[MENTION=68855]Priest[/MENTION]TheyCalledHim, you asked about peoples' opinions regarding counting clean time...that's something I've been thinking about a lot. As anyone can see from my posts, I do indeed count days/weeks, etc. But I firmly think that there are counterproductive, even harmful effects of such counting.
The main reason I think counting clean time (at least a literal counting like I do) is harmful is because during early recovery it's all but assured that we're gonna slip. Racking clean time is hard for everyone, but it's especially hard for the people who need the most help: those of us in the first steps of changing our lives.
I feel like we need a metric for progress, but it needs to take into account the realities of recovery's ebbs and flows.
Say I've gotten 30 days clean. There's a big difference between slipping up by getting high once, vs. getting a hotel room and going on a five-day run. To my thinking, in early recovery, a *small* lapse so long as it's a *rare* event shouldn't reset the clock all the way to zero. As time goes on, it seems logical that the meaning of "rare" might change, getting stricter.
All this is to say that people in early recovery need encouragement, not shaming. I guess this whole post comes from my negative experience with NA, where dicksizing with clean time was just one of many ways that people were made to feel deficient and disappointing when they were most vulnerable.
Obviously, the hard part is that once we admit shades of grey, everything gets murky really fast. I can fully understand and respect classic arguments that there is no room for half-measures in recovery and that a slip is a slip. But at the end of the day, I think recovery is inherently murky. Counting time in some way does seem helpful. But a literalist, all-or-nothing clock seems counterproductive during early recovery...maybe even past then.
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