Whether you’ve just recently walked through the doors of a drug and alcohol treatment program or have been in a doctors or professionals recovery program for months or years (or you’re anywhere in between), it’s very likely you’ll hear or have already heard someone say, “More will be revealed.”
Some common first responses to hearing this aphorism are:
“What the heck does that mean?”
“Is this a ‘recovery mantra’ that’s spoken when someone thinks you’re not ready to know more?”
“Is someone holding something back from me that I’ll get to know later?”
If the context of what was being said at the time didn’t really help you clearly understand the meaning of “More will be revealed,’ no worries. Let’s explore it together and hopefully come to some greater clarity about it, and see how it is often a quite appropriate and useful phrase.
The fact is, the vast majority of us who come into recovery do so from a life in which there is very little, if any, lucidity or accurate perspective left in the gas tank. That is, most of us had been leading lives filled with chaos, calamity and self-delusion, which we’d tried to navigate with fuzzy thinking and judgment clouded by our drinking or using.
At the outset of our venture into addiction recovery, we’re told “it’s a process,” which implies it takes time… time to get out of the old familiar ways of living, and time to make sense of and begin adopting some admittedly new, yet essential ways of living.
In other words, yes, overcoming the challenging obstacles we face coming into recovery doesn’t happen overnight. But we’re reassured by treatment center staff or our sponsor, “More will be revealed.” Even when the sea gets choppy and we feel uncomfortable with ourselves or desperate about our situations, as we grow in our recovery process, we will have a greater understanding of why we had to go through what we went through.
But this new understanding most often grows incrementally. New insights arise, but typically come slowly through the process of daily living in recovery. So we learn not to rush ourselves or panic; rather, to trust that by staying in the recovery process, our ability to respond increasingly better to “life showing up” is assured.
On a similar note, we’re reminded the phrase “More will be revealed” sometimes means we don’t have to address all of our problems at once. Instead, we’re counseled to take the things of our life one day at a time, one matter at a time… because “More will be revealed.” We begin to see that handling one issue as well as we possibly can often allows room for new options or resources to emerge to help us address a separate issue (or issues) we may have.
Some may invite us to consider, “Your Higher Power never gives you more than you can handle. But handling things wisely is up to you.” Again, by staying in the recovery process, we learn to allow things to unfold in their own time, not rushing or putting demands on people or situations; instead, trusting that “More will be revealed” means we’ll eventually know the right way to proceed forward.
Walking our way through a life in recovery—regardless of whether we’re in treatment at a rehab center, in an outpatient program or working a 12 Steps program—we’ll very likely be offered numerous opportunities to see how “More will be revealed” can apply to what we’re dealing with in our lives. By allowing our life situations to unfold without us hurrying or worrying about them, but instead using our recovery program and turning to our recovery network and our Higher Power for support and guidance, we know we’ll come to new understandings and an improved ability to make healthy decisions as we go forward, one day at a time.
Call 866.796.4720 today or contact us online for access to addiction recovery programs.
