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Recovery...
is the experience of a meaningful, productive life within the limits imposed by a history of addiction to alcohol and/or other drugs. Recovery is both the acceptance and transcendence of limitation. It is the achievement of optimum health–the process of rising above and becoming more than an illness (Deegan, 1988, 1996; Anthony, 1993). Recovery, in contrast to treatment, is both done and defined by the person with the problem (Diamond, 2001). “Recovery” implies that something once possessed and then lost is reacquired. The term recovery promises the ability to get back what one once had and as such holds out unspoken hope for a return of lost health, lost esteem, lost relationships, lost financial or social status. Recovery, in this sense, is congruent with the concept of rehabilitation–the reacquisition of that which was lost. For those who have pre-existing levels of functioning that were lost to addiction, there is in the term recovery the promise of being able to reach back and pick up the pieces of where one’s life was at before addiction altered one’s life course. For those who never had such a prior level of functioning, the term recovery may be more aptly framed “procovery” or “discovery”–the movement toward that which is new. For those wounded by childhood victimization, the term “uncovery” may be an apt description of the early healing process (White and Chaney, 1993) This reaching back and reaching forward represent two very different positions from which recovery is initiated, and mark the differences between treatment approaches based on rehabilitation versus those based on habilitation.

This definition is used with permission from William L. White to be featured in:
An Addiction Recovery Glossary
The Languages of American Communities of Recovery William L. White