Sobriety: It’s All in Your Head

Lately, I find myself thinking about thinking. How very metacognitive of me. More precisely, I am thinking about how sobriety is largely a change in thinking patterns. Put simply: It’s all in your head.

Sobriety is overwhelmingly a mental transformation. In fact, the only physical action involved is non-action, or the act of not ingesting a poisonous substance. All the rest of it is a mind game and we get to choose how we play it. We can choose to live a sober, somber, “dry” life, focusing always on what we can’t have. Or we can learn about ourselves and our capabilities and choose to be self-sufficient. And self-sufficiency opens all types of doors and possibilities.

Women For Sobriety‘s founder, Dr. Jean Kirkpatrick, wrote a book called Goodbye Hangovers, Hello Life: Self-Help for Women. In it she writes that lasting sobriety is built on our conceptions of self, and that most people with drinking problems don’t know who we are or what are our true capabilities. “Dependency on alcohol kills desire for self-fulfillment. It totally destroys any feeling of self-sufficiency,” she writes.

When I was drinking daily, and breaking promises to myself daily about whether or not I would drink, I also broke my own trust. When we don’t trust ourselves, we can’t rely on ourselves. We fall silent and fall in line when sober, and become full of words and stubbornness when we drink. We are not to be trusted on or depended on, even by our own selves.

We become failures, in our own eyes, because of our actions. In sobriety, we have the chance to become heroes through our thoughts. We now get to live out a life where we can trust ourselves and create our reality by changing our thought patterns. Dr. Kirkpatrick described how she realized the key to her greatest happiness and a remarkable sobriety was in changing her thinking. “I believed all the terrible things that had happened to me were simply due to my bad luck, to ill fortune. How wrong I was! It was I who had created these negative happenings. They didn’t just happen out of the blue. It was my negative thinking and my negative actions that had created them.”

It is natural to be caught up in negativity when we are caught up in drinking; there are mental and biological processes at work in active addiction that bring us to this place. However when we quit drinking, we have the opportunity to change our thought processes, to expect abundance, and to trust ourselves to achieve it.

I am really enjoying Dr. Kirkpatrick’s book, even though it was published in the ’80s and some information is outdated. But her observations and advice are timeless. She is brilliant at motivating people to look at sobriety not as a punishment, but a priceless, precious opportunity. This is how I choose to look at it, and I so desparately want other people to view it through this lens as well. A blessing or a curse? A sentence or an open door? The beginning or the end? You decide.

I’ll leave you with a little pep talk from Jean:

Now is the time to live. Now is the time to become all those things you always wanted to be when you were trapped in a narrow tunnel of addiction and self-destruction. Now you are free to be everything you want to be. It takes planning, and it takes a belief in self, and it takes enthusiasm and desire. Invest your life with these, and you will never again want to drink.