Empowered sobriety is possible. These are 10 tools that help me be a strong, peaceful former alcoholic
I’ve been sober for almost 8 years.
I didn’t admit powerlessness or surrender to a higher power
I didn’t follow the 12 Steps or go to meetings
I don’t call myself an alcoholic
I’ve had some HUGE challenges. But I’ve never struggled to maintain my sobriety.
Want to know how?
Read on
I learned to breathe.
Yes, I know we are born knowing how to breathe.
But are we really breathing?
My Yoga teacher training taught me to slow my breath. To breathe mindfully and consciously.
When you get stressed out, your breath quickens, gets more shallow.
Unless you’re aware, and slow it down, this will keep you stressed.
Slowing the breath helps you manage your responses, and regulate your emotions.
Use your breath to relax mind and body, and all of life becomes easier to deal with.
Use the healing power of writing to release and process my emotions
My Yoga teacher training asked me to go deep into myself. I explored who I am and where I have come from.
As I wrote, I found myself releasing decades of pent up emotions, and making connections between trauma, challenge and heartbreak, and the development of my addiction.
When you write, allowing the words to flow from you, you access the part of yourself that needs to be heard.
The part that is crying out for healing. The part you have been hiding from yourself.
When you start to listen, you can begin to heal.
That process of writing my emotions allowed me to give them space, instead of pushing them aside. Or trying to drown them in an endless flow of wine.
When we try to ignore, push away or reject our emotions, when we don’t give our emotions the space to be heard, it hurts us.
They make themselves known. They show up in addictions. Rage. Physical pain and illness. Mental pain and illness. How we relate to ourselves. How we relate to the people around us.
They hurt all parts of our lives because we are refusing to allow that we are hurt.
When we accept the hurt, and face it, we start to work through it
(disclaimer. I am not saying that this is the only way to process your emotions. You may need professional support to do this. I am just saying that writing helps. Every time.)
Releasing physical tension through Yoga
As well as the breathing, my yoga teacher training gave me a tremendous tool box of other body practices to release tension from my body.
Combined with the breath, these practices untied 40 years of stress knots in my body.
As I breathed and stretched, I released pain in my shoulder from a traumatic labour in 2010.
I let go of the tension I had held in my body from trying not to be seen for 40 years, I felt myself finally truly inhabiting my body.
I’d spent 20 years punishing my body for its existence. Not really caring if I lived or died.
Now, I was finally starting to feel like my body was mine, and it was worth caring for.
When I gave up drinking, I didn’t ‘give up’ straight away.
I knew I didn’t want, or need, to continue to make myself suffer.
I had new coping strategies to deal with my pain and stress. I no longer needed to seek the oblivion of drunkenness.
I didn’t think I wanted to give up drinking. I just didn’t want any more hangovers, shame or blank memories.
So I told myself ‘I’m staying sober tonight’.
Not ‘not drinking’. Staying sober.
I went to bed knowing I’d remember doing it.
I celebrated making it to bed. Putting my pyjamas on instead of crashing out in the clothes I’d worn all day.
I woke in the morning and savoured the memory of getting there. Feeling a ‘normal’ morning mouth, not a mouth that tasted and felt like I’d been licking the carpet in a bar.
No shame. Clear memories. Feeling good.
By the time I decided, 6 weeks later, that I wasn’t ever going to drink again, I already knew that I preferred sober life.
‘Never again’ didn’t feel scary. It felt like the future I wanted.
I focused on a new identity
I don’t call myself an alcoholic. I am a sober person.
When I was an active alcoholic, I would have argued with you all night long about it. I wouldn’t…couldn’t… admit that. Not to you. Not to myself.
I became sober by healing the broken parts of me.
By becoming a person who doesn’t need alcohol. Who is strong even when she feels weak and battered. Who knows that there is no problem I will ever encounter that I will solve by drinking even one glass of wine.
I’m a different person than I was in 2013 when I tried ‘Go Sober for October’ and lasted 3 days.
So why, WHY, would I choose to identify myself by the behaviour and coping strategies I lived by then?
James Clear tells us that we become the person we want to be when we assume the identity of that person.
I play the violin, I am a musician…
I write, I am a writer…
So if I want to be sober. Why would I focus on being an alcoholic?
Holding on to the identity of a sober person is amazingly effective at stopping me from drinking.
If I’m EVER tempted (which I think has happened maybe 4 times in 8 years) I imagine how I’ll feel in the morning, with the hangover, regret and profound disappointment in myself I will feel. I can ask myself “will the couple of hours of drunkenness be worth how I will feel from tomorrow morning?
There’s not yet been a moment when it would be.
So I stay sober. Because that is who I am.
