Answer Addiction

Category: Sober Curious

  • "Sober Curious" or Literally Dying: When Saving Your Life Becomes Trendy

    "Sober Curious" or Literally Dying: When Saving Your Life Becomes Trendy

    It’s not my intention to minimize what sober curious folks are doing, but let’s not lose sight of actual alcoholism or addiction either.

    Somewhere in the drunken mess of 2002, I was curious to try the combination of vodka and Klonopin. Ditto, I was a curious little kitten when it came to what could possibly happen if I took acid and ecstasy at the same time! I was curiouser and curiouser about everything, from trying heroin to trying to buy cocaine instead of paying my rent. That’s the sort of curious that kept me in trouble for the better part of two decades, but curious to quit drinking because I just needed a break from partying and how it was affecting my life? Uh, not so much.

    Trendy, Cool, and Not Dying

    If you don’t know what the “sober curious” movement is, you haven’t been paying attention to “sober influencers.” Those phrases actually cause my eyes to deeply roll and my head to shake like a bitchy old neighbor watching you try to parallel park. Look, I don’t know anything about being an influencer unless we’re talking about the fellow teenagers I influenced to take drugs and come to the mall with me in the 80’s. I also don’t know about sobriety being trendy. I didn’t get sober to be cool, I just got sober to stop dying. But I do know that this sober curious movement is an actual thing.

    We (and by that I mean people like me who write about recovery) like to latch our collective wagons to sobriety buzzwords and trends. This summer, the world cannot stop talking about “sober curious.” The term, taken from author Ruby Warrington’s book by the name same, has popped up on every media outlet over the last few months.

    “Sober curious,” for the uninitiated, describes:

    • Folks who don’t need to get sober but who can see the benefits of cutting down or cutting out alcohol completely.
    • Mainly younger people who want to relieve the pressure to drink heavily at social occasions.
    • Folks who are concerned with hangovers and how drinking is affecting their social and professional lives.
    • Whimsical nymphs who want to hang out with their friends but not get loaded.

    In short, the sober curious ain’t me.

    When Alcohol Is Mildly Inconvenient

    See, these folks can take or leave drugs or alcohol. They don’t identify as having a problem. Alcohol is mildly inconvenient for them; it’s like your aunt Linda who eats chicken vindaloo but forgets it gives her heartburn. Fundamentally, I do not understand this way of thinking. The way I’m wired, I like to do substances in amounts that will numb me out completely. I didn’t care if work was going to be hard the next day or if my health was going to be affected. Hell, I needed tequila and cocaine just to get through six-hour shifts waiting tables.

    I mean, why casually use drugs or drink alcohol when you can implode your whole existence? This is a level of insanity that probably isn’t familiar to the “sober curious.” Nevertheless, they’ve decided to rally together and say “We’re just going to stop drinking and it’s okay if you do too!” It’s more like giving up carbs for a trendy diet than, say, being placed on dietary restrictions because otherwise your diabetes will kill you.

    As a movement in and of itself, it’s harmless. I see no problem with people whose brains are very much not like my own who can say, “Maybe I should cool it with the booze for a while.” The fewer people stumbling around, barfing in Ubers, and screaming at each other in Taco Bell at 3 a.m. can only be a good thing for society. The annoying trendiness notwithstanding, sober curious has at the very least made people examine their relationship with alcohol.

    However, I don’t see a lot of “sober curious” folks in the ER or ICU.

    At my day job as a recovery mentor on an addiction medicine team at a busy urban hospital, I see far more people brought in because of the effects drinking has had on their lives than nearly anything else. As devastating as the opioid crisis continues to be, there is a continuous influx of people with alcohol-related health problems. Sure, sure, the emergency room sees a handful of bachelorette party attendees who drank too much and fell down a flight of stairs who show up needing TLC for a busted ankle. But mainly, I witness patients who are way beyond curious.

    They come in broken, in desperate need of medical and psychosocial attention due to their relationships with alcohol. Despite winding up in the hospital, sometimes in terrible condition, many of them think it’s not that bad or that they can just cut down. I certainly identify with this thinking. For decades, I fooled myself into thinking I could outrun it, or that the handful of people I knew who were heavier drinkers meant I couldn’t possibly be that bad.

    This is where the Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) diagnosis comes in handy. Used in our hospital (and around the country), the diagnosis quickly separates the sober curious from people literally dying. Some NIH assessment questions for AUD include: “Have you continued to drink even though it was causing trouble with your family or friends?” and “Have you experienced craving — a strong need, or urge, to drink?” This sounds wildly different than the interns at the office who decided to cut back on Rosé because it was making them feel icky. It’s not my intention to minimize what sober curious folks are doing, but let’s not lose sight of actual alcoholism or addiction either. Marginalization, ignoring, and minimizing have never done substance use disorders any good.

    If You Drink Again, You Will Die

    For the people I see in hospital beds and for people like me, it’s a matter of life and death.

