Welcome to the sober and happy podcast where we talk about all things recovery related, how to navigate the challenges that we will face along the way on our journey towards our best lives, and how we can go from living a life of simply just being sober to a life where we are both sober and happy.
By the time you are listening to this episode, I am 12 years sober. My sobriety date is July 6th, 2011. Every year I tend to reflect on not only the past year but also my whole recovery journey.
I do this for a couple of reasons. First, to reflect on whether I have stayed committed to growing and evolving over the last year, and second to appreciate how far I have come. I know I am often critical of not being where I want to be at this current moment and don’t spend enough effort to give myself credit for how far I have actually come, so I find it important to stop, and take time and really remember what things used to be like and how much I have changed over the years.
So buckle up, this is going to be a great episode.
Welcome back. A few quick reminders before getting back to the episode. Our private Facebook group is growing and I am proud to say that the community we are building is exactly what I would have wished for. It is positive, supportive, loving, and active. If you want to come join us, you can find it by going over to facebook.com/groups/soberandhappy.
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OK, now back to the episode.
Usually, I start reflecting on my journey the day before my sobriety birthday because that was the day that I have never had so much doubt about anything in my life. I agreed to go to rehab, but I had very little faith in whether or not I was going to be able to stay sober. I had cold feet so bad, that I considered backing out while sitting in the Detroit airport. I was on the other side of the country, had $20 dollars in my pocket, and was trying to figure out how I could back out of going to rehab. It took a promise from the guy waiting outside to take me to rehab that we could stop at the liquor store on the way to get me in the car. I honestly did not believe that the bottle I bought at the store that evening was going to be the last bottle of liquor I would ever drink.
That brings me to the first lesson learned on my journey. You don’t have to know whether or not you are going to succeed. Just being willing to try is enough to get started.
Doubt still looms over me anytime I am going to try something new. The voice in my head telling me I am not good enough to succeed is still there, but I have a mantra that I use, which is simply “Yeah, but I can still try”.
The second thing I learned in recovery is that you don’t have to get sober for yourself. If you have listened to past episodes, you know that it was a moment that opened my eyes to how much my drinking was destroying my mom that motivated me to try. That was enough to get me to rehab. That was enough to be committed to my recovery when I got out of rehab.
But something happened early in sobriety as I started going to meetings and had person after person telling me I had to get sober for myself or I would certainly relapse. Here is the thing though, I felt so unworthy of anything good in my life, that there was no way I was enough motivation to get sober. And having people tell me that my reason wasn’t good enough really set me back and made me start doubting whether I could stay sober. Luckily, I had one guy pull me aside and tell me “Don’t let anyone tell you your reason to get sober is not good enough”. I am so grateful to that man for telling me that.
I think there definitely are precautions that should be considered when you are getting sober for someone else initially. If you are interested in that, definitely check out episode 2 of this podcast, where I talk about that extensively.
That experience from early sobriety taught me something very valuable, and that it is OK to ask why. When I would hear people tell other people or insist to me that I must get sober for myself, I started asking why they believed that and to explain to me further. What I found is most people that were blindly throwing advice towards me simply were repeating things they heard, and often did not know the deeper meaning behind the advice they were giving.
Most of the advice I was given for things came as one-liners of slogans that get repeated regularly. If you have spent any time in the rooms, you have probably had dozens of “let go and let gods” thrown your way when you are struggling with something. I started asking, OK, how do I practically apply that advice to what I am struggling with.
What I found was for most people that simply meant to them to do nothing and hope everything would magically fall into place. When I first got sober, I had a mountain of debt, a suspended driver's license in two different states, a failure to appear, I hadn’t filed taxes in over a decade, and a resume that had such a bad job history that no one seemed to want to even interview me. I was stressed, and people would just say “let go and let god”. When I would ask them, how do I apply that advice to start fixing the immediate problems I would have, the majority of people would simply tell me some version of “just have faith, it will all work out”.
Here is the thing, Faith alone won’t work out those problems. I needed to take action. Finally, one of the ladies in my home group at the time explained to me “The part you are letting go of is the results you think you need”. She told me that I absolutely needed to be doing everything in my power to fix things, however, when and how they get fixed is what I need to let go of. She used my not getting callbacks for job interviews as an example. She told me to keep applying for jobs every day without expectations of which ones are going to call me back or not call me back. That is the part I had to let go of. Once I finally had someone explain to me how to practically apply a slogan to the problems I was experiencing, everything clicked, and it finally became helpful advice.
After that, I started to ask why more. Not in a challenging or trying to be difficult way, but truly because I was looking for practical solutions or trying to find someone that could explain it to me in a way that made it click in my brain. Well… most of the time, that was the reason. I do have to admit that sometimes I was just annoyed and was being difficult.
Here is the good news, I followed her advice and I finally got a callback for an interview and got the job. It was a step back in my career from the point I was at before I went on my last several-year bender, but it was a job, and I decided to let go of all the doubts I had about where taking a step back was going to lead me and guess what? That job led to some great opportunities for learning new things, which created the path that landed me in my current role at the company I am at now. I am further in my career at this point in my life than I would have likely been if I didn’t decide to let go of those doubts on whether it was a good choice to take it, and just show up every day as the best possible employee I could be.
