How I FINALLY got 60 days (and kept going)

My collection of 12-step meeting chips includes dozens of 30-day chips because I relapsed so often over the course of a year and a half.   I always told myself that if I could make it to sixty days I would be free, but I just couldn’t do it.  Something always happened and I fell back into the only pattern I knew – that of severe addiction.   When I finally took my last drink and checked into detox for the third and final time, I needed medical assistance to get through it.  My body had become dependent on alcohol to the point that seizures and death were a real possibility.  The detox facility I was admitted to had me on some sort of benzo and an anti-seizure medication to help my body handle the detox process.  Even with this, it was a rough road.   At first, I couldn’t even keep water down.  Then gradually, I was able to keep electrolyte solution down, and finally little bits of food after a couple days.   I pretty much spent all day in bed, only getting up to get some sort of carbohydrate-laden food from the cafeteria and then vomit it back up.  I also didn’t sleep for three nights – I was up for 4 days straight.  I was an emotional wreck, so being forced to stay up that long and just dwell in my emotional quagmire without any sort of numbing was torture.  I felt very acutely every second of those four days. 

When I was discharged from detox, I went straight into a sober living house.  It was such a low point for me – going from Manhattan attorney to needing financial assistance from my family to pay for rent at a sober living facility.  And I couldn’t go back to where I had been living because my fiancée was also in recovery and needed time to get his shit together too. (A post about relationships in recovery is in the works, so stay tuned.  But if you like a good spoiler alert, we will be celebrating our seventh anniversary soon – both of us continuously sober the whole time.)   At the beginning, however, I was in a sober living house, pretty much isolated from everyone.  If you had asked me at the time, it was the LAST thing I wanted.  I was pretty pissed to be there, to be honest, but it was my last chance.  The only thing between me and living on the streets – that’s how close I came.  My family was done with me. Now, coming up on eight years later, I will tell you it was exactly what I needed and the magic ingredient that helped me to get and stay happily and gratefully sober.   I was in sober living for six months.  It was an extremely difficult six months, but I am grateful for it.  It was so far outside of my previous routines and behaviors that it helped me learn new, more positive ones.   For example, one of my favorite things to do when I was deeply in addiction was to get good and drunk and watch movies or binge watch a show alone.  I called it my “me time.”   How pathetic, looking back on it.  Alone and drunk, escaping reality completely because I couldn’t handle it.  At the sober house I could still watch movies, but I had to do it with the other women and substitute sweets and popcorn for alcohol.  There was no escape, just the entertainment value of the movie itself. It was very uncomfortable at first, but getting used to new paradigms before I was living on my own again was critical. 

In addition, the sober house was right next to a 12-step club, so they had meetings all day, every day, from 6am to 10pm.   I know some people get and stay sober without meetings, but for me they were essential.  Being in such proximity to meetings, I was able to get to a meeting and straighten my head out whenever I had a craving.  My addiction voice had a way of minimizing the detrimental effect that drinking had on my life, but when I went to meetings reality was able to take center stage again. If I went too long without a meeting, then my addiction voice would take over and a relapse would happen - addiction is a master at minimizing destruction and justifying poor choices. This is one of the main reasons I have so many 30-day chips.

Meetings also helped me build a new social network, since I had alienated pretty much everyone in my life and needed to start completely over.  I think it’s fairly common in early sobriety, but I felt like I had done such awful things no one could ever relate to me.  Again, that evil addiction voice told me to run away and hide in alcohol because I was such a terrible person no one would ever want to be around me. I was so wrong!  Meetings helped me meet people with long-term sobriety who had once been as low as I had been, and who had done some pretty awful things as well.   It was very beneficial for me to see that recovery from the emotional toll of extreme shame was possible, even if I wasn’t there yet.

Keeping busy was also key, so in the very early days I used to schedule each day the day before, so I was never left with free time.  At the very least, idleness would lead me to spend too much time in my own head, and that was dangerous (still is, actually!).   One of my favorite sobriety sayings is “Your mind is like a dangerous neighborhood – you should never go there alone.”   At worst, free time would allow my addiction voice to gain hold again. So I would plan my days.  I started out by going to meetings all the time to fill up my time.  I also went on a ton of walks when I didn’t have anything else to do.  Then I managed to get a freelance job by leveraging a contact from many years previous when I was still a reliable employee. That helped a lot with keeping me busy, but also helped my confidence slowly start to rise.   And for the first time in my life, I prioritized my health over a job, so I only accepted a job that would allow me to continue going to meetings and do my recovery work.  I also started socializing with other women in recovery.   This was hard for me because I am a stage 5 introvert, but it was admittedly very nice being around people who knew what I was going through. 

Once I got out of the sober house, I kept working with a sponsor and I very purposely avoided my old routines and behaviors.  I shopped in different stores, watched new shows, and found new hobbies.  Socializing with anyone from my “old life” was off-limits for me.  I found that even just doing the same necessary things, but in a new way, helped me avoid familiar but detrimental patterns.   Finding new people, places, and things was how I spent all my time outside of recovery work.  For all of my family members who were tired of hearing “I’m sorry,” seeing me engage in all new patterns was encouraging and went a lot further toward rebuilding trust than just the words. 

Home improvement projects became a new hobby in sobriety, and over the years I have taught myself to tile, drywall, texture, tear down walls, and all kinds of things I never would have dreamed of before.   I get a lot of pleasure working to add positive changes to my world because for so long I was such a negative force.  I feel like I have a deficit to make up to the world, and I like making things prettier and people happier.  It helps me justify forgiving myself.  I also like polishing rocks because it allows me to take something ordinary and make it beautiful.   That’s kind of how I view recovery as well – we’re all just ordinary (and in my case, ugly) rocks until we go through the metamorphosis of recovery and become beautiful. 

The focus for me was to find new and healthy activities and pursue them with the same amount of energy that I had once devoted to my addiction.  Having the freedom to put my energy where I thought it should go was very freeing for me.  I spent many, many years pursuing the things other people thought should be important to me, because I thought this was the only way to gain approval.   The result was a very shiny and successful exterior and a rotten, miserable interior.  My previous life was one that I needed to escape from, and I did so at every opportunity until I was completely lost to addiction.  Recovery taught me to ignore outside noise and find things that bring me joy.   Of course, I had to level up and handle my responsibilities as well – recovery is not a wonderland.   Recovery is devotion and hard work and a substantial amount of pain and discomfort.  But because I gave it everything I had, I was able to build a life that I didn't need to escape from.  I had tried many, many times before to keep my old jobs, friends, habits, and activities.  Each of these attempts ended in relapse, and I found this approach ineffective.   As painful as it was, I needed to scrap my old life and start over because drinking had facilitated the entire charade.  I’m sure not everyone needs to resort to such measures, but every time I tried a less drastic approach it failed.