Will sobriety ever feel normal?
When will this get easier? Am I always going to miss alcohol?
These questions used to bounce around my head on repeat.
When you first quit – or you’re thinking about stopping drinking – everything feels so uncertain and overwhelming.
If you’re wondering if alcohol free living can ever just feel normal and lovely, this video will help:
Key points:
The choice to be in permanent recovery (or not!)
If you quit drinking with AA, you will largely be relying on willpower to stay sober. You will need to take things one day at a time, for the rest of your life, to avoid overwhelm. You will remain defined by the thing you no longer do any more.
If that doesn’t sound fun to you, then here’s the good news: you can quit drinking and then move on with your life. You don’t have a disease. Personally, if I wasn’t working in this field, I don’t think I’d even think about alcohol anymore. You couldn’t pay me enough to drink it now!
The hard work is in the early days
It takes effort and focus to change a pattern of behaviour to begin with. You’ve got to unpick the social conditioning we have around alcohol. It’s a very romanticised drug and we’re conditioned to project qualities onto it that it doesn’t have.
If you started a big new job, you’d give yourself 3 months to settle in. It’s the same with sobriety – there’s a steep learning curve to begin with. Your first year of sobriety is full of sober firsts and challenges, but after the first 90 days things do tend to settle down and feel easier.
If you’re still find finding things hard…
If you’ve been sober for a long time but it’s still tough, then you need to look at your thoughts. What beliefs do you have about alcohol? What work are you doing to question the stories about booze that swirl around your brain?
This is exactly the kind of work we cover on my Getting Unstuck course. The class is designed for women who are at the very beginning of their alcohol free journey, but if you’re further along and struggling with your mindset, it would be worth you checking it out here.
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