The Mindset Shift That Helped Me Get (And Stay) Sober For Good
For the vast majority of us, sobriety didn’t “work” on the first attempt. Maybe it didn’t work on the second, third, fourth, or fifth either. So many of us have fallen victim to a cycle of sobriety, relapse, binge, repeat.
And it sucks.
Failing is frustrating. We start to build an identity around our failures. Drinking makes us feel like horrible people, and so does our inability to stop.
I get asked a lot how I got sober. It’s a big, heavy question. I’ve always struggled to answer it.
Because I, too, went through YEARS when I could not get it right. Not even close. I’d string together a few days here and there. Maybe even an entire week!
But then… WHACK!
That inner addict voice would start whispering sweet nothings in my ear, tormenting me like Poe’s raven. And I caved. Every single time.
But here I am now, sober for nearly three years. Something changed. But what?
The Mental Shift That Got Me Sober
As I sit here on Day 1 of my latest venture (tackling emotional eating), I realize I’m mentally back in the same place I was in December 2016 when I finally said to myself, “Okay for real this time. Enough.”
And, like then, this time I mean it.
How do I know for sure?
Because I’ve been here before and I know what it feels like.
There is an internal shift in thinking that has to occur. When people ask me how I finally quit drinking, I used to say a flip switched in my brain because I genuinely did not know what else to call it. One day, I just decided to give up the fight.
I felt it in my entire body that things needed to change. No more waiting till tomorrow, or the next day, or next week to start. It has to be now.
How Do You Get There?
So that’s all well and good, but I can’t honestly expect to tell people to keep struggling and hope one day the “switch” flips for them.
I don’t know how it works, friends, but good luck to you!
No. That’s not useful at all. So I’ve wrestled with how to put into words the emotional and mental process I went through to get to long term sobriety. And then the other night, it came to me. The big epiphany!
You ready? Here it is:
The pain of caving has to hurt more than the pain of craving.
That was the tipping point for me. And let’s be honest, both feel horrible. But you reach a point where the guilt, shame, and anguish of failing YET AGAIN hurts more than the crazy-making fixation of craving a drink.
A reader pointed out that saying this seems like I am oversimplifying the issue or ignoring the science of addiction. Looking back at this article through that lens, I can totally see where she’s coming from. The following is a revised, clarified version of this piece and I am grateful to her for helping me get here!
The realization isn’t enough. You have to DO something about it.
Before I got sober for good, I refused to give up the tug-of-war. I wasn’t ready to commit to sobriety as a longterm thing. There was always this niggling feeling in the back of my mind that one day in the not-so-distant-future, I could try again.
One day I would be able to have a couple beers at happy hour and be satisfied.
That’s bullshit for people like me for whom drinking alcohol “normally” is not an option.
I had to get to the point where participating in the constant relapse cycle was too painful to continue. That’s what I mean when I say the pain of caving has to hurt more than the pain of craving.
That’s what I had to give up — the hope that I would ever drink normally again.
Why Caving Causes So Much Damage
Self-hatred compounds.
Eventually you’re going to develop a story about who and what you are and it’s not going to be a good one. Sure, each individual cave is not a total game changer on its own, but that’s what’s so insidious about it.
Each failure makes it just a tiny bit harder to turn things around. And it doesn’t seem like a big deal at the time (unless you go overboard). It’s just one order of fries. Or one cocktail at your cousin’s wedding. It’s seems a lot more innocent than it is.
That’s because the more you cave, the easier it becomes. Eventually you stop trying to fight it.
The story in your brain is that you are useless and can’t commit to anything. The reason you believe that is because you insist on proving it. Over and over and over again.
Everything becomes about tomorrow. Today I f*cked up, but tomorrow I will get it right. Except tomorrow eventually becomes today and round and round we go.
Giving Up (In A Good Way)
Caving will hurt more than craving once you reach the point where you say, “I can’t go on like this anymore” and you mean it with every fiber of your being.
You know that somehow, some way, you have to quit for good.
