From The Science of Happiness: (my paraphrase).
We've always been told that if we work hard we will have success, and happiness will follow. But what often happens is you work hard and achieve success, but then your brain moves the goalposts and puts happiness beyond the psychological horizon. And because success is a relative and ever-expanding abstraction, your brain never gets there!
We need to find a way of moving happiness back within the process rather than positioning it in a future that never arrives. There is happiness to be found in doing something right, to your own good standards: you enjoy the fruit of happiness as you go, in the moment.
We can apply this to withdrawal: There is satisfaction, happiness-- even joy to be found in the small improvements throughout the withdrawal process. If we retain an idealized image of our healed self somewhere off in the future, it too will never arrive-- it simply can't be known. It's day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment; here is the locus of reality, and therefore the site of happiness.
