What is Recovery?

My two main aims with discussing the definition of recovery are to (1) encourage you to critically think through any definitions or labels given to you by healthcare providers – when the experts create definitional understanding based on theory, there are limitations (2) while my work lays out a process and a path through trauma recovery, I cannot stress enough the importance of recognizing the way in which you navigate this path is going to be unique to you. Your recovery, what that looks like and how you define it, is unique to you. Please don’t let others, myself included, ever dictate to you what your life ‘should’ or ‘should not’ look like and how you should, or should not, live. You, alone, can define what it means to thrive and how you, personally, understand and define meaning and purpose and recovery and wellness for yourself. 

I believe everyone, regardless of the severity and duration of their trauma, can experience recovery and can thrive in beautiful ways. This is what I mean when I say all trauma is not just treatable, it is 100% curable. I believe this because I believe in the incredible resiliency of the human spirit. And I make these bold statements because I also believe hope is critical and yet it is so often lacking in our western mental health services because mental health providers can be afraid of setting up ‘false expectations’. And I would like to go one step further and gently suggest that if you haven’t experienced a sense of recovery or post-trauma thriving, it isn’t because you haven’t tried hard enough or because you are somehow weak or flawed. I believe it is because you just haven’t been given the right tools and resources, explained in the right ways, and applied with enough time, to enable and empower you to define and then move into how you experience recovery and thriving for yourself.  Our societal understanding of mental illness and our mental health systems, themselves, are deeply flawed. That is not your fault.