Dear Friend, 

I’ve been thinking about our conversation and decided to write you a letter to share ideas about how I successfully stopped drinking and why I’ve stayed sober for four years. 

I imagine you find it hard to believe that on the other side of hangovers, bitterness, and self-loathing you can be free as a bird at sunset, soaring over the shimmering ocean that is your beautiful life. 

Not everybody who drinks alcohol has a problem but in my opinion if you think you have a problem with alcohol, you do. I sense that you sincerely want to be free of the depressing cycle and there is no doubt in my mind that focusing with honesty on your deep desire to be sober is the best place to begin. 

I’m thinking back to my days of early sobriety four years ago when I quit cold turkey after one particularly bad night. I started drinking in the afternoon and then later that evening, after leaving a neighborhood party, I walked home in frigid temps, tripped, and fell down an embankment, badly hurting my shoulder. 

When I woke up that next morning, unsure about what happened the previous evening, deeply embarrassed, injured, hungover, and sour in body and spirit, I thought “I am treating myself terribly, I am abusing myself. What would I say to someone who was being treated this way by another? I think I would tell them to leave.”

So, consider this letter an encouragement to follow a new path and allow to yourself leave an abusive relationship. 

That cringe-inducing night turned out to be one of the most important in my life so far. My drinking career had started at age 13 and there I was at age 48, with the intervening 35 muddy middle years of (mostly, minus pregnancies and the occasional dry stretches) imbibing whenever and wherever I wished to. Even though I grasped long ago that there was a problem I continued to drink, often daily. I failed at modifying my intake, I failed at drinking only one type of alcohol, I failed at anything that had to do with ending my tendency to use something that was poisoning me from within and without.

I also did the dishes, parented, wifed, worked, and lived a life that may have appeared to many as a full, happy, connected one. But I was an expert at living a compartmentalized life, a less than truthful one–this was uncomfortably familiar ground.

I needed that final low, that rusty nail in the coffin of my lengthy drinking career, to look my glaring imperfections in the eye and to see my actions for what they were, self-defeating, injurious, and below me.

Here is the part I wish I’d figured out years earlier: In my fresh sobriety I could treat myself as I would a cherished friend. Setting relentless judgment and failures aside, I clutched onto the glimmers of my goodness. At first, those glimmers seemed minor…I considered the way I am (generally) loving to others, the way I take care of animals, the way I make tea for myself in the morning, and the way I feel when I am hiking in the woods. I brush my teeth twice a day! I wear a bike helmet! I thought about how there were people in my life that seemed to like me…if they saw good in me there must be something loveable there. 

I created a loop of these fresh and positive ideas in my thought process, I wrote good things about myself in my journal instead of paragraphs of self-doubt. For a brain accustomed to a whole lot of self-criticism and judgment, this was an unfamiliar approach but the more I flexed it the easier (and stronger) the “treat yourself as a cherished friend” muscle became.

Try creating an arsenal of good thoughts for yourself. Ask people close to you what they love about you and put their comments together in a place you can access when you need a lift. The Notes section of your phone or a piece of paper taped to the fridge or the bathroom mirror or used as a bookmark. Try a meditation where you view yourself through the eyes of someone who deeply loves you. What do you imagine they love about you? Consider those qualities in your meditation. There is never going to be another you. What will you do with the gift of you? Strengthen the muscle of your loving self-acceptance.

Stay tuned, part two of my letter covers strengthening the will to be sober, ideas for what to do with all the money you’ll save not buying alcohol, asking and answering the hard questions for yourself, savoring present moments, thriving instead of wilting through stressful situations, and evolving/improving/letting go of relationships through sobriety.

Understand that there is a massive industry built on the back of your addiction. Don’t allow your well-deserved peace and happiness to be stolen by a poisonous substance used to power jets.

Cherish yourself and be your own champion–no one else can do it for you. I urge you to take this path because on the other side of sobriety you will find self-acceptance, joy, and clarity, the beauty of which you can only imagine.

Love,
Your Successfully Sober Friend