I had my last drink 1000 days ago...

Nov 10, 2016
4 min read

These are just five of the things I have learnt...

Addiction is the enemy of truth and authenticity. Free of the poison, for the first time in my life there is alignment between who I would like to be and who I am. I am in control of my thoughts and actions. I am living life on life’s terms, and it is ok, more than ok. I have learnt that it is ok to feel, it is ok to sit with uncomfortable thoughts. It has taken me nearly 50 years but I have learnt that thoughts and feelings are just that, and that they can’t hurt me. I have learnt that talking through anxieties and verbalising complex emotions is as vital to survival as water and oxygen. I have learnt that being who I am is ok. Far from its celebrated qualities as the serum for the bringing forth of repressed truths, alcohol crushes emotional truth. Alcohol is packaged self-indulgence, and when consumed sufficiently and sufficiently regularly it heightens and distorts the consumer’s sense of their own emotions, crowding out capacity for empathy with those around them. The drinker, the serious, drink more days than not and get hammered a few times a week type drinker, has no capacity for meaningful human connection. They live in their own head. They obsess about the next drinking opportunity, and are consumed by the cycle of binge, remorse, shame, make-up, do it again. The more they consume the more they are consumed.
The opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it is connection. The most significant connection I have discovered in the last 1000 days is a deep, complete and living connection with my life partner Pen. It is no accident that the 1000 days coincides with the first 990 days our marriage. At its core, the nourishing part of the connection is our shared belief that we are, each of us, worthwhile individuals, just the way we are. That simple starting point, something previously foreign to us both, has allowed me to free myself of what my therapist refers to as the “I’m not ok” head space and the need to “people please” that comes from that perpetual self-dissatisfaction.There is no need to drink away pain because I am not in pain.Good things happen, bad things happen, and sometimes nothing happens.They are all ok because I am ok, and we are ok.

True sobriety requires authenticity, and authenticity is confronting. I have discovered too that there is a darker flip side of this personal revelation, this altered view of myself as I relate to those around me. Not everyone likes it, and in a large family like mine with very well established modes of operating, one family member stepping out of character can be confronting and disruptive. When the person who has always been the barely tolerated ‘problem’, who should cower in shame because of their drunken shambles of a life, all of a sudden is a clear headed, sane guy, other family members can find it hard to adjust. I have learnt, some people will be so confronted and discomforted by the changed dynamic that they will, sub-consciously, and in my experience, even deliberately, seek to forever remind you of your sins and hang on to the old you with all their might.
Drunks are often loud, but sobriety can be surprisingly silent. I am increasingly noticing that sobriety is not to be mentioned. There is an old saying, that success has many fathers and failure is an orphan. In my experience, the opposite forces are at play when it comes to addiction and recovery, especially around alcohol. The active drinker, with all his good times and his dramas and his problems is the subject of all manner of attention, derision, criticism, speculation and condescension. Success, or sobriety, is a relative orphan. I have learnt that - perhaps because people feel threatened or somehow forced to consider their own drinking - people don’t like talking about it. I have found that, with the exception of my wife, there is a reluctance to discuss, much less acknowledge, my sobriety. Within and outside of my extended family, especially those who gorged on the gossip value of my alcoholic life, have never mentioned my recovery to me. I think they were much more comfortable with the old dynamic. Alcohol may be socially connecting, and sobriety good for personal connections, but sobriety is also very culturally disconnecting. Beyond family, in sporting and other social groups I am involved in, sobriety is, apparently, a taboo subject. People notice I drink soft drink but never ask. Never mind that at a point in time I could have drunk beer for Australia, sipping on yet another Diet Coke I am a curiosity, a cultural outsider not to be fully trusted. Sobriety is a very personal journey, especially in a cultural setting as aggressively pro-alcohol as ours.
Avoid the “Dead Man’s Promise”. After the rehabs are completed, and the Valium scripts dispensed with, the key to sustained sobriety starts with an attitude. That mind set is about viewing sobriety as an active and not a passive concept. All too often in my (extensive) experience of addiction recovery treatments, there is a focus on what addicts can’t do – don’t drink, don’t gamble, don’t mix with enablers, don’t go to these types of events, don’t, don’t, don’t. They are promises to not do something, and as a wise man once said to me, “if it’s a promise a dead person could keep it’s not much of a promise is it son”. So, recovery requires commitments to do things. Exercise, engage with community and contemporary issues, do productive, rewarding and meaningful work, develop existing and new relationships and, above all, live authentically, on life’s terms.