Nov. 30, 2024, 5:45 a.m.
Recovery is a journey marked by resilience, strength, and the unwavering determination to overcome challenges. Whether you're navigating the path of personal healing, supporting a loved one, or simply seeking a dose of motivation, words can offer profound encouragement. In this collection, we've gathered 46 of the most inspiring recovery quotes from authors, thought leaders, and survivors who have faced adversity and emerged stronger. These quotes are meant to uplift your spirit, ignite hope, and remind you that recovery is not just a destination, but a transformative process that celebrates every step forward. Join us as we explore these powerful words that illuminate the path to recovery.
1. “All humans at some time experience injustice, assault, disqualification, invasion and betrayal. No person is completely shielded. We need not trace our family trees very far back or study for long what life was like for our forbears to uncover humanity's abusiveness. The inherited scars of our multigenerational families exist in our family systems as we know them today. The abuse of the past often exists as the shame of today, and the shame is perpetuated through our patterns of interaction.” - Merle A. Fossum
2. “You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town” - Anne Lamott
3. “I am angry that I starved my brain and that I sat shivering in my bed at night instead of dancing or reading poetry or eating ice cream or kissing a boy...” - Laurie Halse Anderson
4. “I'm learning how to taste everything. ” - Laurie Halse Anderson
5. “Everything is, the way it is, for a reason. Or it isn't. Or neither. Or both. It's so hard to tell. It's so hard to tell you're a mile away by the Luke in your eye.” - Alistair McHarg
6. “The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot.” - Mark Twain
7. “Another page turns on the calendar, April now, not March..........I am spinning the silk threads of my story, weaving the fabric of my world...I spun out of control. Eating was hard. Breathing was hard. Living was hardest.I wanted to swallow the bitter seeds of forgetfulness...Somehow, I dragged myself out of the dark and asked for help.I spin and weave and knit my words and visions until a life starts to take shape.There is no magic cure, no making it all go away forever. There are only small steps upward; an easier day, an unexpected laugh, a mirror that doesn't matter anymore.I am thawing.” - Laurie Halse Anderson
8. “A single day is enough to make us a little larger or, another time, a little smaller.” - Paul Klee
9. “I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.” - Gail Caldwell
10. “She needed to recover. His father had died in January; it was only the end of May. They needed to stick to the routine they'd established during the intervening months. in that way, their life would return to its original shape, like a spring stretched in bad times but contracting eventually into happiness. That the world could come permanently unsprung had never occurred to him.” - David Wroblewski
11. “First Embody the Emptiness of SilenceNext Embody the Fullness of Honesty & LoveThus Be HeavenSage Hope (Omid Mankoo) SH...” - Omid Mankoo
12. “He still heard his mother's voice--"Davey"--rise like whisper-dust from unseen corners in the house, but it was no longer the only voice he heard. His ears were also filled with the voices of others--his father and Primrose and Refrigerator John and his grandmother. Of course, all of their words for a thousand years could not fill the hole left by his mother, but they could raise a loving fence around it so he didn't keep falling in.” - Jerry Spinelli
13. “It is not true that everyone is special. It is true that everyone was once special and still possesses the ability to recover it.” - Criss Jami
14. “We can be redeemed only to the extent to which we see ourselves.” - Martin Buber
15. “We take action when we have the honesty to admit that things are still broken, despite our best efforts otherwise. We take action when we hold ourselves continually open to new techniques, remaining resolutely receptive to new sources of support and new feeds of information. We take action when we are willing, in each new moment, to try again.” - Shannon Cutts
16. “We've been there and come back. When you fall in the pit, people are supposed to help you up. But you have to get up on your own. We'll take your arms, but you have to get your legs underneath you and stand.” - Bucky Sinister
17. “Just as others pray daily, you should think to yourself daily about what you can do to be closer to this Ideal Image. Think: "What can I do today to make my life better?" "What can I do to become more like my Ideal Image?” - Bucky Sinister
18. “Your best days are ahead of you. The movie starts when the guy gets sober and puts his life back together; it doesn't end there.” - Bucky Sinister
