There are Still Lessons To Learn

Well over 90 days of sobriety behind me, a full head of confidence and swagger and a lesson still to learn. I had a little over a week of stress and disappointment. You know, that disappointment that feels like you’ll never have success or move forward again? Relationships strained, job situation needing to be changed, living situation not ideal, etc. All of it at the same time after things have been going well.

The path of early sobriety is astonishingly up and down. I have noticed and probably mentioned that I feel like a hormonal teenager with absolutely no control over my emotions. I will be feeling positive and encouraged and within minutes be completely depressed and in such a dark hole my soul feels like it will fall into the abyss and never see light again. And I’ll experience that multiple times in a single hour.

Speaking to multiple “old-timers” of sobriety during the first year or so this is pretty much the standard. The damage we have done to our brains and their ability to control emotions is extensive and takes time to heal. On top of that us alcoholics haven’t experienced emotions without a substance to numb it in years or decades. This damage to our brain, mixed with the lack of recent experience in handling emotion sober, creates quite the cocktail (no pun intended) of emotions.

Beyond our emotional instability and brain damage, if we are doing it right, we are looking our problems in the eye and dealing with them. A myriad of destruction left in the wake of our addiction. It has been an emotional and difficult several months but I have felt successful and was gaining some confidence and swagger from my success and hard work.

Then came just over a week of situations that bowled through my confidence and swagger, a wrecking ball with a Wal-Mart smiley face laughing at me while the emotions began rocking back and forth in what felt like a one person sailboat in a hurricane. Relationship stress, job stress, living situation stress all colliding. And back to that victim mentality did I run. I didn’t just run, I sprinted back to becoming the victim that all of us addicts are especially good at. Justifying our use of substances by becoming the victim that deserves or needs it to survive.

I began to read texts with that mentality. I began to think about situations with that mentality. I began to go to sleep and wake up with that mentality. Poor Daniel, poor addict. No one can even understand how difficult it is. No one can understand what I am going through. No one. I sank down into darkness and depression. Crying multiple times per day. Well, let’s be honest, multiple times per hour. Stopped working the program, stopped making amends, stopped engaging in what I was doing.

I didn’t drink but it was a horrible week. I felt like God had abandoned me, when just a week or two before was praising Him for being faithful. Despite my extremely poor response God was faithful. Despite my pouting and victimhood God was faithful to come through for me and was there. He never left or abandoned me at all. A job change came up, relationships were healed and restored and an alternative living situation became possible.

Lesson? I still need to work on the ingrained victim mentality that I learned and perfected in my alcoholism and addiction. I am not a victim, I am a human living a sometimes difficult life just like everyone else. Feelings and stress is a part of that life and my response is going to be what I make it. I can make it a victim response or I can make it a response of hope and trust in God. We all have the opportunity to control our responses.

Second lesson, I still have lessons to learn.

And with that, I will take another 24