Starting Your New Life Sober: What Happens Once You Choose Recovery
Anna Pybus
Making the choice to enter rehab and begin the road to recovery is a major decision that should be acknowledged. The recovery process as a whole can be a stressful time, especially in the beginning. You are essentially re-learning how to live your life, this time free of drugs, alcohol, or other harmful substances.
Getting clean and sober is no easy task. If it were, addiction would no longer exist because everyone would simply just go to rehab and be cured right away. By going to rehab and starting your journey to recovery you can choose to take on something that you will have to work on every day for the rest of your life.
Starting Your New Life Sober: What Happens Once You Choose Recovery
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So, when major events and milestones come up, you should certainly celebrate them! If someone who works for a company has been there for 10 years, their coworkers might throw them a party to acknowledge all the hard work and dedication they have given over those 10 years. Well, the same types of things should be acknowledged in sobriety as well.
While some of these key moments in your sobriety might be celebrated during an AA meeting or in another peer group setting, not every celebration has to be done in a public setting. While it might be fun to share in your joy with others, at the end of the day these sobriety moments are for you and about you.
As the months and years go on, it will slowly become easier and easier to manage your sobriety. Going to bars, restaurants, or being in settings where alcohol is present will seem like less and less of a big deal, and will start to feel normal again. Not needing to drink or use drugs in order to feel like you are fitting in will also start to feel more normal as well. That being said, you will still notice some changes in your life and for the most part, they will all be positive and for the better.
During the first few years of sobriety, you might start to notice that your life is turning back around for the better. You might be succeeding at work again, or you might have gotten a new job finally if you lost your previous one as a result of your addiction. You might also be noticing that your relationships are improving again, especially with any family members or loved ones who you might have had a falling out with as a result of your addiction.
Seeing and acknowledging all the ways in which your sobriety has helped your quality of life is a great way to remind yourself of everything you have accomplished and why you did it. This can be particularly valuable on those hard days when you might have cravings or an urge to have a drink.
This 5-9 year period is where you will continue to develop and evolve within your sobriety. At this point, you may decide that you would like to get more involved in helping others who are new in their recovery journey. Sponsoring a new person in recovery can be a great way to give back and help another person as they go about the early stages of their journey through recovery.
Becoming and remaining sober is no easy task. It is a lifelong journey that requires work on a daily basis. Because of the challenges that come along with not just getting sober but staying sober, it is important to celebrate and acknowledge milestones and achievements along the way.
They can be as simple as waking up in the morning and not reaching for the liquor or pill bottle to celebrate yearly anniversaries of your sobriety. Before you can begin to celebrate these milestones though, the first step is to get clean and sober through detox and rehab.
Here at our Washington State addiction recovery center, we offer various programs and help our clients find treatment resources through referral services. When you contact our rehab facility, you can learn more about:
Dr. Richard Crabbe joined our team in 2019 as our psychiatrist and medical director. He attended the University of Ghana Medical School where he became a Medical Doctor in 1977. From 1978 through 1984, he was a medical officer in the Ghana Navy and provided a variety of services from general medicine to surgeries. He received his Certificate in General Psychology from the American Board of Psychology and Neurology in 2002.
The Dan Anderson Renewal Center is the place where we can retreat from the world momentarily, immerse ourselves in Twelve Step insights, and emerge with a stronger recovery, a gentle resolve and a keen understanding of life. This is where recovery lives.
Hazelden Publishing is the exclusive publisher of The ASAM Criteria, Fourth Edition print and digital formats. Additionally, as an ASAM Designated Training Organization, we help ensure your team is using and applying the updated ASAM Criteria in the same way to guide clients consistently and successfully.
There are factors that pop up again and again when determining who might have an issue with alcoholism. The first factor is the age at which a person has his or her first drink (the younger people are when they first start drinking, the more likely they are to drink more heavily into adulthood); the other factors are genetics and environment. If you're in the "at-risk" population, it doesn't take much to become dependent on alcohol or other drugs. No one plans on becoming dependent.
