Podcast

This episode is going to be a little bit different. I had another topic scheduled for this week, but I want to talk about dealing with difficult moments that life deals us when we get sober.   This is very fresh for me as someone I love very much had a massive loss in their life this morning.

Here is the thing, life can be tough at times.  Tragedy doesn’t stop just because we got sober.  We just have to learn to deal with it in different and hopefully healthier ways.  One of the greatest gifts in sobriety is being able to show up completely for people in our lives and being able to support them when they need it the most.

I will talk in this episode about how I navigate life’s biggest challenges and how I dealt with my day today.

The inability of people in recovery to establish and set healthy boundaries is one of the biggest struggles I see with people when they are building their new lives.

In fact, this is the method I see most people trying to set boundaries which is exactly what I did for the first many years I was sober:

If someone does something that upsets us, we react negatively to it with maybe anger, sadness, storming out of the room, passive aggressiveness, or whatever your preferred method is to show you are pissed off.  Then we assume they know what they did, why it pissed off us, why they shouldn’t do it anymore, and then we assume that we made ourselves clear.  Then the person does it again and we repeat the cycle to only get more and more upset each time.

So how do we establish healthy boundaries?  How do we communicate them to others?  What should we do when people don’t respect our boundaries?  And how do make sure we are respecting others’ boundaries also?

Well, that is exactly what we are going to be talking about in this episode.

One of the hardest shifts I see people in recovery make is becoming someone who believes in themselves.  It makes perfect sense early in recovery.  Most of us while in active addiction have years of making really bad decisions and likely were not someone who can be trusted.

So it is natural that when we first get sober, it can be very challenging to trust ourselves and always be questioning our decisions, even the ones that are obviously good decisions.

So how do you start learning to trust your intuition again?  Well, that is exactly what we are going to talk about in this episode.

Most people don’t have a plan for getting sober and simply try to wander through life.  They just decide one day today is the day to get sober.  They might kind of know where they want to go, but do not have directions on how to get there.  They simply wander around hoping that one day they will find a place where they are in a life free of their addiction.

Then when things get painful or even slightly uncomfortable they give up because they don’t know where they are going.  Recovery can be difficult, recovery is overwhelming at times, it is very easy to get off track, and if we don’t have an idea of where we are going and how to get there, it can be very easy to get so lost that the only plan that seems logical at the time, is to simply turn around and go back to where we started.

That is how people get stuck in the relapse cycle of recovery.  It isn’t from triggers, alcohol being a huge presence in our society, life events, lack of support from family or friends, stress or anxiety, or any of the other reasons we usually blame our relapses on.   Those are simply hazards along the way but if you know where you are going and how to get there, they are simply detours and not something that gets us completely lost.

When we have a plan though and are focused on our destination, life is more like a navigation app.  When we get detoured, it simply reroutes us back to our destination.

I want you to become the person that is actively chasing your dreams, checking off boxes of things you want to accomplish, finding ways to overcome your challenges, and growing into the person that is always pushing through those difficult moments of life, knowing that you will come out the other side stronger.

Which life sounds better to you?  The one where you are struggling to simply just be sober and spending most of your time and energy focusing on everything that is wrong, or the one where you are sober and happy because you are chasing and accomplishing your dreams?

So imagine it, name it, write it down, actively plan it, and start moving towards it. You are one decision away from changing your whole life and your destination is not as far as it may seem, so get started today.  Starting with this episode.

When you try to change everything at once, you will get overwhelmed, you give up,  and nothing ends up changing.  So how much should we change at the beginning, and how do we pick and choose what to change?

In this episode, I want to talk about whether you need to give up your old friends and other things in your life when you get sober.

I know many people struggle with giving up the people, places, and things that existed in their old life. One of the most common questions people ask me when they are first sober is whether they can still hang out with their friends that they partied with, can they still go to their old bar to listen to that one band they like, and do they need to give up old friendships or relationships that they had when they were drinking or using.  Rather than asking whether we can keep things the same life minus the booze, I think the better question is to ask why would we want to hold onto that old life so desperately.

You will find this episode helpful if you have struggled with the following questions:
Do I have to give up my friends when I quit drinking?
Do I have to change everything when I get sober?
Can I still go to the bar after I quit drinking?
Can I be around alcohol after I get sober?

Today we are going to talk about the biggest mystery in recovery that almost all of us alcoholics have tried to solve.  I believe people have been trying to solve this riddle since the first time someone figured out how to brew alcohol.  And that mystery is: Is it possible to ever be a normal drinker?

