Rules For Women In Recovery: Part One

Being a woman in recovery is a special experience. For the rest of your life, you have a global network of friends, who are always more like sisters, that have lived through some of the very same struggles you have, made the decision to recover, and work hard at recovery every day. The bond between women in recovery is indescribable and incredibly important. To maintain our precious relationships, there are a few rules we need to follow.

Rule #1: Leave Your Judgments At The Door

Even when we’ve hit one of the hardest places in our lives, individually, and collectively we find ourselves in a wilderness therapy treatment setting, we can still judge each other and hold one another against our judgments. Women’s social dynamics can be cruel, punishing, and isolating. Women’s social dynamics can also be incredibly intimate, supportive, encouraging, transformational, healing, loving, and much more.

We’re told in recovery to look for the similarities and not the differences between us. Among women recovering among women, this sentiment couldn’t be more important. We need to look for the similarities between us in the details of our life stories, our struggles, and our recovery so we can relate to one another, have compassion for one another, and support one another. Being in a woman’s program forces us to recognize and focus the one thing we do have in common that we cannot judge one another for, the one thing that binds us together not just in treatment, but across the world: we’re women and as women we face all the same struggles.

Rule #2: Lift Each Other Up, Not Tear Each Other Down

Living as women, we know there is an entire world against us. Our hard work starts the minute we are born. Society takes the position of pinning women against one another based on surface level judgments. Somewhere in our social evolution, we became trained to see each other as threats, rather than allies. Through recovery, we can learn to lift each other up rather than tear each other down. Most likely in our lives, there have been enough other people, including women, tearing us down. Recovery is the chance to build a sisterhood where everyone is supported and celebrated.

Women’s recovery programs created by women, run by women, made for women, are key to helping women navigate the many layers of their world both internally and externally. Created with the female experience especially in mind, the RedCliff Recovery program has been designed to help women believe in hope, live in joy, and find the freedom they deserve. For more information on women’s wilderness, call us today: 801.370.2274