The Jellinek Curve, created by E. Morton Jellinek in the 1950s and later revised by British psychiatrist Max Glatt, is a chart that describes the typical phases of alcoholism and recovery. The point of this research was to show that alcohol addiction is a progression and there's a "vicious circle" associated with obsessive drinking, with much to lose along the way if people don't seek help. The curve shows that life can get worse if the cycle of dependence isn't broken, but it can also get better through recovery.
At this point, it's obvious to those close to you that you're struggling. You might miss work, forget to pick up the kids, become irritable, and notice physical signs of alcohol abuse (facial redness, weight gain or loss, sluggishness, stomach bloating). Support groups can be a highly effective form of help at this stage.
At this stage, drinking becomes everything in your life, even at the expense of your livelihood, your health and your relationships. Attempts to stop drinking can result in tremors or hallucinations, but therapy, detox, and rehab can help you get your life back.
Alcohol travels from the stomach and intestines through the bloodstream, overloading the liver's ability to process alcohol, directly affecting the brain's neurons, potentially converting alcohol into carcinogens, and taking its toll on the heart, pancreas, nervous system, joints and immune system. Heavy alcohol consumption has been linked to more than 60 different diseases.
The Million Women Study in the United Kingdom (which included more than 28,000 women with breast cancer) provided a recent estimate of breast cancer risk at low to moderate levels of alcohol consumption: every 10 grams of alcohol consumed per day was associated with a 12 percent increase in the risk of breast cancer.
Cardiovascular disease
Binge drinking can lead to blood clots, which can lead to heart attacks, stroke, cardiomyopathy (a potentially deadly condition where the heart muscle weakens and fails) and heart rhythm abnormalities.
Pancreatitis
Alcohol causes the pancreas to produce toxic substances that can eventually lead to pancreatitis, a dangerous inflammation and swelling of the blood vessels in the pancreas that prevents proper digestion. Severe abdominal pain and persistent diarrhea, as a result, is not fixable.
The most severe form of alcohol withdrawal is delirium tremens (DTs), characterized by altered mental status and severe autonomic hyperactivity that may lead to cardiovascular collapse. Only about 5 percent of patients with alcohol withdrawal progress to DTs, but about 5 percent of these patients die.
There are many ways to get sober and no one "right" path. The first step is finding a reputable drug rehab. You'll want to find a rehab center that has medically-supervised detox capabilities so that you can comfortably and safely detox from alcohol. There are inpatient and outpatient options, but an addiction specialist should determine the best level of care for you based on your individual needs. Effective addiction treatment providers will have addiction counselors, but they should also have mental health services as many people with alcoholism have co-occurring mental health conditions.
Attempting to help a loved one or friend who is struggling with an alcohol use disorder can be an emotional roller coaster. When an alcoholic is in active addiction, they can be defensive. Don't confront the behaviors while they're intoxicated. Find a time when they're sober and talk honestly about your concerns. Practice what you're going to say. Don't guilt-trip or assign blame; this is a disease. Offer support and use statements starting with "I" such as:
Take action. Find support for yourself and other family members in a rehab family program. Go to an Al-Anon or Alateen meeting or set up an appointment with a mental health professional. Learn to set healthy boundaries for yourself. At the end of the day, the person with addiction has to be willing to accept help.
One of the by far most common myths of alcohol relapse is that relapse will eventually happen, and you should simply accept that fact. Many people go through rehab fully expecting to relapse after it because they think of relapse as just a step in the recovery process. But this may, in fact, be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you believe you are doomed to relapse no matter what and are just biding your time until it happens, you are less likely to work on preventing that relapse; and of course, the less you invest in relapse prevention, the less likely you are to prevent relapse.
While it is true that recovery is not always linear, relapse is by no means an inevitability. Even by the most conservative estimates, 3 in 10 alcoholics will successfully maintain sobriety once it is achieved. The likelihood of this increases the longer you have been sober, so if you can make it through the first few years, you will probably make it in general. With a good relapse prevention plan that includes continued therapy, support from loved ones, and controlling for risk factors like stress and exposure to triggers, it is not just possible but likely that you can maintain your sobriety long-term.
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