Chris DeLine

“Suffering is the stress created by craving for more. Suffering is never having enough to feel satisfied. […] Suffering is the thought that I cannot be happy until I get… Suffering is the anguish and misery of being addicted.” —Noah Levine, Refuge Recovery

With each return to addictive behavior there’s an implicit denial of self acceptance, which boils down to some type of self-rejection. It’s hard to think that the habits that lead us to those places weren’t always there. Things didn’t always work like this, and we didn’t always flail, reaching for something external to satisfy some underlying internal feeling of incompleteness. In part, that’s what recovery is: A reclamation of what once was — that feeling of being whole which has been drowned out by a constant craving for more.