The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober

by Catherine Gray

As a society, we have a blind spot when it comes to booze. We’ve been brainwashed into believing it’s ace, into following each other like lemmings to the pub, when deep down, we know it’s not. We know it’s bad for us.

But, giving up drinking felt like an enormous loss. A bereavement. I was convinced it brought fun and laughter to my life. I thought, ‘I will never date, dance, party or feel truly relaxed ever again.’

But once you learn the superpower of socializing sober, it never leaves you. And you’ll never want to go back.

how common it is for introverts to drink their way into acting like extroverts, rather than embracing their quieter, more thoughtful selves.

As an incredibly nervous kid, I began to believe that relief resided in bottles.

suffered from Wishful Drinking. Tonight would be the night I cracked it. The night I would have two drinks in the pub,

was scared to sit still. To stay in. To take a long hard look at myself.

people find them entertaining and they get invited to every party. If they feel those “likeable” qualities are dependent upon alcohol, it can be very scary to imagine living without it. It could be a cover for shyness and social unease. Whipping that comfort blanket away could unearth a raft of anxieties.’

It’s a slow, insidious undoing.

For me, each rock bottom was what recovery people call a ‘convincer’. They added fuel to my desire to get sober. Without them, I would never have stopped drinking. They’re pitch-black moments in my life, but they serve a bright purpose in the long-term. It’s because of those blood-chilling moments that I finally scraped together the wherewithal to start swimming as fast as I could for the sober shore.

You’ll find yourself hijacked by feelings that you’re just not used to feeling, because you’re so accustomed to numbing them out.

As Brené Brown sagely says, ‘We can’t selectively numb out emotion. Numb the dark and you numb the light.’

The real world is brighter, louder, rawer and scarier than a carful of hostile clowns. Without your alco-armour you feel utterly naked and vulnerable, awaiting the inevitable attacks from the Big Bad World.

I had to constantly, patiently remind myself why drinking was the worst idea in my world.

In "my" world - not everyones just mine is all that matters

If you drink and don’t tell anyone about it, you will find yourself doing it again. And again. Relapses grow in the dark.

They say to protect your newborn sobriety as you would a newborn baby. A simile that helped me many a time. This led me to the idea of self-parenting. In drinking, I was an abusive parent to myself.

I had to relearn, ever so slowly, how to become a soothing parent rather than an abusive one.

Beginning to trust myself to take care of myself has been a really amazing process. I’ve stopped eyeing myself suspiciously, as a toddler would an unpredictable parent, and started folding into myself with relief.

Addiction is all about seeking external relief from mental pain; whether you use cocaine, online poker, shopping, sex, razors, cake or exercise. Addictions are all the same ultimately. You seek to treat an internal pain with an external substance or activity. You pursue a once-pleasurable activity to the point of self-sabotage.

For me, I had to stop hating myself and start liking myself in order to find sobriety. I had to replace self-loathing with self-soothing. I had to start to believe that I was worth something. That I deserved better than drinking.

truly believe that most addicted drinkers, especially women, don’t need to shrink to become the ‘right size’. They actually need to grow. ‘I think dependent drinkers have enough self-loathing anyway,’ says Dr Julia Lewis, a consultant addiction psychiatrist for Alcohol Concern. ‘Most of them actually need a good dose of compassion.’

When I look to other people to fill me up, as if I’m some kind of empty vessel, I make myself helpless. Sitting there and waiting for other people to gift me with happiness; such a waste of time.

Spending some of the money rewarding myself helped. Carrot, rather than stick. Pretty, life-sweetening treats helped me associate sobriety with gladness, rather than denial.

This approach to recovery is called ‘Addictive Voice Recognition Therapy’, or AVRT. It was first developed by the founder of Rational Recovery, Jack Trimpey, in 1986. He defines the Addictive Voice (what he calls the AV) as ‘any thinking that supports or suggests the possible future use of alcohol or other drugs’. Trimpey carried out a study of 250 people and found that AVRT had a 65 per cent success rate.

I finally got to a headspace whereby I realized that I deserved not to drink. I deserved not to have a life of 3am nausea and unreliability and zero money and bloodshot eyes. I deserved better.

Quote to keep

I needed to raise my self-esteem to rise above the desire to drink.

Alcohol ups our social stamina. Without it, parties are louder, brighter, more tiring. We fade more quickly. And we get tired at the normal time.

Extrovert brain blood flow is directed to the regions of the brain concerned with interpreting sensory data – making sense of the outside world. Whereas introvert brain blood flow is more pronounced to the frontal lobe, which deals with the internal processes of decision-making, memory, solving problems – our inner landscape.

