Early in sobriety, it is easy to become overwhelmed and depressed. I have experienced this feeling personally and continue to see newcomers to sobriety feel as if their life will be without excitement in the absence of alcohol. This couldn’t be further from the truth, but it’s a trap your addiction wants you to fall into so you’ll quit sobriety before you even get a good start.
Recovery leaves a bottle-sized hole in your life. It will ache until you fill it. What you fill it with will dictate the quality of your sobriety. Consider this: you have likely exhausted significant time, money, and energy on your alcoholism/addiction. When alcohol or drugs are suddenly no longer a part of your life, you may find yourself feeling bored and alone. Your friends may be out in circumstances that aren’t safe for you. A night at the bar with your friends probably isn’t a recipe for success in early sobriety. Perhaps you have activities you enjoy that can be done without drinking, but drinking is prevalent around those activities, so they’re out for the time being. I’ve known several alcoholics who had to give up darts, bowling, and pool for exactly this reason. It’s depressing. Now you have all this free time and it’s the perfect opportunity for your addiction to tell you this isn’t worth doing.
Your addiction will tell you it’s better to die drunk than live sober. Your addiction will tell you your life will be boring and bland without alcohol. Your addiction will tell you to take another stab at moderating your drinking so you can keep the life you had. You’ll need to resist that.
Is there something you always wanted to learn? Home maintenance? Woodworking? Birdwatching? Learn it. What’s stopping you now? The rest of your life is yours to claim and make of it what you will. You are free now. Go be free. This is all part of a vital paradigm shift you will need to have in order to have a joyful experience in sobriety.
It was helpful to me to adopt this strategy such that I feel comfortable suggesting it to others: learn new things. Pick up a hobby you were always interested in, but never picked up. Or, go back to something you used to enjoy doing and alcohol got in the way of. My recovery involved a bit of all of this. I learned some new skills. I developed an appreciation for nature. I started hiking and spent a lot more time fishing. I learned how to kayak. I built a playhouse. I built a table. I read for pleasure. I started this blog. None of this was possible for me in active addiction. I was not a person looking for new pastimes. I had one pastime and it was booze.
Here's where the changed perspective comes in: I can sit here now and name a number of things I enjoy doing now that I could not do in active addiction. New skills. New interests. New hobbies. I lose all of that if I go back to drinking and I don’t want to lose that. I also don’t want to lose the relationships I’ve developed on sobriety or the ones that I have repaired. New and old, my relationships with people are so much more genuine now than when I was living for my next drink. Again, this is a reason I do not want to go back to drinking. I have more to lose now than I did when I first got sober because my sobriety was the foundation upon which a fulfilling life was built.
If you do the same, you can keep the intrusive thoughts of loss and boredom out. Instead of wallowing in the things you’ve lost by being sober, you’ll think of the things you have gained. This will reinforce a gratitude for your sobriety and the progress that you have made. Add some service work to this mix—helping others, and you will be well on your way to allowing your thoughts to be positive and give reinforcement to your sobriety you may not have gotten otherwise.
Dear Reader, Marcus Aurelius recognized the power of thought and that the character of that thought manifests in the soul of the thinker. If you want to live happy, joyous, and free, it’s important to associate positive developments with your sobriety and a good way to do that is to direct the time, money, and energy you’d previously devoted to addiction to more productive and rewarding endeavors. I hope you will.
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