How to stay sober – part one

Housekeeping: I promise myself and you all that this blog is not going to become exclusively about alcoholism. That said, this entry is the first in a seven installment series, roughly one page each, to be released once a day until complete. I have had a lot of feedback from other people who face similar challenges to those i described. Several people have asked me directly, “how do you stay sober?” Maybe there are people out there who can’t ask that yet. It is an important question, and i am so very proud of everyone else out there making better choices, or even trying to do that. The following is a collection of the best advice i can offer the newly sober taken from my own experiences – some direct, some tangential.

I am going to blend two approaches here – things I do to stay sober, and advice I would and do give to anyone else getting sober with remotely similar circumstances to what you describe. In both cases, the point is not to copy my actions or advice in exacting detail, but to understand the truths behind these things and apply that – the golden sparkly truth – to your situation the best you can.

Disclaimer – I am just going to keep it simple and write *you*. I am not assuming that i know your circumstance completely or have magic vision into your life. Some of my assumptions will be totally wrong. Please don’t let that stuff, my lack of writing from a perfectly neutral space, slow you down. Please do assume the best intent, the helpful intent. Please don’t do what i tend to do with recovery language and fix on a detail and say “that ain’t me” and throw out the rest. Disclaimer ends.

One of the many hard things for me to understand was people saying “getting clean is the easy part, it is life that will kick your ass.” One more cliché. One more staggeringly true cliché. I can’t know where you are at this moment in terms of your chemical relationship/dependency on alcohol, but 30+ days should have most people over the worst of the actual physiological aspects. That really just leaves the mental stuff. Whatever got you started, long-term/heavy/abusive drinking has changed how you respond to almost any scenario. Your body doesn’t really need the drink anymore. Your brain doesn’t either, but you have “Pavloved” yourself. Pain = drink. Difficult = drink. Hard = drink. Happy = drink. Celebrate = drink. Emotion (good or bad) = Drink.

This is the first part of the mental battle – (1) making new habits. The first time i got sober, i still lived in heroin house and i only had one human in my daily life who was clean. This is part of why i spent so much time in meetings. I was not in a position to move immediately, but i needed to create new behavior patterns. You have heard “fake it ’til you make it”. The psychology behind that is re-conditioning – breaking the existing responses we have conditioned ourselves with and building in new responses. You don’t have to believe it, but you do need to do it – it works despite being actively disbelieved.

I will come back to this later. For now, think on it. New habits.

Next up – Outcomes Assessment