19. “Love, Mercy, and Grace, sisters all, attend your wounds of silence and hope.” - Aberjhani
20. “I am evolving from being an animal,' he said. 'But it is going very, very slowly. Sometime I try to cry and laugh like other people, just to see if it feels like anything. Yet tears don't come. Laughter doesn't come.” - Blaine Harden
21. “Resiliency is not gender-, age-, or intellectually specific...” - Asa Don Brown
22. “Trauma does not have to occur by abuse alone...” - Asa Don Brown
23. “Anorexia cannot be cured by treating the physical symptoms alone; it is the mind which must be treated.” - Lynn Crilly
24. “Gratitude isn't a tool to manipulate the universe or God. It's a way to acknowledge our faith that everything happens for a reason even if we don't know what that reason is. ~Melody Beattie, 52 Weeks of Conscious Contact, pg. 34.” - Melody Beattie
25. “An intensely gripping narrative...expertly crafted and totally addictive...a must read!” - Maggie Reese
26. “And the way you lost your temper!" went on Wallis enthusiastically. "Oh, Mr. Allan, it was beautiful! You haven't been more than to say snarly since the accident! It was so like the way you used to throw hair-brushes--” - Margaret Widdemer
27. “What hell condemned, let heaven now heal.” - Aberjhani
28. “Alcoholism or addiction is a disease because it fits the definition of disease. It is progressive and chronic, and left untreated, it will kill.” - Irene Tomkinson
29. “Issues are like tissues. You pull one out and another appears!” - Gary Goldstein
30. “Compulsive behavior occurs when the urge to act out is greater than our will to say no. Recovery then, is the process of reversing that equation.” - Roger Stark
31. “Every great tragedy forms a fertile soil in which a great recovery can take root and blossom...but only if you plant the seeds.” - Steve Maraboli
32. “I almost wish I had cancer. Then I’d either beat it or die from it. But my disease, even if successfully treated, will never go away. And it might not kill me. But it will hang over me like the blade of a guillotine; more threatening inert than if the blade suddenly slips and mercifully turns out my lights. This is my war to end all wars.” - William Cope Moyers
33. “Spurred by Amy’s death I’ve tried to salvage unwilling victims from the mayhem of the internal storm and am always, always just pulled inside myself.” - Russell Brand
34. “Underlying the attack on psychotherapy, I believe, is a recognition of the potential power of any relationship of witnessing. The consulting room is a privileged space dedicated to memory. Within that space, survivors gain the freedom to know and tell their stories. Even the most private and confidential disclosure of past abuses increases the likelihood of eventual public disclosure. And public disclosure is something that perpetrators are determined to prevent. As in the case of more overtly political crimes, perpetrators will fight tenaciously to ensure that their abuses remain unseen, unacknowledged, and consigned to oblivion. The dialectic of trauma is playing itself out once again. It is worth remembering that this is not the first time in history that those who have listened closely to trauma survivors have been subject to challenge. Nor will it be the last. In the past few years, many clinicians have had to learn to deal with the same tactics of harassment and intimidation that grassroots advocates for women, children and other oppressed groups have long endured. We, the bystanders, have had to look within ourselves to find some small portion of the courage that victims of violence must muster every day. Some attacks have been downright silly; many have been quite ugly. Though frightening, these attacks are an implicit tribute to the power of the healing relationship. They remind us that creating a protected space where survivors can speak their truth is an act of liberation. They remind us that bearing witness, even within the confines of that sanctuary, is an act of solidarity. They remind us also that moral neutrality in the conflict between victim and perpetrator is not an option. Like all other bystanders, therapists are sometimes forced to take sides. Those who stand with the victim will inevitably have to face the perpetrator's unmasked fury. For many of us, there can be no greater honor. p.246 - 247Judith Lewis Herman, M.D. February, 1997” - Judith Lewis Herman
35. “…is methodical abuse, often using indoctrination, aimed at breaking the will of another human being. In a 1989 report, the Ritual Abuse Task Force of the L.A. County Commission for Women defined ritual abuse as: “Ritual Abuse usually involves repeated abuse over an extended period of time. The physical abuse is severe, sometimes including torture and killing. The sexual abuse is usually painful,humiliating, intended as a means of gaining dominance over the victim.The psychological abuse is devastating and involves the use of ritual indoctrination. It includes mind control techniques which convey to the victim a profound terror of the cult members …most victims are in a state of terror, mind control and dissociation” (Pg. 35-36)” - Chrystine Oksana
