Recovery Puzzle:
The Lady with the Rock (free)
Looking for fun recovery material?
Created for substance use disorder counselors, this 1-page handout is ideal for individual and group work, either as quick challenge or as a means for discussion. It explores the nature of addiction and relapse.
The first task is simple: Out of these six rock-carrying women, which two are identical? (For more recovery puzzles, please visit the free recovery resources page.)
The second task is much more challenging. There are questions, and lots of them.
- What does it mean to carry addiction along, as if it were a giant rock?
- Why would a person pick up a rock in the first place? It seems like an awful silly thing to do.
- How does rock-carrying change a person?
- How can the woman get rid of the rock?
- What if she finally drops it but hurts her toe?
- What if she can’t drop it — what are her other options?
- If she lets the rock go, how likely is she to pick it back up again?
- What if the rock were decorated and beautiful? How would that make a difference?
- What does this all have to do with substance use and recovery?
- How many of us carry our own symbolic rocks, whether addiction or something else?
Too many questions… Where do you start?
I remember in school they used to talk about getting a “monkey” off your back, a euphemism for trying to quit drugs. This handout is a similar topic, except the monkey is a horribly overgrown rock.
Imagine this rock belongs to you. You wander the lands carrying this enormous burden, and the word “addiction” is plastered right across it. Your hands are scraped, joints all hurt, muscles are burning, and you’re exhausted, but you’ve carried it around for years… and hell, why stop now? Maybe it’s a beautiful thing, colorful by design, with imbedded music and an interactive AI on board, but it’s still a rock and it’s still heavy. People pick up rocks for all sorts of reasons… the issue is they later can’t let them go.
Of course, the easiest way to de-rock yourself is to put it down. You do risk dropping it on your toe. The good news is the toe will heal. The even better news is that you can avoid the toe with a little bit of planning. But what if lowering the rock to the ground weren’t possible. What then?
Oh, there are lots of solutions. Break the rock into pieces, replace it with a small rock, program it to self-destruct, use a small crane to expertly put it aside, hand it off to someone else… or get help. A group of people with rock-throwing experience can set you right in minutes.
Once you discard the rock, how likely are you to pick it up again? You’d think the answer would be “never!” but the honest truth: we do, and we do so frequently.
Why pick it up again? Because it feels familiar, because we enjoy the pain, because everyone else is doing it, because without it we’d have to deal with all the responsibilities we’re avoiding. As long as we’re carrying the rock, we don’t have to deal with other problems, like itchy noses or nosy neighbors. Nor do we have to deal with the consequences. Sometimes it’s easier to carry than to drop. Strange.
But imagine you’ve put the rock aside. Maybe you’re floating through life, happy as can be. More likely you’re hurting and bored and trying to establish a rock-less existence. How do you stay rock-free? That is a huge question, my friend, and there are millions of wise books written on the subject. If you need a list of ideas right now, check out the article, Indoor skydiving and Other Coping Skills.
If you read all this and still interested in a copy of the worksheet, click on the button below.
kimrosenthalmd.com
Looking for more ways to overcome a rock a drug or alcohol problem?
Check out the Outside-the-Box Recovery Workbook, a 30-day journey into the world of sobriety, where relapse prevention meets creativity, fun, and the occasional joke. The link takes you to Amazon.
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