The point is to find activities to fill the time and help you become a better person. You’ll start to transform your identity into someone who shows up, does the hard work, and looks smoking hot in a swimsuit. It works for some folks and has the added benefit of pumping your body full of endorphins, creating new neural connections in the brain, and helping reduce depression and anxiety. Those were the days I’d make it to the gym and think that things would turn out okay after all. I’m a stubborn, recovering know-it-all, which means I don’t like asking for help. This quality has not served me well, particularly in sobriety.
Sobriety Sucks Podcast Coming Soon
Sobriety doesn’t necessarily turn you into being sober sucks Liz Lemon, but it can give you the clarity to understand that you’ve been Liz Lemon your whole life. There is no one way to deal with this. It’s part of the sobriety package, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Sobriety can be an incredible way to shed relationships you’ve outgrown as well as find new ones that align with your new values.
Your AllMusic Account
- Baked into a lot of these programs and therapy sessions are things that will push you to accept full responsibility for your past and then provide you with the tools you need to move forward from them.
- When you abuse alcohol, you become the center of the universe and can’t imagine why anyone might want to escape your orbit for a second.
- While making the decision to be sober was the best thing I’ve ever done, it’s also one of the hardest.
We say, “alcohol has destroyed your life and led you down this path,” which is true, but YOU also had a role in it. My entire world revolved around drinking and unleashing my feelings onto well-intending people, no matter how irrational. She considers herself the victim of a hard world that has rejected her. She drinks, so she doesn’t have to feel any of it. The person who drinks herself silly on a Friday night and posts self-deprecating posts on drug addiction social media, hoping to find validation for the pain she’s in.
Sobriety Doesn’t Suck: A Refreshing New Approach to Recovery and Personal Growth”
If people press that response, I’ll either stare at them and hold an uncomfortable silence (this is enjoyable at some point), or just change the subject. There are exceptions to this, like if someone alludes to their https://ecosoberhouse.com/ own struggle with alcohol, and then I might offer up a bit more of my personal experience. You are a mirror now, a flashlight of sobriety in a society that is laced with the judgment that it’s abnormal to abstain from alcohol. People will assume you drink and will be very curious about why you don’t have a drink in your hand when they do. I used to get drunk and play games and it was fun.
- One minute you’re cooking dinner, and the next, you’ve lost five minutes to daydreaming about that one time you threw up on your mother-in-law’s new rug.
- Be patient and uphold your own standards.
- And I’m also the one who doesn’t wake up with a hangover.
- This quality has not served me well, particularly in sobriety.
- But one day, you realize the clouds have lifted a little bit.
You don’t have to figure this out on your own.
Whatever recovery path you take (and there are MANY), the main thing is to acknowledge that you don’t have all the answers and could use some help. That step alone will lighten the emotional load significantly. It’s normal to feel like the absolute worst person in the early days when you’re forced to deal with big emotions like guilt, shame, and regret. It’s hard to face that stuff when you’re newly sober and it has hurled a lot of strong, well-intending people back into relapse.
Grift People Grift People
It’s not uncommon to feel like you’re running on a treadmill, getting nowhere, but feeling emotionally and physically exhausted. Prove to yourself that you can finish what you start and be reliable. Push through and show up, even on days you don’t want to. A lot of people in recovery become fitness buffs, and it makes sense. We gotta find new avenues to channel our energy and work out our stuff. My past relapses were largely fueled by sobriety’s inability to solve my problems for me.
Nobody told me this side effect of long-term sobriety. For years, I’ve been helping people not just get sober, but discover a deep excitement about sobriety—the kind that opens doors to personal transformation. Sobriety isn’t just about putting down the drink or the drug; it’s about reclaiming your life, reconnecting with your authentic self, and finding a way to thrive. Through my work, I’ve seen how recovery can spark creativity, spirituality, and fulfillment in ways that feel unique to each person.
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For those who aren’t into AA, I recommend Annie Grace’s support programs. The actual recovery process of sobriety starts to get better around the 3-6 month mark, but the psychological recovery can take even longer. And when we self-medicate with alcohol, we enter into a vicious cycle of drinking to avoid our problems and then causing new ones because, well, we drink. Before you know it, you’re drinking to avoid the fact that you have a drinking problem. We usually start drinking alcoholically because we are trying to hide from something. Many of these problems enter our lives because of our drinking.
So your bold, life-improving decision to not drink will mean changes almost everywhere you look. Here are some surprising (and not-so-surprising) occurrences that will inevitably happen to your relationships, your identity, even your free time, and how I’ve learned to deal with each one. It’s brilliant fun and I would be lying if I didn’t. When it seems like all you want to do is forget, to go get high or drunk and be gone, if only for a few moments, remember what addiction’s cost you.
- When I finally walked away from booze at 34, my life opened up.
- The whole reason I wrote my eBook Sobriety Doesn’t Have To Suck!
- People think you’re lame if you don’t drink and sober people don’t want to hang out with me because I’m a drug addict.
- You are a mirror now, a flashlight of sobriety in a society that is laced with the judgment that it’s abnormal to abstain from alcohol.
It’s important to remember that you never have to give yourself up to make other people comfortable—ever. Whether you’re stating a one-sentence response (“I don’t drink”) or using a small excuse, the only thing to consider is whether you are comfortable, and whether your boundaries are being upheld. First of all, let me preface this by saying that getting and staying sober has been, by far, the best decision that I’ve ever made. There is no doubt in my mind about that. But I’m also going to say something else that might not be what other people in recovery want to put out there, but what I have found in my experience to be completely true.