Have asked yourself any of the following questions: How can I control my drinking?  Am I an alcoholic?  Why do I always drink so much?  Will I always be an alcoholic?   Why can’t I control how much I drink?  Is moderation of alcohol possible?

If so, you will find this episode helpful.

One of the more common questions I see on various recovery forums online is “Can I get sober without AA?”  Having spent several years in the beginning of my sobriety in AA and watching the majority of people that come through the doors not stay sober, I have to wonder if we are asking the right question.

I have spent many years struggling in AA, many more years researching some of the reasons why so many people struggle in AA, and have experienced massive growth since leaving and applying different methods to my recovery and that is what we are going to talk about in this episode.

How many times have you heard or even said something like this?

Today I lost my job and don’t know how I am going to pay my bills.  I am not sure I can get through this without having a drink.  When we have that mindset, we set up conditional sobriety on the impossible task of nothing ever going wrong.  To live truly sober and happy lives, we must accept and even embrace our challenging times.

If you are asking yourself questions like this, then this episode is for you.

How can I maintain my sobriety when life is going bad?

How do I stay sober after a breakup?

How can I quit relapsing every time something goes wrong?

re you planning on doing a new years resolution?

Maybe you are still struggling with your recovery journey and this is the year you want to get and stay sober.

Maybe you have put together some sobriety time, yet are not satisfied with some other areas in your life, and want to improve on something else.

Maybe you are absolutely killing it right now, and want to keep that momentum so you want to improve even more in an area you are already making progress.

Or, maybe you have tried resolutions in the past, failed, have seen everyone around you also fail, and have sworn resolutions off completely.

I was in that last camp until I started doing some research and convinced myself to give it another try.

If you are considering doing a New Year’s resolution this year, this will be a great episode to listen to.

In this episode, I want to talk about what to do if you just relapsed. Most of the focus around relapse is through relapse prevention methods and with that focus we tend to think all is lost if we did actually relapse.

I think the biggest thing you can do for relapse prevention if you have already relapsed is to shift the focus off of the fact that you relapsed to focusing on what you can learn from this so that you can break the patterns that led you to where you are now.

We will talk about why you should stop saying things like “relapse is a part of recovery”, how to not give up right before you see the rewards of your sobriety, and how you can start putting in place methods to help make this your last sobriety date.

In this episode, I want to talk about how our identities based on our past is often holding us back from our greatest potential in recovery and life. So much of our identity when we get sober is based on what we think we are not capable of achieving. We start picking up limitations when we are young from people and experiences in life. Maybe we are told we are not smart enough, not talented enough, are a troublemaker, or that we are never going to amount to anything. Then as life goes on we find ways to strengthen that identity and even defend it sometimes to the point that we become addicted to our perceived limitations. We will discuss here how to identify the old identities that our holding us back, how to break the behavior cycle that keeps is there, and how to step into our infinite potential.

Relapse. The most dreaded word in recovery and the most misunderstood event also. How many times have you talked to people who have relapsed and they can’t really tell you why? They might talk about some general ideas of things that happened leading up to it or maybe they put themselves in a compromising position and were unable to resist when the sudden temptation hit. But is that really why people relapse?

In this episode, I want to talk about relapse and how many of the things we have been taught about relapsing and relapse prevention may actually be setting us back on our journey.

We will discuss why so many people relapse and don’t know the reasons why, how come some people are able to stay sober without much difficulty and others become chronic relapsers, and why alcohol, drugs, life events, society, the people in your life and your surroundings are not the reason people relapse.

You will learn how to understand your recovery better, ways to learn from the speedbumps along the way and be able to create a solid foundation that doesn’t crumble to the point where picking up seems like the only solution.

In this episode, I want to give you tips to help you navigate a world filled with alcohol after you have quit drinking.

If you have ever asked any of the following questions this would be a good episode to listen to:
How can I be around alcohol after I get sober?
How to say no when someone offers you a drink?
How do I tell people I work with that I don’t drink?

Holidays can be challenging times.  When we have drank for so long, so many of the things that we do in life is associated with drinking and that couldn’t be truer for many of us than during the holidays.  Everything about the holidays for me revolved around drinking.  Partly because many of the people I celebrated with enjoy drinking, and partly because well I am a drunk so I managed to incorporate alcohol into every holiday tradition.   In this episode, I will give you 10 tips to help you stay sober during the holiday season.