36. “Some abusers organise themselves in groups to abuse children and other adults in a more formally ritualised way. Men and women in these groups can be abusers with both sexes involved in all aspects of the abuse. Children are often forced to abuse other children. Pornography and prostitution are sometimes part of the abuse as is the use of drugs, hypnotism and mind control. Some groups use complex rituals to terrify, silence and convince victims of the tremendous power of the abusers. the purpose is to gain and maintain power over the child in order to exploit. Some groups are so highly organised that they also have links internationally through trade in child-pornography, drugs and arms.Some abusers organise themselves around a religion or faith and the teaching and training of the children within this faith, often takes the form of severe and sustained torture and abuse. Whether or not the adults within this type of group believe that what they are doing is, in some way 'right' is immaterial to the child on the receiving end of the 'teachings' and abuse.” - Laurie Matthew
37. “In a nutshell, the process they [abusers in a ritual abuse group] use on survivors is designed to:break the will and personality of the person until they become as nothing... with no will of their own...no identity...then they... rebuild the person & shape their will in order to...try and make the person one of them...thus gaining powerIf abusers hold all the power, becoming one of them can, for some, be the only means of survival. However, this doesn't always work, instead survivors often find ways of regaining their own power and fighting back.” - Laurie Matthew
38. “Political prisoners describe:- extreme physical and emotional torture- distortion of language, truth, meaning and reality- sham killings- begin repeatedly taken to the point of death or threatened with death- being forced to witness abusive acts on others- being forced to make impossible "choices"- boundaries smashed i.e. by the use of forced nakedness, shame, embarrassment- hoaxes, 'set ups', testing and tricks- being forced to hurt othersRitual abuse survivors often describe much the same things.” - Laurie Matthew
39. “In some counties, there is an actual named crime of ritual abuse and there too, there have been convictions.” - Laurie Matthew
40. “Do not wait and hope to be discovered...make yourself so you cannot be denied!” - Jamie McCall
41. “Why couldn’t I find one action that would make the need to binge automatically disappear? Because there is no magic action to make that horrible prebinge feeling go away. The cool thing is that we are designed so that the feeling will pass through us on its own—in time. All we have to do is sit there and feel what is going on inside of us. We must experience the feelings. To help us deal with the feelings, we can call someone on our support team. We can also express the feelings by focusing on our breath or even hitting a pillow. The important thing to remember is that no matter how terrible, feelings do pass. It takes patience and trust—not food . . .” - Jenni Schaefer
42. “To stay in recovery, you must be responsible for finding your own motivation. Remember, motivation may not be easy to come by at first. It will probably be a very small, timid part inside of you. When you find it, let that part be in charge. Let the minority rule and lead you to a life you never dreamed was possible” - Jenni Schaefer
43. “I wrote in my journal about how good I felt when I was not living under Ed’s control. Then, when I really felt like giving up, I read these pages and realized that I was striving for in recovery was a real possibility. I thought about these experiences and used them as encouragement to keep moving forward. Even one minute of freedom was proof that I was getting better. At first, these times were few and far between. Now, these moments are connected; they are my life” - Jenni Schaefer
44. “Just because you may live your life in recovery, surely doesn't mean the PARTY IS OVER, Nope!, it just means you can remember what you DID LAST NIGHT!".LOL” - Catherine Townsend-Lyon
45. “Why do prostitutes when they get straight always try and get so prim? It's like long-repressed librarian-ambitions come flooding out.” - David Foster Wallace
46. “Gately can't even imagine what it would be like to be a sober and drug-free biker. It's like what would be the point. He imagines these people polishing the hell out of their leather and like playing a lot of really precise pool.” - David Foster Wallace