Recovery Is A Journey

When walking the path of Recovery, what works one year may not work if done the year before. (This is the same with some adventure games, where a problem must be solved in one area of the map before progress can be made in another.)

It is thus not a simple matter of trying out each option in a single trial and expecting to get meaningful results. If we consider the total 'game tree', then we need to try everything at the start, then try everything again as a possible second step, and so on.

Just as the 'game tree' of chess expands to an unmanageable size long before the game gets interesting, so it is with the Recovery Journey. We can't simplify this to a picture of 'X works when we see Y', as an RCT effectively does. If 'X works when we see Y but only after A and B have been done in that order', then it may appear that, in general, it is not the case that 'X works when we see Y', and thus one may naively conclude that it is not the case at all that 'X works when we see Y' (this is confusing 'absence of evidence' with 'evidence of absence' if you want to consider the fallacy in general).