Within the depth-psychology and allied clinical corpus, ‘Substance Abuse Recovery’ is not treated as a discrete clinical endpoint but as a complex, longitudinally unfolding process whose determinants reach well beyond pharmacology into the domains of spirituality, social identity, trauma history, nutrition, meaning-making, and community embeddedness. The field is marked by foundational tensions: abstinence versus moderated resolution, acute-care models versus chronic-disease frameworks, and the role of spirituality versus secular cognitive-behavioral approaches. White’s definitional work interrogates whether abstinence is constitutive of recovery or merely one pathway among several, while Najavits foregrounds the inseparability of PTSD and substance-use trajectories, insisting that treatment of trauma and addiction must proceed simultaneously rather than sequentially. Grim and colleagues mount a substantial empirical case for faith-based community infrastructure as an undervalued but economically and clinically significant pillar of recovery support, documented at continental scale. Laudet’s line of research shifts attention from symptom reduction to quality-of-life, recovery capital, and the buffering effects of social support, spirituality, and life meaning. Russell extends these questions to adolescent populations entangled with the criminal justice system, while Flores and Avery each address the complicating presence of co-occurring psychiatric conditions and the therapeutic community model. Across all voices, the consensus is that recovery is an extended, nonlinear process requiring systemic rather than episodic intervention.