Getting out into nature
I started walking in the hills near my home after my brother died. It became my bereavement therapy, and a deep, abiding love. In my walking boots, in the hills or by the coast, I can get perspective on my life and problems that can be hard to see from anywhere else.
There’s something about being surrounded by nature and wide open spaces that frees your mind of stress, giving you space to resolve problems in a different way.
My recovery began in many ways when I started walking. Although I was still drinking, I would deliberately stay sober on Friday nights so I could walk on Saturday mornings.
So a good 8 years before I stopped drinking, I was already learning that there were better ways to find healing and joy in life.
I created new social circles that didn’t revolve around drinking.
For 20 years, my social life was all about drinking. If we didn’t get drunk or stoned together, we probably weren’t going to stay friends. You would reject me for my drunkenness. I would reject you for being ‘boring’.
I know I am not alone. I think creating a social circle that made my drinking feel normal is a common thing to do. We need to feel accepted by our peers. So of course we surround ourselves with peers who do the things we do.
Giving up drinking quickly highlights the friendships that are actually real. Some people don’t want you to change, They’ll try to keep you where they are. “Go on, just this one, it won’t hurt”… or “but you’ll still drink with me, won’t you?”
The people who made the effort to find new ways to be with me are the ones I’m still friends with. They still drink. I don’t. We’re ok with each other’s lives and choices. And I still enjoy going to gigs, where I dance with wild abandon!
At the same time, I also started to make new friends who didn’t see me as ‘drunk Esther’. I cultivated a new normal. I no longer see excessive drinking around me, and when I do, the people who know me don’t expect, or want, me to participate.
Maybe the most important part?
I had a lot of self loathing and shame around who I was. I think it’s safe to say I had shockingly low self esteem, and a terrible relationship with myself.
An ‘observe your thoughts’ exercise we were given in Yoga teacher training highlighted this to me. I realised that probably 90% of my inner dialogue was raging criticism and bullying of myself.
A regular, almost daily, tirade was ‘I’m such a fucking idiot, I hate being me’. Usually when I couldn’t find my keys!
I mean, yes, it’s annoying to not be able to find my keys. But I asked myself if I’d speak to my child like that, with that level of rage and contempt?
Of course I wouldn’t. So why was I talking to myself like that?
The journey to self-acceptance and compassion is just that… a journey. I screw up OFTEN, and need to come back to self-compassion time after time after time.
But recognizing that I was worthy of it was a significant moment in my recovery. Because I had a lot to be ashamed of. Many catastrophic decisions and actions to regret.
So if I could find myself worthy of my own forgiveness and compassion, so can you. We all deserve that. This moment could be the moment you let go of the past, and move into a happier relationship with yourself.
I discovered the missing piece of the puzzle
I have no doubt that my addiction has its roots in undiagnosed ADHD.
I grew up feeling like I didn’t belong anywhere, that I wasn’t quite right in the world, that nothing I ever did would be good enough, and that I was weird and incomprehensible to most people.
This was the fuel that powered my journey to addiction. Being drunk helped me forget all that. I found my party people, and found the oblivion I needed to escape my self loathing.
Everything that got me there can now be explained by a rudimentary understanding of what ADHD looks like in women and girls.
My diagnosis in 2019 upended everything I thought I had learned about myself in the first 5 years of my recovery. I had to rediscover myself and my past all over again.
Coming as close as it did to the start of the global pandemic, and a major heartbreak just before we went into lockdown, if there was ever going to be a time I hit the fuck it button and threw myself into a vat of wine, it was then.
But I knew I wouldn’t survive that. So I armed myself with knowledge. I binged Tracy Otsuka’s ADHD For Smart Ass Women podcast. I joined her Your ADHD Brain is A-OK training.
And I learned new levels of self-acceptance, self-forgiveness and compassion.
And so here I am, 7 years, 9 months and 8 days sober.
I have come through
- Breakups that tore me apart
- Work and financial anxiety
- Single parent life, including…
- A savage, long-lasting battle with my son’s father
- Some significant health problems my son has to deal with
- Homeschooling
- Brexit
- Watching the world descend into fascism and environmental disaster
- Covid
- And the terminal illness of someone I love very very much
- ….and more!
And not once I have come close to relapse…
No 12 Steps…
No meetings…
No surrender to a higher power…
No powerlessness…
No relapse…
I am sober because I have found the strength in me to be sober
I am sober because I learned new coping strategies, and healed many of the wounds that kept me drunk
I am sober because sobriety is the solution to the problems caused by drinking.
I am sober because I know that drinking will only make things worse.
I am sober because I have evicted the demons.
I am sober because I am a sober person.
