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Restarting after a break

Restarting after a year off — the side effects came back like new

Started 4 June 2025 · 14 replies · 156 hearts · read 2.2k times

NikolaiSofia, BG · 4 June 2025
about a year ago

Starting a thread on this because it keeps coming up in ones and twos: Restarting after a year off — the side effects came back like new

Writing this partly to ask and partly because writing it down usually tells me what I think.

What I would find most useful is not advice. It is somebody describing what their version of this stage was, and how long it went on for before it changed.

My experience of this stage has not matched any account I have read, which I assume means the accounts are tidier than the reality rather than that something is wrong.

My honest position is that I do not know whether to change something or wait, and I have been going round that question for three weeks without getting anywhere.

Anyway. Thank you for reading this far. Any experience of this stage gratefully received, and I will come back and say what happened.

52

NerysRhyl, UK
#1

I found the first fortnight of the restart emotionally heavier than the first fortnight of the original start, which I had not anticipated at all.

9me too 1

BenediktFacilitatorVienna, Austria
#2

Facilitator note: if this thread has landed close to home for you while reading, our support resources page lists the kinds of service worth finding. No obligation and no drama.

21

BobbieRochdale, UK
#3

Read, understood, and glad you are here.

7

InêsPorto, PT
#4

Nobody in this circle has ever asked me why I stopped in a tone that required an answer. That is the whole reason I was able to come back and say I had.

12

ZoraSarajevo, BA
#5

I want to name that my break happened because life got very hard for a while, and going back happened because it got less hard. That is the entire mechanism.

10

Gwen DAberystwyth, UK
#6

Gently disagreeing with Bobbie, or rather adding the other half of it.

The most useful thing anybody said to me was to treat the restart as a new start rather than a resumption, because my body had had a year of its own in between.

13me too 6

AurelBucharest, RO
#7

What Inês described happened to me too, in a slightly different order.

I have restarted twice. The second break was shorter and the second restart was easier, and I think that is because I had stopped treating either one as a verdict.

11

MableBolton, UK
#8

What surprised me was how quickly the routine came back. Muscle memory for where things go, when I do it, what the week looks like. Three days and I was back in it.

4

NikolaiSofia, BG
#9

If you are hovering, the only thing worth doing is booking the conversation. Everything after that is much smaller than it looks from here.

11

NerysRhyl, UK
#10

Picking up Aurel’s point rather than starting a new one.

The conversation I dreaded took under five minutes and contained no judgement of any kind. I had spent a month rehearsing for it.

9

OttilieCheshire, UK
#11

Coming back a year into my restart to say it held, it was ordinary, and the break in the middle is now just a gap in my notes rather than a fault line.

9

BobbieRochdale, UK
#12

Nerys, thank you for that. It gives me somewhere to start from.

I restarted after fourteen months and the hardest part was entirely in my head. The practical side took one appointment and a fortnight.

12

BenediktFacilitatorVienna, Austria
#13

Facilitator note: everything discussed here is a matter for you and whoever prescribes for you. We are company for the thinking, not a substitute for the appointment.

15

ZoraSarajevo, BA
#14

Restarting is an ordinary shape. I did not believe that when I was doing it and I believe it completely now, having watched about thirty people here do the same.

13me too 7