There are ones to strengthen our resolve, ones that prepare us for a lifelong struggle, ones that keep our spirits up, ones that sound alarms when we begin the planning process for accessing drugs, going on an unsafe sex binge, whatever our addiction may be. But to deal with the long term I think we have to modify those tools, especially for the down times that everyone has in the normal life we've chosen to struggle back to. Generally I think this involves focusing more on the positives, on how well we are doing, and have done, and why we ever wanted to start doing it. This is seldom easy for addicts, because we are comfortable with failure. It is failure itself that sometimes feels like that familiar warm blanket round our shoulders.
Success is much more difficult to handle.
Which brings me back to the beginning. Instead of reinforcing the negative stereotypical images, how about cutting us a bit of slack now and again. We are succeeding every day we don't fail. We are climbing every day we don't fall. I think there's a touch of heroism in that, and perhaps we could do with a bit more praise for it.