1.) Life Won’t be Fun Anymore: One of the number one reasons why people are afraid to quit drinking is because we’ve been led to believe by our culture and big alcohol companies that “Life is more fun with alcohol.” Don’t believe the lie. I don’t intend to speak for others, but I have heard from hundreds and hundreds of women, and I think it’s safe to say that there’s a collective agreement among those of us who got sober and stayed sober, that we love our alcohol-free lives. In fact, alcohol was the downer at the party that kept most of us from being fully present in our own lives. I think it’s also safe to say that for many of us, life began when we kicked alcohol to the curb!
The decision to sober up, for most, doesn’t come easy. I quit drinking years ago in the month of June. I remember one of my first thoughts was OMG, how will I have any fun on New Year’s Eve (my birthday) if I don’t drink? That thought process right there told me a whole lot about my relationship with alcohol, but the idea of a night on the town without drinking was unthinkable. Actually, the notion that I would have to live the rest of my life without drinking terrified me. What the hell do people do with themselves if they don’t drink? (hint: we get shit done and find our gifts.) I’m pretty sure that a true social drinker wouldn’t panic and worry about what they might drink six months down the road.
2.) What Will People Think?– What will people think of me if I quit drinking? Will they whisper about me behind my back? Will they think I’m an alcoholic? The word, alcoholic, sounds so low-brow. But here’s the insanity of it all: Did I worry what people thought if I was out in the bar or the club slurring my words? Did I worry about making a scene? Did I care who I might be hurting or that most of my relationships were superficial? Did I think twice about befriending you because after all, you did say your husband dealt coke, right? The only people I hung out with were people who drank like me. If you were someone who sipped on a beer or a glass of wine and then declared that’s enough—well, that seemed ridiculous and we probably wouldn’t be socializing again any time soon.
Once I decided to get sober, the fear of what others would think left me quickly. It dawned on me that no one else could live my life or feel my feelings and if I wanted to get better, I had to stop caring what others thought about me and care more what I thought about myself.
3.) How will I ever relax? I drank to relax, or that’s what I thought, but the truth is that I drank to change the way I felt. I lacked healthy coping skills. My alcoholic mother and rage a-holic father never taught me how to deal with life. People still believe the lie that alcohol helps them relax. Maybe the real truth is that alcohol helps you feel numb and we’ve come to confuse numb with relaxed? The truth is that alcohol disrupts sleep and it’s a depressant. Its main effect is on the central nervous system in the brain. Alcohol, in the long run, causes more anxiety, but most everyone who drinks deludes themselves into believing that it decreases their anxiety when the truth is it makes most situations worse —never mind what alcohol does to our internal organs…
4.) Denial– Denial is a hallmark of the disease. Alcoholism is the only disease that will tell you that you don’t have a problem. It’s akin to standing in the middle of the street in your bathrobe and everyone wants to know why you’re not dressed but you deny you’re wearing a robe and scream at them for not liking your perfectly good dress! Denial is the baffling part about alcoholism. In most cases, the people around us can see that something is amiss long before the alcoholic can admit there’s a problem. When we’re in the throes of our disease, we just don’t see the harm. However, once in recovery, I hear most people say that they knew in their gut that something was wrong, yet they just chose to ignore the small voice that was screaming at them.
5.) False Pride- Millions of people are in recovery. The topic of addiction is ubiquitous in most all media forms, yet, there’s still a shame factor. Here again, I had no shame in acting the fool while I was in my alcoholism, yet heaven forbid I do something good for myself and quit drinking. Suddenly, I cared what people thought—and to stop drinking—well, erroneous thinking had me believe: can there be anything else more embarrassing or humiliating?
I didn’t care that I was floundering in so many areas of my life but because I was relatively young, I still looked pretty good, and had no major consequences; there didn’t seem to be any reason to stop drinking—but deep down, I knew it would catch up with me. In order to recover, I had to swallow my pride and admit that my way was not working. And, the truth is, most people were not thinking about me anyway. They were caught up in their own lives. It was my own self-centeredness that made me think others even cared what I did.
In order to recover, I had to reevaluate most of my relationships. I realized that the people who we’re okay with me not drinking were keepers, and the ones who didn’t like it, well, I had to let them go.
6.) But Everyone Drinks: Our culture has reinforced the twisted thinking that alcohol is necessary. Alcohol ads and pictures of people drinking flood social media, HGTV, Netflix; you name it, you can’t look anywhere or watch anything where people aren’t drinking; let’s not forget that you can’t even shop without running across at least a few wall plaques or tacky tee-shirts with pitiful sayings such as: “Drunk wives matter” and “I make POUR decisions,” yet, we feel bad when we decide we have a drinking problem and can’t participate in the collective madness.
When I look at some of the arguments I made, and now that I’ve been sober and my thinking has been restored, I can see how flimsy my old thinking was. Sure, there were some fun times in my drinking days, but the boozy life started to become a long dark hallway with no end in sight. Recovery changed everything, and I couldn’t be more grateful to be able to live a full life, in the light, and without the chaos or depressing boozy thoughts that used to take root in my mind.
If any of the above thoughts resonate with you…all I can say is that once I gave up the alcohol—the whole trajectory of my life changed—and yours can too if you let it.
Lisa is the author of the multi-award winning book, Raising the Bottom: Mindful Choices in a Drinking Culture. After short stints where she trained polo horses, worked as a flight attendant, hairdresser, and bartender, she revamped her life and settled in as a registered nurse. For the past twenty-nine years has worked with hundreds of women to overcome alcoholism, live better lives and become better parents. She was prompted to write Raising the Bottom when she realized after twenty plus years of working in hospitals, that doctors and traditional healthcare offer few solutions to women with addiction issues. You can start reading for free on Amazon. Follow her on Twitter @LBoucherAuthor and Instagram.