What Makes Sobriety Stick?
What Makes Sobriety Stick?
When this becomes clear, it's irresistible.
I have never attended an AA meeting, though I have heard amazing things about them. I have not done all of the 12 Steps, though I do own and have read (most of) The Big Book. My feeling on AA and all formal recovery programs is this: It is right and good to do whatever keeps you safe, empowered, accountable and, above all else, sober. I do believe community is necessary for recovery. But I do not subscribe to any externally organized program that keeps me sober. At the end of the day (don’t you hate when people say that), you only ever answer to yourself. No one else, no program, no group, no book, no doctor, no theory or therapist, nothing outside of you, will save you from the addiction that wants you dead. Only you can do that.
That said, I do a lot of things repeatedly and without distraction that are non-negotiable for me because I know that sobriety must come first. I know my ongoing recovery from alcohol addiction (which is drug addiction, but that’s for another post entirely) is more important than everything else in my life. Even marriage. Even motherhood. Even family. Even friends. Even money, career, image, success, social life, acceptance, and even, well, let’s not belabor it: literally anything else.
For 410 days now, after drinking abusively for 20 some years, I have remained entirely sober and will continue to do so indefinitely. This is my path. No alcohol. Ever. At all. No question. No flinching. No apology. For me, ‘moderation’ of any kind would be a lie and a manipulation of myself. It’s off the table. Stone cold sober is the only way to go. This will always be my path. And I could not be more humbled or more genuinely grateful to know this. Because it was the not knowing that was crushing me.
It has been a strange, rather circuitous route to get here, one could say. Considering when I finally broke down and told my doctor what I was dealing with, she didn’t have a lot to say when it came to ‘prescribing’ anything. It was kind of like, and I am paraphrasing here because during the actual conversation I was drenched in hot tears, smeared with snot, and practically hyperventilating from a mixture of fear and the beautifully grotesque relief of finally coming clean, albeit sloppily:
“So sorry to hear this (and she really was saddened to hear my story, I am in no way questioning her earnest compassion) - I can see you need help.”
What will help? ….therapy? I asked/suggested soggily.
“Yes,” she nodded. “Therapy would be good, that’s a very good idea.” (…that I came up with on my own… you’re welcome, I guess?)
Where do I go?
“Go through your insurance.”
Ah. Okay. Thankssss.
So my physician’s office has no close relationship with an accessible addiction recovery center or even a single therapist. Had I but shredded my rotator cuff whilst playing an aggressive game of tennis or practicing improper fencing technique, referrals to highly specialized orthopedic surgeons would surely abound. Or, perhaps more to the point, had my liver been failing all over the linoleum floor, there would have been swift medical attention. But there’s no easy way to quantify or fully explain the sickness of addiction in its entirety when it is mostly manifesting itself in the misfirings of my worn-out mind. It is very hard to make appear real what is completely invisible to the naked eye of the physician, even if said physician’s eyes do look to be truly concerned.
We hear a lot about ‘gray area drinking’ these days, which is essentially a catch-all term for a supremely wide spectrum of drinking that we would maybe all agree isn’t ‘responsible’ but also won’t immediately land you in a supervised detox facility. Even in AA, even in filing insurance forms for a medical leave of absence, the only real way you ‘know’ if you are an alcoholic or someone who suffers from ‘substance use disorder’ is if you personally elect to diagnose yourself as such.
What we fail to mention is that married right up to gray area drinking is the elusive gray area treatment for people who actively struggle with what may truly be a deadly tangle with an addiction they have no way of understanding how to assess, let alone get help with managing. We also tend to think that, while perhaps a bit sketchy or fuzzy, the ‘gray area’ falls somewhere within a specific measurement. That if you simply took an online quiz and added up the number of drinks per day/week/month over however many years it has been going on and/or progressing, you’d get an automatically generated QR code to scan and find out what you’ve won. A drink ticket good for a couple of glasses of red wine a week (like a normal person!) or permanent exile onto the dry island of misfit maladjusted irresponsible losers?
Either way, those quizzes aren’t getting you any closer to safety or, while we’re at it, freedom. And freedom is what we are really after here. Anyone who has ever been chained to their substance of (infuriating) choice will tell you that being held hostage by abuse is not fun or easy or cheap or chill, it’s tragic. It’s maddening. It hurts. It scares the living hell out of us.
It took me over a decade to finally show up in the doctor’s office and admit I needed help. Part of the reason it took so damn long is because I didn’t know how badly I needed help. I didn’t know that alcohol could ruin a person who doesn’t mean to ruin herself. I just didn’t know. I didn’t know what it really took to get sober. I didn’t know if I should. I didn’t know how on earth I would ever do it if I had to. What would happen to my life? What would happen to me? Where would I belong and how would I find such a place and would I hate it? All the unknowns made my drinking feel too big to even mention on all those previous doctor’s visits where the nurse asks you how much you drink and then quickly offers an acceptable answer: “Socially?” like tossing out a life line I clung to every single time even though I knew with every fiber of my petrified being it was a monster-sized lie. “Um. Yep. Socially.”
All this begs the fair question: What is it that has kept me sober all this time? How can someone who hid her addiction - even from herself - for so long, and then got nearly zero direction from her doctor on where to go from there, essentially stumble upon the path of sobriety and then, without any specific medical or social program, stay sober? Why has this sobriety thing worked for me? Why has it stuck? Why have I not relapsed even when it was mind-body-cringingly difficult not to?
