A gentle friend
First of all, I just want to thank the developers for one small thing. The No Contact widget. It shows you every day how many days you’ve gone without contacting your object of fixation or abuser or whatever that person may be that you want to keep away on your journey to healing.
At first I thought it was going to be the Duolingo “streak” kind of thing, and really that added some anxiety to the mix. I started to fear what would happen when I fail, when I backslide. I knew I eventually would try to reach out and this made me feel small and fatalistic. But as addicts and alcoholics know, you don’t always fall back in when you’re feeling down. You don’t always do it because you need to cope. Sometimes you’re feeling great, confident, maybe overconfident, and you dip your toes back in because you think you can handle it. You’re just “drinking socially”.
So I texted the person wishing them a good day. No Contact be damned. And the person didn’t respond. So a but later I called. No answer. I left a cheerful, just calling to say hi, voice message. No response. Shared a funny “inspirational” meme on Instagram. No response. Sent another text… you get the picture. I was the equivalent of five beers in and ordering a double whiskey. I was not feeling good. Had this person completely blocked me??
And now I had to face my failure, or the fear of my failure. My widget said K hadn’t contacted this person in 3 days. 3 days that felt like an eternity. And now what? Back to “0 Days without an accident”?
But that’s not what happened. Instead, the following morning I woke up to see that I was on my 4th day of No Contact. Then I realized how the app counts my days of success. It’s not about a “streak”. It’s about how many days you’ve been to the gym in total to build those muscles. The result is your body, your kind, built from the cumulative effect of showing up. So I have 4 days of showing up, and now I know that if I contact this person once in the next 30 days, now that I should, I can still see that I was able to focus on myself for 29 days. The widget is a gentle friendly reminder that tracks your successes. It’s a trophy case.
At first I thought it was going to be the Duolingo “streak” kind of thing, and really that added some anxiety to the mix. I started to fear what would happen when I fail, when I backslide. I knew I eventually would try to reach out and this made me feel small and fatalistic. But as addicts and alcoholics know, you don’t always fall back in when you’re feeling down. You don’t always do it because you need to cope. Sometimes you’re feeling great, confident, maybe overconfident, and you dip your toes back in because you think you can handle it. You’re just “drinking socially”.
So I texted the person wishing them a good day. No Contact be damned. And the person didn’t respond. So a but later I called. No answer. I left a cheerful, just calling to say hi, voice message. No response. Shared a funny “inspirational” meme on Instagram. No response. Sent another text… you get the picture. I was the equivalent of five beers in and ordering a double whiskey. I was not feeling good. Had this person completely blocked me??
And now I had to face my failure, or the fear of my failure. My widget said K hadn’t contacted this person in 3 days. 3 days that felt like an eternity. And now what? Back to “0 Days without an accident”?
But that’s not what happened. Instead, the following morning I woke up to see that I was on my 4th day of No Contact. Then I realized how the app counts my days of success. It’s not about a “streak”. It’s about how many days you’ve been to the gym in total to build those muscles. The result is your body, your kind, built from the cumulative effect of showing up. So I have 4 days of showing up, and now I know that if I contact this person once in the next 30 days, now that I should, I can still see that I was able to focus on myself for 29 days. The widget is a gentle friendly reminder that tracks your successes. It’s a trophy case.
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Just started
Loved the start haven’t really used the app but what I’ve done already brings me peace
Wow
What a beautiful app for a bad moment in my life, the app is STUNNING
Made no contact easier
I was struggling with no contact and this app’s way of visualizing my progress made the process a lot easier. The journal prompts also helped me reveal some negative self beliefs and understand myself at a higher level.
