I first confronted my drinking problem back in 2017. I had been drinking so heavily for so long that my drinking seemed, quite often, to happen independently of me. I didn’t want to drink the way I did.
I thought about drinking all the time. I promised myself so many times that I wasn’t going to drink that day. Almost every single morning I looked in the mirror and promised the tired, hungover woman staring back at me that I was stopping for good RIGHT NOW.
Somehow, though, that promise had faded well into the background by 5 pm.
The truth is that my drinking was the equivalent of a runaway train. The brakes had failed a long time ago, and the weight of the habit had kept it rolling downhill for so long that it was carrying on at a terrifying speed. I knew I needed to stop it, but I had no idea how to do that.
After a very embarrassing display on Christmas of 2016, I told my family I had decided on a quit date of 1/1/2017, and when that day came, I quit.
For about a week, anyway.
Then I decided that everything would be fine as long as I only had one beer a day.
Since I told everyone I had quit though, I couldn’t very well let my roommate catch me drinking, so I hid the beer in the back of my closet and had my one, or, well, maybe two…or just three…eh, may as well finish the six-pack…alone in my room in the evenings. That lasted for a little more than two weeks until I lost control and got blackout drunk, got caught, and had to embarrassingly start all over again. So I quit again…for about a week. Then I decided that everything would be fine as long as I only had one beer a day. I’ll bet you can guess what happened next.
This pattern, with some slight variations, went on for a little over two years. I don’t think there are words to express how frustrated and angry I was with myself during that time. All I wanted to do was quit drinking, but I couldn’t. Not for any real length of time, anyway. I was ashamed of myself and embarrassed – not only by the situation but also by my behavior. I pushed people out of my life because it was easier to do that than it was to continue to live with the feeling of continually disappointing them, but of course, the isolation just gave me an excuse to drink more.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that all the stopping and starting, while frustrating, was also serving a purpose: it was slowing down that drinking momentum.
Of course, I was struggling to stop and stay stopped. I had been drinking excessively for most of my adult life. Alcohol was my safety blanket, my coping mechanism for absolutely everything. I didn’t have the tools I needed to maintain an Alcohol-Free lifestyle because I had never developed them. All those sober stints, short though they may have been, were allowing me to do just that. The runaway train had entered new country. Rather than barreling unchecked down a mountainside, it was encountering uphill stretches. The train was starting to slow down.
On February 16, 2019, I had what I thought was going to be my last drink ever. I felt good about being sober. I wasn’t struggling the way I had on previous attempts. I stopped, and I stayed stopped for 55 ½ days – my longest sober stretch in nearly a decade. By quitting over and over and over again, I had managed to slow the train down enough to stop it. Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to protect my quit when faced with a difficult situation, and chose to drink again in April. As soon as the alcohol passed my lips, the train started rolling right back down the mountain.
That experience taught me that I needed to develop tools to get that train on the right track and keep it there. I started going to AA and working with a sponsor, and even though I struggled to maintain sobriety for any real length of time, I was continuing to resist the drinking momentum. After 16 months, I finally got my quit to stick again. This time around, I was lucky enough to find the BOOM community. With the help and support of others on this site, I have been able to develop and utilize the tools I need to protect my quit.
The experience I had on my road to sobriety is the reason I always say that the only trick I know to quit drinking is to never, ever quit quitting. Every quit, no matter how short, puts up resistance against that drinking momentum. It helps bring that train back under control.
If, like me, your drinking is barreling down a mountainside at terrifying speeds, then it might take you a while to slow that train down enough to stop it. That’s not an excuse to stop trying, but it is a reason to take it easy on yourself. If you slip, get back up and try again. Each and every day you manage to avoid drinking, you are putting the breaks on. You are telling Snidely that you aren’t going to take his crap anymore. You are getting closer to your goal of not only getting, but staying, Alcohol-Free. So stick with it. You can do it. We’re here to help.
The ultimate idea behind Sober Momentum is that you get to a place where your sobriety chugs along on its own. It has its own weight, its own force, and its own drive. Just as my drinking seemed to happen independently of me, sober momentum allowed my sobriety to happen independently of me – at least some of the time.
The idea that my sobriety could ever just coast along without constant attention seemed, if not impossible, then at the very least improbable to me. In all of my previous experiences with an Alcohol-Free life, my mind was as consumed with thoughts of sobriety as it had been by thoughts of alcohol. Most of the time my thoughts bounced back and forth between alcohol and sobriety all day long – a constant game of ping pong with no winner in sight
Early on, I had to think about my sobriety, because I had to keep my focus on maintaining it. There was no other choice. Every thought I had was in some way connected to the idea that I was not drinking. I would think, “How do I tackle this task (while sober)?” or “How do I deal with this feeling (and stay sober)?” I got frustrated a lot because it seemed like my life was a never-ending Sobriety Plan. In my AA days, I had heard several people espouse that “It gets easier.” Later on, I also read the same thing in posts on BOOM, but I couldn’t imagine Life As A Sobriety Plan ever arriving at a place I would come to think of as “easy.”
But when I was around six months sober, something interesting started to happen: I would get through most of my day and realize that I hadn’t thought about alcohol at all. Not only that, but because I hadn’t thought about alcohol, I hadn’t thought about sobriety, either. I would be driving home from work or putting laundry in the dryer, and it would just hit me: I have not thought about this at all today!! Then I would go straight to BOOM and post about it.
As time went on, this happened more and more frequently. Somewhere around nine months or a year after I quit drinking, it started to feel normal for me to not think about alcohol and/or sobriety all the time. I was no longer surprised when I realized that I hadn’t thought about it all day, because it was just the way things were. My sobriety had finally gained momentum of its own.
This doesn’t mean that I never think about alcohol or sobriety anymore. I do. Once in a while, particularly in HALT situations, the idea to drink will pop into my head. That’s when I need to think about my sober tools and what to do to move through the feeling. I also try to take some time every now and again to just check in with my sober self. How am I feeling? How appealing does a drink sound? Is there anything challenging me that I feel is a danger to my sobriety? Depending on the answer to those questions, I make adjustments. Most days, though, I just live my life.
The best thing about finally getting to this place is feeling like I have the emotional bandwidth to focus on other things. I made a pretty big mess out of my life during the last few years of my drinking career, and even though I have picked up most of the smaller pieces in the last 19 months, there is still some pretty heavy lifting to do. Now that I’ve got my AF legs carrying me along without much thought, I feel like I might actually be able to get started on some of it.
To me, this is what Sober Momentum is all about. It has taken me a long time to get here, and there were a lot of feelings of frustration along the way. My inner toddler was constantly whining, “Are we there yet?” My inner grownup was no less impatient, but at least she is less inclined toward temper tantrums.
It is such a relief to be able to tell both of them, “Yep! We sure are!”
MORE BY THIS AUTHOR :
The Art of Living Sober is a Skill that Takes Practice
Trading the Drama of Drink for Serenity
WHO ARE WE?
Online Community Support to Stop Drinking – BOOM!
If you’re “sober curious” …If you are drinking too much too often and want to stop or take a break… Talk to Us. We are an independent, anonymous and private community who share resources, support and talk it through every day. It helps to have a community behind you in a world where alcohol is the only addictive drug that people will question you for NOT using
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