Introverts often appear to be daydreaming, but that’s because their internal landscape is a buzzy metropolis, which takes up a lot of their energy. They’re not zoned out, they’re just attending to their inner landscape. Introverts turn inwards, while extroverts point outwards.

When I was drinking being alone meant the self-loathing set in. I had wanted the distraction of other people, because I didn’t like myself. Sober, I started to love being alone.

Until I was utterly reliant on it for any sort of socializing. When I sobered up, I found that I had to relearn how to relax at parties, how to carry small talk with strangers and how to venture onto a dancefloor

Think of the metaphor of a plug in a socket. Extroverts are the plugs; they get energy from social interaction. They feel electrified by it. Whereas introverts are the sockets; they lose energy while socializing. They may well love it, but it costs them dearly and they need time to recharge afterwards.

‘Expectations are resentments under construction.’

‘The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.’

‘It’s not finding gratitude that matters most; it’s remembering to look in the first place. Remembering to be grateful is a form of emotional intelligence.’ As the brain gets used to seeking out the positives, it becomes more efficient at finding them, he explains.

And some people see positivity as deeply uncool. Shrug it off. They can jog on. The keepers in your life will love your new, shiny, happy attitude.*

Elizabeth Gilbert calls this not-enough grabbiness a ‘wretched allegiance to the notion of scarcity’ in her marvellous book, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear.

Thrusting yourself into drinking situations is not what builds this muscle up. I’m not suggesting you constantly hang out in bars. It’s all about paying attention to your cravings, triggers and romanticizing. Having misty-eyed visions of enjoying a gin and tonic in a beer garden as spring begins to chirp and bloom? You’re going to need to dismantle that fantasy before you sit in a beer garden. Fantasies of being able to moderate? Get down and give me 20 examples of when you tried moderation and utterly, irrevocably failed. It’s a mental muscle which is steeled by fighting fantasies with reality.

EIGHT MONTHS SOBER I’ve realized that I’ve stopped clocking who around me in the restaurant is drinking and who isn’t. I was like a drinking detective for first six months, I could have recited who had what drink and how many, at any given party. (Professor Plum, in the study with a martini).

A brilliant book has also helped me soothe my pre-party anxiety. The Chimp Paradox by Professor Steve Peters. In a nutshell, he presents a mind model whereby our panicky, irrational, paranoid limbic brain is ‘our chimp’, whereas our logical, rational, fact-driven frontal brain is ‘the human’. ‘Our chimp’ is fastest to react and loves to catastrophize.

On the flipside, I’m going to a big, boozy party this weekend and I’m not remotely nervous about it. No future-tripping at all. I know it will be fun. I’m not catastrophizing. I’m beginning to understand that when I tell myself something is going to be really hard, it turns out to be really hard. Whereas, if I just shelve it and think ‘I will worry about that when I get there’ I never worry about it, because I get there and everything is fine.

Then I realized. Normally I am only around drinking about twice a week, but it’s been in my face (‘try this coffee liqueur everyone…oh’) for the past five nights, constantly from 4pm, and I am knackered.

Hard times in sobriety seem like a wall. But they’re just a cardboard wall. That you have to punch your way through to get to the magical stuff in the next room. I’m really learning that if you just sit with the discomfort and trust it will pass, it always, always does. And then really great times roll in. It’s as if the universe rewards you.

It’s such a thrill now to head out into the night and know that I’m in safe hands. My own. To be able to trust myself, and know that I won’t do anything crazy, or job-threatening, or offensive.

Their opinion was gigantically important to me. I orbited their opinions slavishly, because I had no self-esteem-centre of my own.

Everyone in my life knows that I don’t drink, and they also know why. That makes me feel safe, secure, anchored.

sobriety will inspire respect, more than anything else. Side note: once you stop being ashamed of it yourself. People pick up on the shame, and mirror that, but if you start feeling quietly chuffed, even proud that you don’t booze any more, you’ll find that you’ll get a lot more ‘well dones’

‘When you no longer need approval from others like the air you breathe, the possibilities in life are endless. What an interesting little prison we build from the invisible bricks of other people’s opinions.’ – JACOB N

When you have anxiety, your brain says “alcohol is the solution to that”, because it has worked in the past. With many years of repetition, that sticks, so that the brain then automatically suggests it. Your brain is merely trying to solve your problem.’

Marc Lewis is in agreement. He says that addiction is less of a brain disorder, and more of a ‘cognitive adaptation’.