Unpacking and Unpicking... Recovery (Part One)
Is recovery all about getting back to a previous activity, state, or life? Or is there something else to be found in its complicated trajectory? This is part one of two.
ℹ️ Content warning: This post includes descriptions of my former work with adults with brain injuries. There’s nothing graphic or gory, but there are details of the bigger challenges that can happen after severe brain injury.
If you don’t want to read those, you may want to:
Skip this whole article.
Skip one section: From ‘Recovery in reality’ up to the ‘Who I was > who I am’ doodle. I’ll put a specific content warning at the beginning and end of the section to skip.
What is recovery for?
Recovery comes after a huge range of situations. A cold. A vomiting bug. Childbirth. An elbow injury. A hip replacement. A period of depression, or high stress. Burnout. Relationship breakdown. There are even specific models of recovery for mental health, and for substance dependence.
Dictionary definitions for recovery use phrases like:
A return to normal state.
An improvement in a situation after a difficult period.
Well, I don’t know about you… for me they don’t seem to do the complexity of recovery justice.
So, here I am with your latest instalment of Unpacking and Unpicking. This time, we’re focusing on recovery. Pretty topical, as I’m easing myself through recovery from some tonsil surgery (so long, tonsils!). And it’s a rich topic, so it’s coming at you in two parts (in celebration of the two tonsils I’m now missing, ha!).
Recovery is… not linear?
This phrase pops out at me on a regular basis. “Recovery is not linear”. I live with chronic illness, and have recovered from four surgeries in my life. In the past couple of years I’ve experienced repeat respiratory infections.
So this ‘recovery is not linear’ phrase cuts through to me.
I often see it on social media along with a graph. To show what I mean, here is an example. There are loads of versions of this, and I’ve just picked one - this is not intended to be a personal attack on any particular illustrator, merely a noticing of a pattern. In the example below, the context is mental health recovery through therapy.
I’ve seen it applied to all different types of recovery.
But. Does this way of presenting recovery reflect reality?
Perhaps it shows a return to greater function that often has wobbles. A return to feeling good that often has struggles and dips.
So my sense is that it does reflect recovery in a way. In one way.
In the way that many things can be both true and yet not capture the whole truth of an experience.
I don’t think the graph can convey the complicated experience that is living through (or with?) recovery. With my own recent experience of recovery, I have been wondering if it’s not all that helpful.
This led me to a question: What could we use instead?
This meant a deep dive into my own experiences of recovery to understand why it’s not helpful. This is part one.
Is recovery about ‘getting back’? Or something else?
‘Recovery is not linear’ implies that recovery is about getting from one place to another. The ‘return to normal state’ or ‘improvement’ phrases that appear in those dictionary definitions.
But this oversimplifies what actually happens in recovery. Many of the graphs I see double down on this. They show an outcome that is ‘higher’ after recovery than before. It implies getting back to a place that we were at, before - or surpassing that.
Let’s take a look at real examples of recovery, and see what they can show us.
Recovery in reality
ℹ️ *Content warning begins here* ℹ️
In the 2010s, I worked with people with severe acquired and traumatic brain injuries. They had been living one life - with a role in their family, a way of earning income, and a social life. Then, a significant life-changing event occurred.
Immediately after an injury like this, the initial focus is on survival. There’s a lot that needs to happen to get things stabilised - medically, physically. Only then does the focus shift to recovery, and a big part of this is getting things stabilised emotionally too.
As part of the team that I worked with, for a local charity, we had different roles for three different stages:
Immediate support (especially for family and friends).
Dealing with the aftermath (for everyone).
Something that is best called, ‘What next?’
There would come a point when people started to talk about ‘getting back to normal’.
But the more time I worked in this area, the more I drew on my own experiences of recovery, I started to wonder. Can we really get back there?
Hasn’t the experience of injury changed who we are - how we experience and perceive the world from that moment on? And the people close to us?
Getting back to… what, exactly?
After these kinds of severe injuries, life was never the same for the people I worked with. Their injuries affected them physically or cognitively (or both) in big ways. This meant they were no longer able to do what they could before.
Rehabilitation often reached a plateau. This meant the end of state-funded rehab. This could be hard to accept, but not impossible. People got there in lots of different ways. Perhaps they just knew, right away, that life wasn’t going to be the same. Others had to have a go at going back to find that it wouldn’t work. Eventually, people found themselves in a sort of holding pattern.
I came to specialise in working with people in this spot. They had come to a place of acceptance. They could see that they weren’t going to get back to life as it was before. They weren’t going to be able to go back to their job. They weren’t going to have the same role in their family as before.
But they were also missing hope and possibility. Ok, I can’t go back. So, now what?
Recovery became about growth in all of its possible meanings
In this space - and with the emotions it brings - I worked to find hope. I brought tools and techniques to help people create a new path for themselves. The tools kept people grounded in who they still are and helped them to embrace who they are now. People identified new possibilities and acted on them.
For some people, that meant trying to get back to activities from ‘before’. For example, going back to play a particular sport. But when they tried it, it didn’t feel the same. They didn’t enjoy it like before. Often this led to a sense of closure and a desire to find something different. That’s a part of me from before - and that’s ok. I did that. And now I can do something else.
Through doing this work with people, I learned that recovery is not about getting to the top right segment of a graph. It’s not about getting back to normal. It’s not about getting back, or going back. And it’s not about adding in more, and more.
Instead, I saw that recovery is about:
Some things growing.
Some things remaining the same.
Some things changing in ways that you may even judge as being or getting ‘worse’.
Finding some things -
Some things that have been lost.
Some things that you didn’t know you had.
Some things that you have now that you didn’t before.
ℹ️ *End of content warning* ℹ️
Exploring the things we lose, and the things we find
If recovery really isn’t linear, and can’t be shown on a graph, what are some other ways of showing it? How might we capture that sense of things that are lost, things that are uncovered, and things that are found? From some of life’s biggest, most complex challenges there is loss - and it’s often the most noticeable at first. And there is also gain, often not noticed until later.
I played with exploring this experience in a doodle, as a shift in shape. A venn diagram seems too perfect. So these wibbly wobbly shapes came from my pen. I like how they show the nobbly bobbly bits of recovery. So the second shape ‘Who I am’ has more bumps and lumps than the first shape, ‘Who I was’.
In the next part of this post on Unpacking and Unpicking, I’ll dig deeper into these discoveries about recovery and explore some other ways of drawing it.
Until then, have a play with recoveries in your own life with the reflection prompts below.
Reflect on recovery in your own life
Think of a time you recovered from something - an illness, an injury? Nothing too big - pick something you see as relatively minor to make it manageable.
Reflect on the phrase ‘Recovery is not linear’ in relation to that experience.
What are some ways that ‘recovery is not linear’ was true in that experience?
What are some ways that the phrase comes unstuck, or doesn’t match your experience?