The question becomes: HOW?
1. Take Responsibility
A lot of people find it difficult to abandon their identity as a victim. I used to be one of them.
Some of us are dealing with big trauma that planted the seed early in our brains that we are somehow “less than.” We nourish that identity with every failure. The longer we try (and fail) to get our lives together, the stronger that sense of worthlessness and victimhood becomes.
The first step to NOT being a victim is to admit that you’ve been acting like one until now.
And that means you get to start playing with the idea that you actually have agency over your life. That you have the POWER to make different choices. It took me years to believe that.
But once I did, I was able to get help.
Until that point, I’d mostly just been basking in my own misery. I couldn’t stop drinking through sheer willpower so that made me a failure. For the most part, I was content to play that role.
Until I wasn’t.
2. Get Out Of Your Feelings
Seriously. Run!
I used to stew in my feelings for days on end. Getting drunk made it easier. I hated my life, was lonely, suffering crippling anxiety, no romantic prospects, job that drove me crazy, and a lot of emotional baggage piled on my back.
Taking responsibility means stepping back and saying, “It’s time to do something. It’s time to get help.”
The opposite of taking responsibility is sitting on your couch chain smoking and slamming eight bottles of hard cider while marinating in the emotional cesspool that is your brain. Oh, and Facebook.
YOU have to intervene. You. The person that’s struggling to find air time inside that messy brain. And you really cannot do that if you spend all your time wallowing in emotions.
Step back.
Leave your emotions over there in the corner to do their thing while the real you assess what is going on.
Once you do that, you’ve taken the first step towards disassociating with your emotions and recognizing that YOU are not all these raggedy feelings any more than you are an itch on your foot.
So what are you going to do about that?
That’s where counseling and recovery work come into play.
3. Work On Understanding Yourself Better
Therapy is a fabulous way to work on the ability to step outside of your emotions in order to create new ways of understanding and dealing with them.
You need to find support systems and teachers who can help you learn to recognize when you are headed for an emotional spiral and give you the tools to reverse course.
If you want to get out of this cycle of constantly being led by your emotions, then you have to be willing to learn how and do the work.
Wanting, alone, won’t cut it. In fact, it’s another way of falling back into the same old emotional trap where your feelings dictate everything you do with your life.
I used to “want” to not feel so bad and actually love myself for real. But I couldn’t force it (though I certainly tried).
It wasn’t like I could just decide to feel better or treat myself with kindness. That “wanting” was all heart and no head. It took on a life of its own. It became another form of craving.
I refused to take action or open myself up to somebody who could teach me how to do it. So I continued to function from a place of feeling.
I WANT to be sober, but it’s not working. It’s hard. I don’t like it. I’m sad, miserable, depressed, scared every single day. That’s my entire life.
But here’s the thing – it didn’t have to be. And I didn’t need to have all the answers to fix it. I just had to be willing to listen to someone who did – to say, “You know what? I can’t do this on my own.”
Reframing EVERYTHING.
A friend of mine who is in recovery and works with people in treatment said something about getting sober that I’ll never forget. “You have to be done with it.”
Maybe that doesn’t sound revolutionary, but for anyone who has struggled with addiction you know that it is.
I was never done with it. Not really.
Sure, I talked a big game, but it was mostly bullshit. In the back of my mind, I was just biding my time until I could go drink or smoke again. Even if I said I was quitting, I knew deep down I wasn’t.
If you’re still playing that game with yourself, you will likely wind up in the same vicious relapse cycle I participated in for the better part of a decade.
You have to pull the trigger.
Either you’re done or you’re not. Either you’re doing this, or you’re not. Once you decide, then you can change. You don’t have to know how to quit drinking, but you have to be willing to do whatever it takes to get there.
That means going to therapy, or AA, or some other place you don’t want to be and saying, “I’m going to stay here and keep coming back because I can’t deal with failing at this anymore.”
And then watch your world crack open.
