With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, our thoughts and feelings are drawn to the romantic side of life. 

Accordingly, I would like to focus this month’s column on special issues that often confront single people in the process of recovery. 

I consider myself to be blessed in the area of relationships, as I have been married to a truly wonderful woman for close to 20 years. 

By the same token, I am intimately familiar with the many challenges confronting single people, by virtue of having spent over a decade jumping from one dysfunctional relationship to another following the breakup of my first marriage at age 29.

Cultivating a Healthy Approach to Relationships

Early in recovery, we tend to be particularly shaky and vulnerable, as our bodies and psyches are undergoing a major readjustment that takes many months – often years – to work itself out. 

In recognition of the vulnerable status of alcoholics and addicts during the early stages of recovery, AA and other 12-step programs wisely discourage forming sponsorship relationships with persons of the opposite sex, and also caution against emotional entanglements early on. 

Later in recovery, forming and maintaining wholesome relationships can still be challenging.  This is particularly true, as many of us in recovery come from rather dysfunctional family backgrounds.
There is hope for all of us, however, and our ability to maintain healthy relationships tends to grow as we move forward along the path of recovery. The following are offered as practical pointers for surviving and thriving as a single person in recovery:

• Recognize that although you are single, you do not need to be alone.  Becoming actively involved in your 12-step program, going to meetings, working with your sponsor and eventually offering to sponsor someone else when you are ready, all provide excellent opportunities for reaching out socially to others in recovery and fending off loneliness and isolation. 

Over and beyond your recovery support group, seek out additional social outlets that will bring you into contact with other people with both feet on the ground who share your basic values and interests.  Joining a hiking club, or linking up with a group effort concerned with promoting a cause that you believe in, are examples of creative ways of reaching out to connect with people with similar values and interests.

• Nurture a sincere appreciation of the importance of forming wholesome relationships with persons of both sexes – again seeking out people who validate your core values and basic interests.

• Be on guard against the traps and pitfalls associated with addictive relationships.  When we perceive ourselves as being incomplete, it is easy to fall into the trap of desperately searching for a partner who will validate us and make us feel whole, while becoming addicted to the sexual intensity that frequently accompanies the early stages of relationships. 

If you find yourself falling into this pattern, you need to make a conscious effort to get off the relationship roller coaster and TAKE IT SLOW. 

In any new relationship, we need to focus first and foremost on nurturing trust and friendship, while exploring the potential for affinity with the other person based on a foundation of mutual respect, shared values and common interests.   The other aspects of the relationship will unfold in due time, if this is meant to be.

Your Most Important Relationship

In truth, our most important relationship is with ourselves, and we need to get that one down first.  Too many people tend to hold up a front in their pursuit of relationships, in the hope of attracting a desirable partner. 

Far better to honor yourself first, and focus your energies on becoming the person whom you truly want to be.  As the saying goes, to thine own self be true.  Once you have reached a level of growth where you are truly comfortable with yourself as a whole person, then – and only then – will you be ready to attract into your life a truly meaningful, mutually nourishing relationship with long-term potential. 

In the meantime, don’t rush the process, and enjoy the journey.  Until next time – to your health!

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John Newport, Ph.D., is author of The Wellness-Recovery Connection: Charting Your Pathway to Optimal Health While Recovering from Alcoholism and Drug Addiction (Health Communications, Inc., 2004). 

For more information on wellness and recovery, visit Dr. Newport’s website www.wellnessandrecovery.com. 

This article was adapted from a column originally appearing in “Steps for Recovery”
(www.steps4recovery.org).