4 Tips for Super Sobriety

Today we have a Guest Post!

4 Tips For Super Sobriety

In the early days of recovery, hanging onto your sobriety is pretty much the main priority in your life. But  in order to be sober and happy, you have to make an effort to grow as a person. Here are 4 elements that you can work on to ensure you have super-sobriety. Doing the following things will help you grow stronger and happier in your recovery.

Learn To Let Go

Addiction is an disease of stuckness. We get stuck in the cycle of using drink or drugs, and we also get stuck with our moods, grievances and resentments. Recovering addicts can not afford to become too stressed out, because stress makes relapse more likely. The world will always be full of adverse experiences. We have to learn to let go of them, so they don't waste our energy or make us stressed.

Nest time you're fretting over a gossiping friend, your lost car keys or missing out on promotion, put things in perspective. Realise how you're only harming yourself by getting worked up over small things. Wouldn't it feel more freeing to forgive, learn your lesson, and move on? Learning to look at things differently can help you to let go more easily.

Free Yourself From Judgement

One of the reasons we suffer in life is because we're too concerned with looking outwards and worrying about the rest of the world. We compare ourselves to others and worry that we'll come up short, or we do the opposite and think critically of others and the way they live their lives.

Wouldn't it be freeing to stop judging yourself by external standards, instead choosing only to improve yourself day by day. And how liberating to stop judging others, and just accept them for the way they are. We can't change other people anyway, so we should focus our energy on just being the best that we personally can be.

Sit With Your Stuff

When people are in active addiction, what they are basically doing is trying to block out unpleasant feelings. Even if you've stopped using drink or drugs to mask or change your mood, often you may still be doing things to alter the way you feel. Recovering addicts typically cross-addict to other things, using work, caffeine, sugar or sex as new ways of fighting their feelings.

There's nothing wrong with soothing or distracting yourself when you're hurting sometimes, but you become a much stronger person if you can learn to "sit" with some of that pain without doing anything to assuage it. When things are hard, see if you can just sit still and accept it, without needing to turn to other substances or distractions. Keep yourself safe by starting with only slightly unpleasant feelings until you get stronger.

Feed Your Soul

In the early days of recovery, we usually play it safe and stay within fellowship and recovery groups. That's a really useful approach when you're newly sober, but it can limit you a lot later on. Never moving outside of recovery circles means that you may never find out what really makes you tick and gives you a sense of meaning in the world.

In order to lead a fulfilling life you have to find out what makes you happy, what your values are, and how you can contribute to the world in a way that makes you feel great. Some find joy in helping others, or find fulfilment down a spiritual path, while others discover that they really connect with the world when they're being creative.

Sobriety is just the start of your new life. You must learn to feed your soul with what it needs, too. Move beyond the limits of recovery-focused activities to find out what will fulfil you and set your soul on fire. If you find something that fulfils your deepest needs, it'll be so much easier to be sober and happy.

About the Author: Beth Burgess is a solution-focused therapist and coach specialising in addiction recovery. She is the author of two books on addiction: “The Recovery Formula: An Addict’s Guide to getting Clean and Sober Forever” and “The Happy Addict: How to be Happy in Recovery from Alcoholism or Drug Addiction.” Beth specialises in Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, Mindfulness, Recovery Coaching, and NLP — and works with clients privately in London, and internationally via Skype.

Rethinking the Hustle

Today we have a guest post by Tim Powers...

Rethinking the Hustle

Introspection is always an excellent gift to have when you look back through the past chapters in your life and gauge your evolution as a human being. This is especially true for the recovering addict because for the addict, turning the pages of past chapters is peeling back those old layers to get to the mechanisms of what made us tick at that point in time.  We understand how the amalgamation of the experiences and events of our past helped create that addict archetype.  Ultimately, as we page forward in our personal histories that archetype start to rust and give way because we finally see how we were destroying ourselves with our true soul.

In looking back on those poisoned years, there are certain revelations that cause a spark to my memory.  The clearest revelations are the most obvious: I became an individual that I swore that I never be.  My view of addicts were shaped by countless Afterschool Specials of my youth, as well as personal experiences with friends whose parent or other family member was an addict.  Those experiences cemented by resolve to run a different path away from vice and ruin.

What I found, however, was that fact seemed to trace a huge arc back towards the person I swore that I wouldn’t be.  That gradual turn was fueled by feelings in insecurity and a deep-seated desire to fit in and be accepted, even if those feelings were superficial.  I slowly become that character: cunning, manipulative and darkly chameleonic.   In the broadest of strokes, I became the villain pure and simple.

Other revelations, however, were somewhat more difficult to put into words that would be easily understood.  That difficulty wasn’t borne from synthesizing complex visceral emotions into a common denominator.  The difficulty laid in the concept itself because when I would verbalize it people would give me a sideways glance and huge question marks popped up in their thought bubbles.  That revelation was this…..As an addict, I was goal-oriented and focused.

