3 Keys To My Sobriety

Entering recovery for drug or alcohol addiction can be so overwhelming. Not only do we have to deal with the past that we have trudged through, we also need to build a brand new life! Something very important to acknowledge early on in recovery is that if you knew how to get and stay sober, you would have done it already and surpassed a lot of pain and suffering. We need new ideas on life, it is absolutely vital.

There are some basic principles that made my foundation rock solid in recovery and I want to share them with you. Remember, recovery is simple, it’s the people that make it complicated.

Surrender 

I went to several treatment facilities before I got sober, surrender was a word I heard all the time. I was told I needed to surrender before anything else and I would pay lip service to that idea and simply say, “Okay, I surrender!”. 

I really did not understand what surrendering meant at those times and my actions did not meet my words. I could probably write a whole book on what it means to surrender but to put it simply, surrendering means I am no longer going to make decisions on what my life should look like or what I think I need to do in order to get and stay sober. That may seem a little radical for people. It is, but it is so vital. 

I spent years trying to arrange my life and making decisions on what my life should look like after I went through treatment, each and every time I ended up back where I started, sometimes even worse. Clearly, I do not know how to stay sober! I needed to stop acting like I did! When I finally surrendered I was completely open to other people who I trusted telling me what I should do. People had been telling me what I should do for years and I never listened, this time I did and the results were amazing. 

I was finally open to guidance in all areas of my life, I would specify what those were but I believe we all have different paths and it wouldn’t be fair to lay out one specific path and assume everyone's is the same. My point is this, surrender means being completely open to guidance from others who have been in early recovery and successfully made it out and continue to live a great life. WIthout this, good luck is all I can say!

Support Network 

I tried plenty of times, more than I can count, to get sober on my own. It does not work. Luckily there are scores of people who have gotten and stayed sober who are looking to help those new in recovery because they know what it feels like to enter recovery. It’s terrifying! It must be acknowledged that meeting other people who have been successful in sobriety is vital when entering recovery. 

My first few months I just followed a solid group of sober men around and they were more than happy to help if I needed rides anywhere and especially if I was asking for guidance on the many problems we experience when first getting sober. It is just a fact that they have between where I currently was at that point so they told me what they did to face whatever problem and I just did similar things and it always went great! That is about as simple as I can break down the relationship with a support network. Luckily my treatment center also had an alumni program which had me connect with peers from the same place instantly and got me involved with them.

Learning To Love Myself

Amongst all the people who rightfully did not like me in active addiction, I hate me most. I’d have thoughts obsessing about how terrible I was, that I will always be a failure and that it is my destiny to fail. I truly believed I would never be able to live a good life. Those thoughts continued as I entered recovery but I was not practising being more aware of what I told myself and talking about it with others.

I learned that the things in my mind are not always true, i’d say they are rarely true! The best way for me to counteract those intense negative impressions I would leave on myself was through action. I began making it priority to treat people better, treat my own body better, write down positive affirmations often and anything else that could possibly have a positive impact on my day. When I made mistakes (you will make tons in early recovery) I owned up to it, talked about it with somebody and tried to see what I could learn from that mistake.

After only a few months of taking action to make my life more wholesome and positive, I really began to actually appreciate and love myself. It is perhaps the greatest emotion I have ever felt in all of my recovery. I loved who I was becoming. What a powerful journey that was and continues to be.