Recovery. It works, but it is hard to do so on an emotional level. When you go through any experience, whether it is stressful, horrifying, or very enjoyable it will always be a part of you. Recovery states that the bad experiences should be able to be put behind one's self, to be moved on from and that they should not trouble one anymore. The definition of recovery is "restoration or return to any former and better state or condition." (Source - Dictionary.com, definition number 4.) If recovery also holds true for emotions as well as the physical, then the experiences, the bad ones, should be something that we can separate ourselves from as surely as we can separate ourselves from mold or cancer or the common cold, however, we find that this is not the case.

No matter the experience, it stays with you, in fact your experiences define you, so your emotions and your experiences define you, emotions and experiences that should the holder should have long since been recovered. However, when you experience something it stays with you (i.e. rape, war, assault, etc.) and that proves that recovery, at least on the emotional side, is at its core a broken tenant of the human vocabulary.

Those who have been through assault will never look at a darkened city the same just as those who have been to war will never feel the same about those of the ethnicity they fought, never feel the same way about tight spaces or other things of that nature, just as those who have experienced rape will never view the opposite sex in the same way, and never have the emotional intimacy of their past.

My point is that recovery, at its base is a false hope, physically, for the most part it works, emotionally, well, its a long way off, in my opinion.