Great article. Your thoughts and the spectrum of information you provide on alcoholism and sobriety is immensely helpful!
Thank you, John!
What do you mean when you end the article with “and then watch your world crack open”? In my experience with counseling it opens old wounds with the intent of processing thru them. But doesn’t that make you more vulnerable? I do agree that once you’ve worked passed the issue you are better but the process to get there can be excruciating. So what exactly do you mean? Cracking open old wounds? Or cracking open a NEW life?
Congrats on three years sober, first and foremost. That’s a huge deal. Does it still shock you? Mine does me. As bad as it was for me… And it was very bad… That I’m no longer living that way blows my mind. I never thought I’d get out of it. I had one year on June 1st.
I didn’t come here intending to be contrary. I don’t remember why I clicked over to this to be honest. It’s my first time here reading your work. Oh that’s right…Pinterest. The title intrigued me. I was curious if your mindset and mine were similar.
I’m just curious: so you are saying addiction -alcoholism specifically – is a choice? I don’t think you actually came out and said those words but you said:
“One day, I just decided to give up the fight.
I felt it in my entire body that things needed to change. No more waiting till tomorrow, or the next day, or next week to start. It has to be now. ”
I could be wrong. But that reads to me that you’re saying you just chose to stop so you stopped.
Yes the pain of caving is excruciating. But the disease of addiction doesn’t care about that or even stop to consider the option. You’re drinking before there’s even a chance to consider how caving will make me feel. That’s sort of the definition of addiction.
Same with anxiety. I struggle with debilitating anxiety. If I could just tell myself to channel it into excitement instead, I would. You make it sound easy when it’s not.
Again, perhaps I’ve misread. The reason I am asking is because I’m obviously an advocate for the science and medicine behind the disease of alcoholism and no that doesn’t make me a victim or excuse one horrible thing I’ve done. What it does is allow for a diagnosis and treatment plan.
I write about my experience as well, because it’s important to remove the stigma still attached to addicts and alcoholics. As long as there is a belief that it’s a choice, and we can just stop when we “really want to”, that stigma will live on.
So I’m just respectfully asking exactly what message you’re sending.
Thanks for sharing your story, congrats again. Well done.
Hi! Thank you for this. I agree with you 100%. It is NOT a choice. Me deciding to give up the fight was in reference to fighting with myself over whether or not I was an alcoholic/had an addiction problem. Once I did that, I was able to begin the actual work of sobriety. I finally just gave in to the fact that I was never going to have a healthy relationship with alcohol. That part of my life had to be done if I was actually serious about living better. It wasn’t until I made that mental shift that I was able to be successful.
“That’s what I had to give up — the hope that I would ever drink normally again.”
That is very well said and I hope a lot of people who may be struggling with the same issue see this because that’s a hard distinction to make when you’re addicted, still using/drinking. I wish I had seen that a year or two ago. It’s that very thought – this time I’ll just have a couple and then stop- that keeps the cycle going and worsening.
I’m sorry I didn’t get that message from the original post when perhaps I should have. Im really happy I found your blog. You have powerful things to say that can help people.
This…
“I WANT to be sober, but it’s not working. It’s hard. I don’t like it. I’m sad, miserable, depressed, scared every single day. That’s my entire life. ”
Yes. That was my life too. And I have no doubt it’s where countless others are right now too. It’s not easy to open up that part of yourself and I imagine a lot of why you do this is because you remember that feeling well and want to help people not feel that way anymore. Because it will drain you of your will to live. So thank you. What you’re doing here is important.
Thank you Maria! And thank you for helping me to take a second look at that article. It DID need clarification and revision.
Your right the ah ha moment was when the guilt, disappoint and anxiety in myself was stronger than my craving. Many people want there to be one defining moment that does it but for me it was a series of several months of just being over myself(who I was drunk and hungover) that did it..Thank you! Great article glad I found this site!
It’s so funny you say that because I think for years, I was waiting for one Hollywood esque defining moment to do it for me and it never came. I’m glad you’re here!