Take the small wins where you can get them

Hey, guys. Chris Edrington here from Cadre. Got another nice one for you. Current. Some situations I deal with regularly, like during the week, I'll do the live about it, or generally about that topic. So this one is specifically for people in early recovery who are either themselves sort of frustrated with the progress early on, or maybe your parents are struggling with your progress or whoever's paying the bills or your wife or your brother or your uncle or your dog. And the reality of it is this.

There are a lot of ways to gauge progress in early recovery, and some of them are kind of confusing and absolutely baffling to people who don't understand what the process is about. Recently, I had a client whose parents were after calling, and they're very concerned about the job progress, the sort of advancement in terms of get your s*** together, get back in the world. And, you know, that comes from what I call parent blood. And you have parent eyes, and you can't not see the progress in your kid, and you can't not be scared for them versus maybe your boss, who's frustrated that you don't show up for work and they want you to get better, but for other reasons.

And all of this stuff kind of relates to somebody trying to get sober for other people. Right. You gotta. You gotta get out of their context and in your own context for what? What does progress mean for you? Right. So back to the parent sort of perspective on progress. In this particular case, I said to the family who was frustrated, and the person wasn't sober very long. They had four years once or three years once, I think, in the. In the west coast. And they had had a taste of what their kid looked like sober for a while.

And they were really, really sad that it was a start, that it was starting over. So frustrated about progress and specifically the job. So I got on the phone and said, you know what, mom? We're winning on different levels here. We're winning on the connecting with people front. He's got a sponsor, he's working with new people, and he's working as a sort of a peer big brother figure in the sober house because he's a little bit older. He's not stressed out and anxious and a problem child in terms of behavior.

At the sober house, he's a good example around that. He's not losing his head about stuff and general comfort level and early sobriety is so hard to achieve that I didn't really want to disrupt that. And so I went to the parents and I said, look, we're winning on a few elements here. The routine is good, the sponsorship's happening, the meetings are happening, the overall connectivity in the milu and the silver house is happening. And we're four weeks in, and, I mean, that's a win. That's actually a really big win.

And we're not. We don't have a job yet, and we're avoiding it 100%. We're blowing it off. There's definitely not a lot of effort there, but that, we can't kill them for that. It's not the hill you want to die on. And this is really one of the big, sort of context issues where families get in there and they look at the situation like a family. Like, why doesn't my kid have a job? How come my kid doesn't have a boyfriend or a girlfriend? Or, why doesn't my brother go back to school? I know he wants to.

And that's all wonderful and applicable, but not necessarily helpful in that sort of context of, let's get the life going, let's get back to work, let's get back to school, let's get organized. Doesn't work like that. I mean, especially, you know, you've been shooting dope in the. In the, you know, for the last two years, or whatever. Whatever the history is coming off of a lot of the substances. Meth, heroin, you know, fentanyl, booze. I mean, you're lucky you can tie your shoes coming in on the first few weeks.

And so this is the message here, right? So a lot of families need to get advice from the right people. You need to put your kid in the right program where they're going to talk to you about this kind of stuff and say, let's win over here. We're not going to get that yet. We'll get that later, right? This is positive. Guess what comes from that. Now, when he's talking to his family, he's not getting, how come you don't have a job? How come you don't have a job? How come you don't have a job? He's maybe getting a message from mom and everyone else, like, hey, we hear you're connecting.

I think that's great. We think you're a really personable person. We think you could be a leader. We think that people look up to you, and it's really cool that the younger guys look up to you, and this is like rocket fuel coming from your family, right, who have been harping on you forever to get your s*** together. And now they have some information, some context to share with you that is like, positive. And I've seen kids on the phone go like my mom just really say that this isn't everybody. This is just this one context.

And I thought it was important because in these short videos, I like to just stay with one little thing and hammer this one home. That when you have someone in early recovery, set your expectations in a place where you can understand where is their growth? What is positive about this? I designed my sober living around the things that families saw. Their kids failing at time management, money, meds, adherence to a schedule. You know, a lot of people in early recovery set up therapy appointments, don't show up and don't cancel them.

And if you don't cancel them, you pay for it anyway. And that's a quick way to frustrate whoever's paying the bill. So that is kind of parallel in a lot of areas, right? The dysfunctionality and the using lifestyle is terrifying. Moms are thinking you're going to die every day. And then we get into early recovery, and now they're wondering why you don't have a job and you're four weeks sober and you see the absurdity of it. And I don't mean to say that moms are absurd. I mean to say that moms learn from people like me and others where there's a way to get some really good context, not only for you to be able to sort of calm down and accept what's going on and be glad for what is happening, but then the message that you're sending, right, the message you're getting or that your kid is getting from you isn't.

You're still not good enough. It's still not enough, which is, ugh, you know, none of us want to hear that, right? And a lot of us have that story. So not saying every mom is punishing their kids for not being good enough. I'm saying in the context of early sobriety, it's easy to get caught up in progress and milestones of progress that you decided that they should meet. So the last thing I will say is, if you are, when in early sobriety, if you're connecting with other people, making friends, finding people to model after being of service to others, you're winning.

You're winning the game. If you have a really difficult time making friends and sticking your hand out and being someone of a voice in the room, then it's going to be harder. And you need somebody to help you figure that out, because sticking your hand out to strangers, as painful and unbelievably difficult as that might seem to some people will save your life. So, moms, talk to the professionals, put your kids in the right place, the treatment or sober living or whatever it is, and set your expectations, with some help from some people who know what they're talking about.

And I have to say that, you know, my experience being able to share these things makes me super proud that I have that even have that ability to do or have that awareness and knowledge to share with you. And there's a whole bunch of people on Cadre with the same kind of thing going behind them, like, their shared experience. And that's really what they're offering. It's not just somebody you babbling online about something they read on TikTok. This is people with real experience sharing what really works here at Cadre.

So sign up, sign on, follow somebody. See you next time.