Recovery Quotes

Something contracts in my chest. The air shifts, grows heavy and dense as mud. Alexa twists her hair around her finger and whispers, Didn't you even try to escape, Charlotte?

~ Clara Kensie

I say to my sister, I thought you were doing the things in our Dream Book. I was sure of it. Why would I do that stuff without you? Because you could.Well, you were wrong.

~ Clara Kensie

Each second of my four years, two months, and seven days in the attic dragged on forever, and nothing ever changed. But outside the attic, everything changed, and so violently fast. Destruction and devastation for all of us, whether we were in the attic or out.

~ Clara Kensie

The only thing that gave me comfort in the attic was thinking about my family. Now I'm home, but it's not the home I imagined. Not the family I imagined. I'd convinced myself that they'd continued on with their happy, carefree lives without me, that they were doing it double, because I couldn't do it at all. I was wrong.

~ Clara Kensie

My sister has never not told me something before. We used to share every secret, every thought. While I was in the attic, it felt like we were forever far away. Now I'm with her again. We're so close that we're touching, but there's still a distance between us.

~ Clara Kensie

Alexa's face whitens. The coil of hair loosens itself from her finger. You did it for me. You never fought back. Because you thought you were keeping me safe.I pull up my gaze to meet hers. Yeah.I-- It's a strangled, high-pitched sound, laced with shock and grief. Then she bites her lips shut. Her chin trembles, just once, before she turns away.

~ Clara Kensie

My Keeper took everything from me: my home, my family, my voice. He made me powerless. But I'm home now. It may be split in two, but I have it back. My family may be broken, but I have it back. I have my voice back. I am not powerless anymore.

~ Clara Kensie

That night, when the creature sleeps, when he sleeps, the mother escapes into her daughters’ room. She tells her daughter that the creature’s afraid of her having too much love, too much heart. She takes a tube of lipstick and drags it across her finger like a knife, marking it across her daughter’s cheeks, red, blood, war paint.

~ Elijah Noble El

Shame is a powerful feeling. There is a tremendous difference between making a mistake and believing you are a mistake...If I don’t see myself as being a mistake then it is I who must take responsibility and I am not ready to accept that.

~ David W. Earle

Others hide from being real by filling the air with words; the more words they throw out, the less actual communication happens and they are left with only an illusion of connection. This is the intimacy they so ardently seek but with these coping skills find so elusive.

~ David W. Earle

The more severe the dysfunction you experienced growing up, the more difficult boundaries are for you.

~ David W. Earle

It is one thing to know about your dysfunctional habits but quite another to change them.

~ David W. Earle

If you are looking for love under rocks or bringing home water moccasins, you might be confusing love and pain.

~ David W. Earle

Sitting on the hot seat of change requires much courage, patience, and persistence.

~ David W. Earle

Putting labels on others creates a black hole of disregard where judgment thrives and schisms deepen.

~ David W. Earle

The more dysfunctional, the more some family members seek to control the behavior of others.

~ David W. Earle

Teenagers can spot hypocrisy a mile away and here I was telling them how to cope when they witnessed the shambles of my own life and how I was living.

~ David W. Earle

When someone obtains peace and serenity, this shines a bright spotlight on others’ own unhappiness making their discomfort even more apparent.

~ David W. Earle

Swirling in a squirrel cage of perpetual motion, the head-committee meets, argues, votes out the guidance available from emotions, and successfully keeps serenity at bay and chaos close at hand.

~ David W. Earle

For several days, I slept. Whether this was a necessary part of physical recovery, or a stubborn retreat from waking reality, I do not know, but I woke only reluctantly to take a little food, falling at once back into a stupor of oblivion, as though the small, warm weight of broth in my stomach were an anchor that pulled me after it, down through the murky fathoms of sleep.

