A psychotherapist shares her story of getting sober
If my journey with drinking was a movie, it’d be the least compelling one you’d ever seen. I was primarily a take it or leave it kind of drinker most of my life. There were months where I wouldn’t drink at all and then years where I would without incident. Quite boring, really.
Where’s the suspense?!
COVID: “Hold my beer.”
Right around the time my son and my postpartum anxiety turned five months old, COVID entered the chat. At that point, I became more of a “take it” kind of drinker.
As in, “I will take anything that can distract me from how it feels to be me right now.”
By the time the lockdown was issued, I was a resident of Struggle City, desperately trying to relocate. I had just started to come out of the mindfuckery of what it felt like to become a mother (another term for this is matrescence, but you go with what works for you) when we got the orders to stay inside indefinitely.
But, but, but, I whined.
Me and the outside world were, but a moment ago, beginning to get acquainted again. I was slightly more rested. I was having hours of the day where I had access to my own thoughts. I was getting back to work. I would be opening my psychotherapy private practice. Slated for February 2020.
It’s truly comical when I look at it now. I had three whole blissful weeks with in-person clients before being locked up in my house again.
That is what the previous five months had already been for me. Lockdown. Isolation.
Now, here I was again. Stuck. Powerless. Taking sessions from my bedroom while I could hear my son crying in the next room. The rest is ubiquitous at this point. Zoom happy hours. Socially distanced walks with a cocktail.
I wasn’t drinking to oblivion, by any means, but an afternoon drink, sometimes two or three, became as routine as my morning coffee. If questioned about this at the time, I would have said it wasn’t a big deal. I was drinking less than most people. I could always stop when I wanted to. It was just a reward after the hard days.
After all, what would be left if I stopped?
It turns out, me. All of me. But that awareness didn’t come until much later.
Psychotherapist by Day
Being a psychotherapist means I’m often talking with clients at some point about how alcohol shows up in their lives. I’m not an addiction specialist, but it’s important to get a sense if and/or how much it plays a role in clients’ lives. Before their initial session, clients fill out an intake form that asks: “What is your relationship like with alcohol? (e.g., How often do you drink? How much? How do you feel about your behaviors around drinking?)”
This may seem like something I’m not supposed to say as a therapist, but here I go: My clients are constantly teaching me. They don’t mean to, of course, but they do. When they bare their soul to me, I can’t help but be just as honest with myself. Not that it’s a competition, but I would venture to guess I get as much from those sessions as my clients do.
At that point, I had been practicing almost ten years. Over the course of those years, I heard a lot about alcohol. Stories about how it impacts people—those who drink and those who don’t, in equal measure. How even sometimes the lightest drinkers were consumed with angst about this force.
It started to sound eerily similar to how I’d hear clients talk about abusive relationships.
“Well, it’s not that bad.”
“I can’t just end it.”
“It’s just the way things are.”
I started to wonder, “What would bad enough look like for me?”
Then I noticed the little whispers.
The Whispers
“What if you just stopped?”
“Do you want to do this?”
I’d always had these whispers, but I thought they were just my flair for the dramatic. The controlling part of me putting on a show.
During this time, I was also learning more about a modality of therapy that was new to me: Internal Family Systems (IFS). The quick and dirty on IFS:
- We all have multiplicity—meaning, we are more than just one unitary being with singular thoughts and feelings. Instead, we have a system of separate but interconnected parts of ourselves with their own thoughts, feelings, needs, wants, and worries.
- The thoughts and feelings of those parts have no moral meaning about us as people or our character.
- These parts are often young in their understanding and need updating to our current circumstances.
- Parts take on extreme roles when they deem it necessary.
This model helped me realize that what the seemingly loud, controlling part of me wanted most was for me to be free.
She whispered: “Honey, I’m not trying to control you. I’m trying to liberate you. I think you already feel controlled by something that has nothing to do with me.”
That is the thing about whispers of love: they are so easy to ignore. Not until they’re yelling do we engage. We can miss the quiet truths of a whisper.
Yelling, for me, comes from insecurity, powerlessness, and fear. A whisper is confident. A whisper suggests a knowing. “You’ll get it when you’re ready. I’ll be here waiting.”
Over time, I realized the part attached to drinking was also a protector. She thought she was lightening my load. She learned to numb when things were tough so as to not burden others. She didn’t realize there were other ways.
Long before I became sober, I wrote this note. It’s from a lecture by Gabor Maté. He outlined questions he thinks are imperative when exploring addiction.¹ He inquires:
- What does it do for you?
- What qualities does it replace?
- How did you lose these qualities?
It was easy to answer number 1. But numbers 2 and 3 rattled me.
Other than quality sleep, it hadn’t really occurred to me that I’d lost anything. That I could have lost parts of myself.
The Change
While I could stop drinking when I wanted, what I struggled with was keeping myself from starting when I said I wouldn’t. I’d have a little chat with myself on the way to a restaurant or sometimes in the morning. I’d say to myself, “Today, let’s just not drink.”
I thought if I could just break that habit then, with a little bit of time, everything would reset and I could drink sporadically. Except I did that and it did very little for my mental anguish.
In early 2023, I started experimenting more intentionally with drinking less. At first, it was a few weeks stitched together, then a social outing sans alcohol, and all of a sudden months had passed.
I noticed how much less congested my thoughts were when I took alcohol off the table.
The last time I consciously drank was on a trip to Mexico in May 2023.² At that point, I hadn’t had a drink in a month or two. I had known I was going to drink on the trip, but had committed to being sober on our final day there. While I didn’t know it at the time, that would be my quit date.
The After
I didn’t immediately commit to sobriety. That came a few weeks later. My tagline at the end of that trip was: “Weddings and Vacations.”
Even then, I knew that wasn’t my truth. It was the truth I felt everyone else would understand.
Being a therapist has given me many gifts. One that is both a blessing and makes me grit my teeth is when I realize I’m being a hypocrite. Other people didn’t need to understand. I needed to understand. And I did, deeply. Perhaps more than I’d ever understood anything.
As I’m sure you can imagine, being sober has not solved all my problems. They’re all still there.
It has, however, given back access to myself. Slowly, I was able to reclaim that I could be light, joyful, and carefree without alcohol. I know now that has always been in me and always will be. I cannot, however, with alcohol, feel embodied and stay with myself.
With alcohol, I was never going to have all of me. Without it, I can.
I’m a fair-weather fan of most decisions I make. Every place I live. Every relationship I have. Every entree I order. But not here. I wonder, of course, but I’ve never regretted the choice to stop drinking. Not once.
Now that I’m sober, I realize how much life I have in me. There are so many things I want to do and see. Addiction is like that. Whether it’s social media or substances. It’s the thing telling you it’s more important than the life right in front of you. Begging you to play.
What strikes me most is this all happened entirely within me. It was almost imperceptible to those around me. This reminded me that it’s okay if something is just true to me.
I did a thing. Not for anyone else. A thing I didn’t have to do. Just because I knew it was true for me. It’s been the deepest lesson in trusting my little whisper. She knows a thing or two and is ready to share, if I’m willing to listen.
Your turn!
We’d love for you to share your response in the comments:
- What did drinking or using do for you?
- What qualities did it replace?
- How did you lose these qualities?
And, perhaps the most telling question of all:
- What have you regained, remembered, or discovered since getting sober?
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¹Then, at the end, I wrote his working definition of addiction: “any behavior that gives you temporary relief, temporary pleasure, but in the long term causes harm, has some negative consequences and you can’t give it up, despite those negative consequences or if they do, they experience withdrawal or irritability.”
²I was once served without my knowledge about five months into my sobriety.