This brings me to the next huge lesson I have learned in sobriety. When things don’t go my way, that isn’t a necessarily bad thing.
I was a couple of years sober when I heard the parable of the Chinese farmer.
The story goes that there was a Chinese farmer that only had one horse. One day his horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around and told him how unfortunate it is that his horse ran away.
The farmer said, “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.”
The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!”
The farmer again said, “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.”
The following day his only son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “This is horrible, with your son injured there is no way you can harvest your crops”
The farmer responded, “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.”
The next day the Chinese army came through the village and took all the able-bodied young men to go fight with them, all of which died. His son was only spared because of the chain of events that led up to him breaking his leg.
I can’t count how many times in my recovery that things I was certain were the best things happening to me ended up not being that way, and some of the worst moments in my recovery, ended up being blessings.
That doesn’t mean that life is going to stop happening and there are not going to be moments that absolutely suck. Two key lessons I have learned from this. The first is to not make a permanent decision based on a temporary emotion. The second is to look at what you can learn from some of your most challenging times.
If you have dated unsuccessfully in recovery, you will know that when it is good, the feeling is probably the closest I have felt to the early days when the booze worked wonders for me, but when it all comes crashing down, the lows are the closest I have felt to the end of my drinking right before I got sober.
After the first few failed attempts at dating, I convinced myself that I am a great guy, the girls were the problem, and I simply just had bad luck in dating.
The first part about me being a good guy was true, but that didn’t mean I was a good candidate for dating. After yet another failed attempt at dating that followed an eerily similar pattern as the last ones, I finally realized that maybe that isn’t all a coincidence, I took a break from dating and took a real good look at myself.
In that process, I learned that I was still bringing all my insecurities, fears of rejection, and a whole Uhaul full of baggage into each relationship. Which made me needy, constantly looking for reassurance, and completely incapable of actually being myself in a relationship.
I realized that I needed to heal and learn more about myself before trying to date again. But that would have never happened if I hadn’t paused and looked for the lesson from my experiences. I would likely still be stuck in the cycle of bad dating that I was in still blaming it on luck.
This brings me to probably the most important lesson I have learned along the way. Healing takes time, effort, compassion, and patience.
This not only applies to our own healing but the healing of the people who our addictions have affected.
We can’t just try to ignore it and hope that things will fix themselves.
For our own healing, we will have to learn to deal with the emotions that we tried to bury down with our addictions. This is something I am still working on today and likely for many years to come. But it takes commitment. For me, this looks like educating myself about mental health, and finding a really good therapist that I was able to connect with and fully trust.
For others healing, it takes more than just saying we are sorry. I know I had years of saying I am sorry and making well-intentioned promises that I simply did not keep.
We can’t rebuild that trust overnight. We have to show up as our new version of ourselves for a period of time for that trust to be rebuilt. This was frustrating to me, especially since I knew it was different this time. But the reality is, I have told people it was different before, so the only way to prove that wasn’t with my words, but with consistent action, and allowing others to heal and forgive at their own pace.
Now, I saved the best for last. This has been the greatest lesson I have learned in recovery. You are capable of way more than you can even imagine.
I want you to imagine the most amazing version of yourself and the life you are leading as that person.
As great as your imagination could be, you are probably still selling yourself short.
A couple of years ago I was downsizing and getting rid of a lot of things I didn’t need. When I was going through some boxes, I found my workbook from rehab. As I was going through it, I found the exercise they had us do where we listed our 1, 5, and 10-year goals.
I remembered doing that exercise. The first time I did it, I showed one of the addiction counselors, and he handed me a new blank goal sheet and told me to do it again but to think bigger because he knew I was capable of more in life.
The sheet I found in that box was the second version of my goal list. I thought as big as I could possibly go, and listed goals that I didn’t think I would ever be able to accomplish in my life, let alone in 10 years.
I was probably around 8 years sober at the point I found it, and as I looked at the 10-year goals on that list, I realized I blew every single one of them out of the water. This isn’t because I have a massive ability to accomplish things, I simply had no idea at the time what I was capable of. I was basing my future ability based on my past experiences.
We are not our pasts. They are events that happened that we can learn a lot from, but they are not the gauge of who we can become.
If you commit to healing, growing, dreaming, and most importantly trying, I promise you that mountain that you don’t think you can climb at this moment, you will soon find yourself at the top of that mountain enjoying the view.
And from that beautiful view from the top of that mountain, you will see an even bigger mountain. And having climbed the first one, a little voice will come into your head that will say “Maybe I can climb that one too”.
All you have to do is listen to that little voice and I promise you at some point down the road you will realize that you too are capable of way more than you can even imagine.
Thank you for listening to my trip down memory lane this week and I am hoping you are enjoying my podcast. If you are finding it impactful, all I ask is that you share it with one other person you think might also find it impactful.
New episodes come out each Friday, so I look forward to connecting with you next week. And as always, thank you so much for listening, and keep living sober and happy.