about the potential dangers of substance use, as well as about how substance abuse and mental health disorders negatively interact as co-occurring disorders.
National Recovery Month also aims to disperse information about the effectiveness of treatment services and to encourage people to seek treatment. National Recovery Month also honors addiction professionals.
What positive message does National Recovery Month spread?
National Recovery Month shares the positive message that recovery is possible and worth the effort.
Recovery is a precious gift, tough and meaningful beyond imagining. Recovery turns us into what we have always wanted to be in our deeper selves, making us more heartfelt, wise, and real. Living in the world as it is, activating our potential, while feeling what it is to be a human being.
Every day, through 12-step programs and addiction treatment programs, people are able to transform the whole basis of their lives and begin again.
Recovery is hard work, and the realities that each person must face on their path can feel overwhelming at times. However, there is also a heartwarming abundance of people available to help, starting with other recoverers, and extending to treatment staff and informed family and friends. Resources exist to help us as we do what sometimes feels like the impossible, but which is asked of us nevertheless, to give our whole life over to a benevolent change process.
National Recovery Month helps spread the truth-telling voice of the recovery community to the ears that need to hear its hopeful and fortifying message.
What are some objectives of National Recovery Month?
National Recovery Month aims to change the perception in the public mind about people recovering from addiction, raise awareness about addiction and treatment, and help those affected.
People who were once in the clutches of addiction can be reclaimed and redeemed to live lives of connection and health in every sense of the word – mentally, emotionally, and socially. People who have been written off by society can become potent, positive contributors, the lifeblood of aware, loving communities.
National Recovery Month has the objective of improving understanding of substances and substance use disorders. Additionally, it works to lower barriers to entering treatment and getting needed help.
National Recovery Month campaigns to promote the benefits of early intervention in substance use disorders, receiving substance abuse treatment, and getting help for mental health alongside addiction.
National Recovery Month also hopes to provide visibility for the recovery community and share recovery stories to counteract impressions of hopelessness and despair. Stories help reduce stigma about addiction and can help people’s self-recognition process when they find their own experiences reflected in another’s share.
National Recovery Month also takes on board the necessity to help loved ones, friends, work colleagues, and healing professionals cope with the feelings and pain that accompany loving or working with people who have addiction.
With a greater understanding of addiction and how it works, much pain can be depersonalized, leading to greater effectiveness at emotional support and less burnout for affected parties.
What are 5 ways to get involved this month?
There are many ways to support National Recovery Month. Here are some ideas from us over at Villa Kali Ma.
1. Educate Yourself
There are many resources on the internet about recovery and addiction, including blogs (like ours!) as well as websites dedicated to sharing information, facts, and stories related to addiction. One way to support recovery around the nation is to familiarize ourselves with the landscape that recovering people inhabit.
2. Go to an Open AA Meeting
Although most AA meetings are closed to non-addicts, there are always some meetings, tagged as Open Meetings, which welcome supportive members from the community who would like to learn more about the realities of recovery. Inside the walls of such meetings, you will have the chance to hear first-hand stories of the miseries of addiction as well as the deep joys of recovery. Through this act, you can become an informed, sensitive person when it comes to the addiction topic. You will know much more about what helps and what doesn’t when someone needs to recover.
3. Host a Sober Party
For many, it is out of the ordinary to host events without alcohol or drugs. That simple creative restriction can spur invention and lead you to organize different, fun, heart-connecting activities you wouldn’t have thought of before.
If you have a friend in sobriety, throwing them a sober party can be a personally meaningful act of love. Even if you just want to try it out as an energetic support for the healing of addiction nationally, you will learn much from the experience of interacting and playing with other humans in a festive setting, without relying on substances.
4. Go Without Something for a Month
If we really want to delve into what is asked of people in recovery, we can look into the quaky discomfort that arises in us when we don’t have our go-to comforts.
Most of us have some greater or lesser addictions, not only to substances but also to movies, TV, the internet, food, sex, drama, or cell phones. This National Recovery Month, pick one habit you have and try to go without it for the whole month of September.
If it isn’t easy, be nice to yourself about it and understand, with empathy, through that challenging feeling, what it is that sober people face when they first begin to change their lives so deeply.
5. Interview Someone in Recovery and Do a Creative Project about Them
If you have someone in your life you can interview about their recovery, conduct a considerate, respectful interview made up of questions you would feel all right answering in their shoes. Using the answers as inspiration, make an anonymous artwork, poem, song, or collage expressing the emotional content of that interview.
What treatment programs do we offer at Villa Kali Ma to support women with addiction and mental health issues?
At Villa Kali Ma, we offer several tracks for women who are looking to recover from addiction, mental illness, trauma, or all three.
We have inpatient services at our residential facilities, as well as outpatient treatment, here in the San Diego area.
We offer a medically supervised detox program, an innovative residential trauma treatment program, a residential addiction treatment program, and intensive outpatient and partial hospitalization programs.
You can read more about how we work to heal mind, body, and spirit through an integrative, holistic approach united with our cutting-edge, evidence-based clinical program.
Villa Kali Ma Supports National Recovery Month
At Villa Kali Ma, we know how important it is to get the message out that recovery from addiction is possible. We know from our own experiences how hopeless and despairing one can feel when in the throes of a substance disorder, and we know perfectly well the shame, self-hatred, and self-destruction that addiction makes any person feel.
We also know the joy, the beauty, and the life-changing restoration of dignity and freedom that comes through the path of recovery. We celebrate National Recovery Month wholeheartedly this September, for ourselves, for those of our sisters we helped recover, and for all those to come.