I have been asking myself this question over the past few months. Not only because I wanted to answer it for myself but also because I need to be able to share my answer with the lovely people I will help stay sober through my (newly budding) Sober Life Coaching practice. (Sidenote! I am now a Certified Addiction Recovery Coach and will be sharing more soon about how we can work together if that is something you may be interested in. It’s very cool.)
What is the key, the trick, the organizing principle that can make recovery stick?
The answer is this. There is something essential that runs underneath all the other things a sober person does to maintain her sobriety. It runs much deeper than the coping tools in my toolbox which keep me safe by preventing overwhelm, diffusing destructive tendencies, enabling relaxation, and ensuring internal emotional self-regulation.
For me, it is a support structure erected inside my being that aligns my body, mind, and spirit behind the advancement toward one specific, defined, and deeply personal vision for what I want my life to be. It is the conviction that my sobriety is the irreplaceable internal compass that keeps my entire life headed in the right direction: forward. Never, ever back to the way it was.
What I could not have clearly articulated while I was working through my first year of sobriety, but can articulate now that I know what keeps my commitment strong, healthy, and unbreakable, is that what has kept (and is keeping) me sober is that I have consciously, actively, and steadfastly cultivated what I now refer to as my Forward-Focused Sobriety. (Which is also fun because the abbreviation is #FFS as in #ForFuckSake let’s keep our shit together, shall we.)
What I mean by Forward-Focused Sobriety is: because I have a clear vision for myself of the kind of life I intend to create and to live, and I am 100% certain alcohol has absolutely no place in it, there is no more confusion around what my recovery means to me, why I am in recovery for life, or what my recovery will allow me to do going forward.
It doesn’t matter what life or this (diseased) culture throws at me. I know what I want and my focus on having it is locked-in with laser precision the way only a scan of my unique retinas could open an underground vault which contains all the riches I’ve ever accumulated in the world had I any worth storing in an underground vault that requires the scanning of one’s retinas to, in fact, access.
I want a life that expands into its fullest, most creative expression. I want freedom from poison and toxins of every kind. Not only do I live completely alcohol-and-drug-free, but because I do I also live completely free of the rules society tries to impose upon us to keep us sick, degraded, addicted, blind, helpless, hopeless, and small. When I say alcohol has no place in my future, it is because nothing that aims to harm (let alone annihilate) me does.
Every choice I have to make in this life - from relationships to career to goofing off on the weekend - I choose from this place of clear conviction and belief in that forward-looking vision of my continuously sober life. By remaining forward-focused on that singular goal, everything else falls into alignment with my sobriety. And what I envision as my future then, naturally, becomes my experience of the present. When you know where you are headed, so, too, you know exactly where you are in relation to it. The mind and the body will go where they are headed. They have to. That’s how physics works.
There is a saying that what we focus on expands. In this way, we choose our own freedom or our own imprisonment by choosing what we give our attention to. Focus on ambiguity and you will live ambiguously. Focus on clarity and you will live clearly. There could be nothing more dangerous or detrimental to my sobriety than looking backwards and remaining fixated on old patterns, habits, and ways of living which romanticize a past life that was literally killing me. Focus on the past and it becomes your present.
What keeps me sober is my unwavering commitment to Forward Focused Sobriety. My commitment to giving myself the life I know I deserve in the future by aligning with it now. Today. Each moment. Only in sobriety can I be certain that I will remain clear on who I am, what I’m about, and what I want for myself, everything else be damned. That clarity is what keeps me safe. What keeps me safe is that unshakeable self-trust that I know where I am going. I know what I am directing all of my energy toward. That stubborn, unflinching loyalty to holding myself accountable and with grace for my own well-being.
A lot of people are afraid to commit to sobriety. I know I fucking was. And there is plenty to muddy the waters these days, too. A lot of talk about ‘moderation’ and being ‘sober curious.’ My view on all of that is: Whatever heightens your honest awareness of what’s going on between you and alcohol, instead of blindly sucking it down just because everybody else does, is a good and wonderful thing. Half the battle, at least for me, was that I was paralyzed by the fear of even admitting to myself how much I was drinking. But once the alcohol is removed for an amount of time, say a month or so, the body is free of poison and the mind is exponentially clearer to objectively assess what is really going on.
Forward-focused sobriety is about no longer trying to fool yourself, lie to yourself, or manipulate what you believe such that you can make excuses for keeping alcohol in your life when you know full well it does not belong. Forward-focused sobriety is also about making the commitment to sobriety before you are certain it will stick. So many folks are afraid to commit because they are afraid they will fail. But without making the commitment to get where you want to go, all of your best intentions will fall merrily apart the minute your shitty day at the office collides with a two-for-one watermelon margarita happy hour special.
Commitment comes before certainty because the commitment is to ensure the certainty you seek. Forward-focused sobriety sticks because it focuses all your attention on the vision you have of the life you want to create for yourself. When you know what that looks like, you will do whatever it takes to figure out how to have it. Which renders the stupid-size tub of fruity margarita not only powerless to seduce you but also entirely and more importantly useless to you. It does not serve your purpose in this life to live free and clear on your own terms. One drink is a couple drinks is a wretched night is a bloodshot morning and no part of that serves your future vision well. You know what you want. Stupid isn’t it.
This forward-focused sober commitment to a fuller, more meaningful, more expansive and creative life anchors you inside yourself so that you are safe to make the choices that bring you the most freedom to have what you want. Freedom to say ‘No.’ when you mean it and ‘Yes.’ only when it truly aligns with your own personal conviction and intention. Only then are you free to keep expanding in and moving toward a life that you design for yourself. That answers to no one’s demands but your own. You who know for sure what you deserve and won’t stop until it’s yours. Eyes on the prize. Always forward. Never back.