~ Diana Gabaldon

A lot of things are inherent in life -change, birth, death, aging, illness, accidents, calamities, and losses of all kinds- but these events don't have to be the cause of ongoing suffering. Yes, these events cause grief and sadness, but grief and sadness pass, like everything else, and are replaced with other experiences. The ego, however, clings to negative thoughts and feelings and, as a result, magnifies, intensifies, and sustains those emotions while the ego overlooks the subtle feelings of joy, gratitude, excitement, adventure, love, and peace that come from Essence. If we dwelt on these positive states as much as we generally dwell on our negative thoughts and painful emotions, our lives would be transformed.

~ Gina Lake

Instead of saying, I'm damaged, I'm broken, I have trust issues say I'm healing, I'm rediscovering myself, I'm starting over.

~ Horacio Jones

I sense that in my golden age of transparency I have become less timid and more at ease. I am beginning to let this feeling go, I feel the discomfort slide from my shoulders and wither away. I want you to understand me, to know that my heart is elastic and my mind expansive. I want you to know that I need you because I see God in you – not in myself.

~ Rhett Burch

I won't be mad at you because you gave me something no one else has: the ability to live even when I thought I was dead.

~ Alexandria Hampton

Someone once asked me how I hold my head up so high after all I have been through. I said it's because no matter what, I am a survivor NOT a victim.

~ Patricia Buckley

Oftentimes, especially during my recovery, I didn’t need to think about everything I was doing wrong; instead, I needed to focus more on what I was doing right—and then do more of the right stuff. I needed to live more in the solution.

~ Jenni Schaefer

In the past, I was a perpetual victim; how I was doing in any given moment depended on what happened to me. Today I do my best to avoid this kind of ‘victim thinking.’ Instead, how I am doing is determined by how I respond to what happens to me.

~ Jenni Schaefer

With Ed, I always pushed away the good and only heard the bad. Today, I let in the good.

~ Jenni Schaefer

Sex had nothing to do with feeling good, everything to do with superficialities, and was always accompanied by a masochistic agenda to feel anything but dead inside.

~ Justin Donner

The initial journey towards sobriety is a delicate balance between insight into one's desire for escape and abstinence from one's addiction.

~ Debra L. Kaplan

Joy sat in my throat like an egg resting on a spoon, quiet and fragile, but real.

~ Shannon Kopp

When you are aligned with the truth of who you truly are, then you experience bliss.

~ Vivian Amis

The key problem I encounter working with wounded, depressed, and unhappy people is a lack of connection…starting from a disconnection from themselves and then with others. This is why love often becomes so distorted and destructive. When people experience a disconnection from themselves, they feel it but do not realize the problem.

~ David W. Earle

You did not invent these family habits. Your family is like mine, for thousands and thousands of years our families have embraced a dysfunctional lifestyle, passing these habits as gospel on to subsequent generations. This was not done out of malice, spite, or hate, but what they knew best. As ineffective as these habits are, you never stopped to consider another way of loving.

~ David W. Earle

No one escapes some degree of chaos for it is so ever prevalent; it is the human experience. This realization does not mean we can’t improve. It does mean we can accept our state of chaos, lighten up on ourselves, have fun, and work on improving…we are a work in progress. Enjoy the journey.

~ David W. Earle

Many of the habits of dysfunctional families use are not from the lack of love but are the result of fear. Knowing the love-limiting habits and behaviors of dysfunctional families is a wonderful beginning to lower the fear, allowing us to be real, allowing us all to learn how to love better.

~ David W. Earle

Many people look at their past and bemoan their mistakes. Those errors in judgment, behavior, hurting others, and the wrong decisions may be what consumes them now. It does not have to be that way, for recovering from a traumatic situation is all a matter of how we think about what happened. It is not so much about what happened to us as what we make of the circumstance.

~ David W. Earle

In this week I see such a picture of life, hard and joyful pressed up together and sleeping in the same bed. They come knit together. The lines of pain run through the joy and remind us to go all in, because life is short. The joy edges the pain and gives us a reason to rise.

~ Anna White

Treatment for dependency at substance abuse treatment centers must change if alcoholism and addiction are to be overcome in our society.

~ Chris Prentiss

Trauma does not have to occur by abuse alone...

~ Asa Don Brown