The 9 Keys of Recovery are:
Reawakening
Poverty: Recovery is admitting you are at the end of your rope and want to begin discovering a place and way to live without drugs.
Sadness: Recovery is a deep remorse over our broken past and finding a genuine drug free comfort and hope for the future.
Reinvent
Humility: Recovery is a willingness and openness to receive help, finding a drug free contentment with the world around us.
Hunger: Recovery is a hunger to change and be changed, finding fulfilling new appetites and purpose for a drug free life.
Reinvest
Kindness: Recovery is a genuine compassion and empathy for others, discovering a desire to restore and initiate restitution with others.
Sincerity: Recovery is living transparently, unafraid of consequences and discovering a new way of living life on life’s terms, without drugs, regret and remorse.
Goodwill: Recovery is consideration and cooperation through compromise, finding a spiritual awakening, discovering your role and place in a new drug-free life.
Revival
Disconnect: Recovery is saying goodbye to our old self-medicating lifestyle and relationships, discovering new meaning to family, friends and a healthy, hopeful future.
Resolve: Recovery is not taking criticism from addicts personally, but using it to see the brokenness of others and a sign of our own recovery accomplishment.
9 Keys of Recovery
An opioid addiction recovery program based on the Beatitudes for the addict wanting to become an addict who chooses not to use.
Introduction
For those who have struggled with the disease and pain of addiction and the unyielding obsession with satisfying its hunger, the 9 Keys of Recovery may offer a different approach.
If we were for a moment to consider the end of the process, where your addiction is going, where it will eventually take you, it is not unreasonable to assume that overdose and death are your future. Addictions steadily increase as our tolerances increase. This escalation of medication requires more and stronger to maintain the same measure of pleasure or relief from pain.
Since overdose and death are likely in your future, why not “cut to the chase?” Why not die the death of heroin here and now? This may seem like a sarcastic or grand statement meant to get your attention or shame you into rehab, but what if it is not? Seriously, what could free you from opioids if not death?
Let’s view opioids as an adversary, a competitor beyond our abilities and skill to overcome. With no chance of ever winning the battle the most logical strategy for winning is losing. How many times have you been to rehab? 1,2,3 to 5 ? 5 to 10? How many promises to those you love have you broken? How many more will you break before you end? If there was a back door out of addiction, wouldn’t you have found it by now? If there was a magic pill to boost your willpower and self-discipline, wouldn’t you have taken it?
I was attending an addict’s funeral the other day and heard her children say, “She is finally free, free from all her demons, free from her pain and heartbreak.” They were right. She was finally free and the price was death. How sad that she couldn’t enjoy it, celebrate and find peace in her newfound freedom. Some might think, “That is a cold, callous and mean way to think. Is this a joke? How could you make light of something so sad, so final, and so serious, so broken?”
But What If?
What if the “addict” could die and be reborn as “an addict who chooses not to use?” What if in death to addiction, we could win the drug war raging within us? Could the answer really be as simple as giving up on any victory over heroin? By allowing it to kill us we free ourselves to reinvent and redefine who we will become. How long will you fight your losing battle? Give your addicted self over to death and become someone new. We all know the endless stories, movies and history where a lone hero goes willingly to their death in a seemingly unwinnable scenario for the survival and love of another. Might your current addicted self make a heroic sacrifice of death to save your future self, the self who wants to become an addict who chooses not to use? Like Jesus on Easter or the phoenix rising from ashes, we surrender to the death of opioids only to rise again as addicts who choose not to use.
This program, 9 Keys of Recovery, celebrates the death of the addict and the resurrection of someone new, an addict who chooses not to use.
Background
The 9 Keys of Recovery is a drug recovery program based on the beatitudes of Jesus contained in the Sermon on the Mount. These sayings have been reapplied specifically, but not exclusively, to recovery from opioid addiction. The 9 Keys of Recovery grew out of an addiction and recovery meeting called “Hunger 4 Healing,” a 12-step drug and alcohol meeting which ran from 1998 to 2013 at the storefront church in downtown Manchester, New Hampshire called Main Street Mission.
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Published by: Hope Academy
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The Serenity Prayer
Many from a recovery background know of the power and peace that come from what is commonly known as “The Serenity Prayer.” Written by the Lutheran Pastor and Theologian Reinhold Neibuhr (1892-1971), in the early 1940s. Its first lines were adopted by the burgeoning Alcoholics Anonymous and included in AA materials as early as 1942. It is still recited in almost all AA meetings and is a staple for all those seeking freedom from addiction.
God grant me the serenity To accept the things I cannot change; Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.
During our time of planetary sorrows, I was reminded of Timothy King’s book “Addiction Nation: What the Opioid Crisis Reveals About Us.” He proposes that “We are all addicts” and that “Human beings are addictive by nature.”
He wrote, “The question for each of us is not whether we are addicted but how we are addicted, and to what. Denial of the existence of addiction in your life is not a mark of moral accomplishment but a sign of blindness”.
Yes, it is certain that these challenging times bring to focus and confront the addictions within our culture that we do not like living without. They turn up the heat of the refiner’s fire to discover what we truly love, the good the bad, and even the ugly. These painful times can burn away the false gods of money, celebrity, power, affluence, and intellectualism that keep us “talking about being Jesus” instead of actually “being Jesus.”
Such is the message of the serenity prayer. It is a message of powerlessness over the unchangeable, yes the army of God marches on its knees. It is a message of courage, the courage to stand up and say “No” or “Yes,” to reach out with help and prayer, to be captivated by the Kingdom of God rather than anything this world has to offer (Matt 65:247-34). And it is an acknowledgment that wisdom comes from God, and without that prayerful connection, we are the blind leading the blind.
I offer during these difficult days Reinhold Neibuhr full prayer as he spoke it to his congregation that first Sunday morning after penning it and leave you to wonder what the sermon that day must have been about.
The Serenity Prayer
God grant me the serenity To accept the things I cannot change; Courage to change the things I can; And wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time; Enjoying one moment at a time; Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace; Taking, as He did, this sinful world As it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right If I surrender to His Will; So that I may be reasonably happy in this life And supremely happy with Him Forever and ever in the next. Amen.