On the surface, that last statement sounds like it comes out of left field.  I will admit, that at first glance that statement rubs against the grain of what it normally hypothesized in the world of the addict.  If you take a step back and use that introspective lens to study the mechanisms and motives behind the thoughts and actions of the addict, it does make sense.  The addict is a goal-oriented creature, but the outcomes we seek and put energy towards is different from what others may strive for to obtain.

For the addict, our definition of what normal is different from what…well…normal people think of what is normal.  For normal people, goals may include buying a house in the suburbs with the white picket fence and having a beautiful trophy spouse, 2.3 kids and a dog.  In other cases it may be going to college and studying your ass off to land that dream job.  I may be simplifying things here, but in order to get what we want we set goals, put plans into motion in order to achieve these goals all in order to achieve happiness, freedom and to claim a piece of that proverbial American pie for ourselves.

For the addict, the underlying mechanisms of achieving goals are the same but the energies put behind those mechanisms are used to achieve different ends.  Looking back on my experiences I thought about what I went through to get booze with no money in my bank account and no job to support myself.  I would sell things to get money, not to pay bills or buy clothes to wear to job interviews, but to buy booze.  I would manipulate my parents to give me money, not to pay my rent, but to buy booze.  I would play one person off of another and cause discord, all in the matter of keeping up appearances that things were alright

Whether I thought about it at the time, I was running my hustle on family, friends and even complete strangers in order to get what I needed in order to satisfy those deepest wants and desires.  An addict may not be able to verbalize a concrete definition of what a hustle is, but they can demonstrate the hustle with broad brushstrokes.  As an addict, we can also create the hustle on the fly and improvise like a jazz musician when situations change or when Plans A, B, and C fail.  You come to realize that the energy is takes to create and maintain a hustle is enormous and very focused—it just so happens that instead of being productive it is geared towards mischievous and sometimes downright devious ends.

In recovery, we are basically retraining ourselves to think, act and conduct ourselves in constructive and healthy ways.  In reality, the art of the hustle doesn’t necessarily disappear—it gets revamped in order to fit into the new, sober mindset and philosophies that have been created and put into motion.  You can think of the hustle as an animal like a monkey, a lion or another creature that has the ability to be trained.  

In addiction, the hustle was used to keep you on a stepwise path from being thrown on the street, dope sick, hungover, in jail or being disowned and thrown to the wolves.  In recovery, the hustle is retooled and that stepwise path points toward growth in the soul and conscience and as a human being.   It is about creating something lasting and genuine.  Ultimately it is about creating a legacy for yourself that you can hang your hat on and can provide inspiration for others to follow.

Tim Powers – bald, tattooed, a business professional by day and rocker by night. Sober by the grace of God since the 8th of May in the year of our Lord 2003. Sharing my stories and myself in order to pay it forward. You can follow me on Twitter @tpowersbass42

Lisa M. Hann is a freelance writer and author who specializes in addiction recovery. She holds a B.A. in Journalism from Temple University. She resides in New Jersey with her son. She has been sober since 2010 and is a Caron PA alum. She is the author of "How to Have Fun in Recovery" and "365 Ways to Have Fun Sober" (available in the Kindle store)

Accomplishing Your Goals

I used to have a grand picture in my mind of what my sobriety would look like. I imagined myself as successful and happy, the exact opposite of my life on drugs. It took a while to realize that none of my dreams will come true just because I’m sober. Sobriety won’t make me happy or successful. In sobriety I can just as easily be unsuccessful and unhappy. For a while, I was.

Drugs and alcohol prevent us from making our dreams come true. It’s only possible to accomplish our goals without drugs and alcohol dragging us down, but it’s not a certainty. Hard work and dedication are still necessary. You can only get what you want if you try as hard as you can to get it. I believe that everyone in sobriety is capable of accomplishing their goals, and it saddens me to see people who don’t believe it or who don’t understand what it takes.

“One step at a time” was the most helpful piece of advice for me. My goals themselves seemed unreachable until I broke them down, step-by-step, and started at the beginning, a little at a time. What is your goal? What are you dreams? Start today by making a roadmap for reaching them. What is your “Step One?” Start there.

I finally accomplished my goal of publishing two ebooks. How to Have Fun in Recovery and 365 Ways to Have Fun Sober are finally out there for the world to read. Of course now my next goal is for my ebooks to do well, and getting this far has given me confidence in myself. I’m so proud of myself, and that’s a feeling I haven’t felt in too long. I want everyone else to feel that way, too.

Lisa M. Hann is a freelance writer and author who specializes in addiction recovery. She holds a B.A. in Journalism from Temple University. She resides in New Jersey with her son. She has been sober since 2010 and is a Caron PA alum. She is the author of "How to Have Fun in Recovery" and "365 Ways to Have Fun Sober" (available in the Kindle store).