    Beyond that, this idea that younger people are drinking less and buying less alcohol doesn’t jibe with bigger, more staggering statistics of alcohol-related deaths among millennials. A study from earlier this summer found that folks between the ages of 23 and 38 were dying the most of “deaths of despair”, meaning suicide, overdose, and alcohol-related deaths. Furthermore, additional data shows that from 2009 to 2016 there was a significant increase in cirrhosis-related deaths among millennials, which researchers say was driven by alcohol-related liver disease.

    Over the last year, I have personally worked with a handful of patients under 30 who have the kind of alcoholic liver damage usually only seen in people twice their age. From my position at their bedsides, it certainly doesn’t look like a generation that has this booze thing all figured out. It looks like a group of people being killed even faster than the generation before them. This is a story not buzzword-worthy or even really noticed. About a month ago, I had the honor of sitting with a 28-year-old while he processed the news that if he ever drank again, he’d die. Heavy news for a kid whose friends are all still happy hour-hopping and swilling the latest craft beers. This young man didn’t have the option of being sober curious.

    Yet, as different as Ruby Warrington and I are regarding alcohol, we’re doing the same thing: We’re talking about how much we drink. What if someone reads my stuff and says, “Well at least I don’t drink like that guy!” Likewise, the plethora of sober curious articles might make a reverse light bulb go on for someone. They might seek help after reading about this new trendy health craze and think: “sober curious, that ain’t me.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Is Recovery Possible Without Abstinence?

    Is Recovery Possible Without Abstinence?

    If I told an AA meeting I was having wine once in a while, the group would tell me that I am headed for certain demise.

    Benders, Blackouts, and Finding Recovery

    In 2013, I bottomed out in no uncertain terms. After years of heavy drinking that spawned blackouts and dangerous behavior, I had a three-day bender that left a 24-hour hole in my memory and landed me on the doorstep of a local AA meeting.

    I attended those meetings for a couple of weeks, and they saved my life. In those rooms I found people who validated what I had suspected for a long time: I was an alcoholic.

    When I stopped going to meetings, it wasn’t because I rejected the program. It was because my lifestyle had changed: shortly after I stopped drinking, I uprooted my life and began traveling. Whenever I arrived in a new city, I always looked up a meeting, just in case I needed one. But I never felt the need to go, because I was never tempted to drink. 

    I was sober for nine months when I finally settled in one spot and I felt ready to tackle the program. I returned to the rooms and found a sponsor.

    I’d had high hopes that AA was the missing piece of my sobriety. Those nine sober months had been lonely as I struggled with the unpleasant feelings that had previously been ignored with the help of wine. My friendships had become riddled with conflict as I became sensitive to even minor misunderstandings. When I was drinking, those bumps had been smoothed over with alcohol. Without it, I couldn’t move past an argument. I thought maybe it was a sober thing, and other sober people would have advice for this new territory.

    But my return to AA lacked the same connection I’d initially felt all those months earlier. My new sponsor asked me, with undisguised disbelief, “Nine months, really? All on your own?” She went on to tell me how she had once been sober for three years without AA. She eventually began drinking again because she hadn’t been accountable; she hadn’t told people in her life that she was an alcoholic. 

    Without AA, You Will Fail

    I corrected her assumption that we were the same. “I tell people I’m an alcoholic, and that I am sober.” When she responded with visible relief, I realized that she’d been skeptical about my claim because she assumed I was still in denial. In that moment I felt the inflexibility of the program, and the words of speakers I’d heard echoed in my head: “Without AA, you will fail.” There was no room to do it any other way.

    After that coffee with my sponsor, the hope I’d had for AA dissolved. I realized I wasn’t looking to AA to help me stay sober, I was looking to AA to help me be happy.

    Instead of returning to AA, I found a therapist. At the end of our first session during which I had tearfully explained my sobriety and my sadness, she diagnosed me with severe depression. After hearing my history, she suggested that I had always been depressed and likely self-medicating with alcohol. 

    I asked her about AA, and if she felt it was necessary for me to continue attending.

    “Are you tempted to drink?” she asked.

    “No,” I answered truthfully. Even with the challenges of my new sober life, I’d never considered it. I wanted a solution, and I already knew drinking wasn’t it.

    “It sounds like your lack of connection to the meetings is only furthering the isolation you feel,” she told me. “If you feel like you want to drink, go. But otherwise, it sounds like you’re okay.”

    My sadness wasn’t a byproduct of new sobriety, my sadness was depression. When she told me I didn’t have to go to meetings because I wasn’t struggling not to drink, I was validated.

    Sober, but Not Abstinent

    I began having sips almost two years later. I don’t remember the first one, but I do remember having no desire to get drunk. They continue to be infrequent and small, leaving me with no desire to drink to the point of drunkenness. I have even had a sip too many on occasion: my cheeks flush and my tongue grows loose. I used to drink for that feeling. Now, it stops me in my tracks, repelling my desire for more.

    The commonly understood language of recovery does not allow for this kind of behavior. People on the outside only understand recovery in the terms presented in movies and on television: Alcoholic bottoms out. Alcoholic attends AA meeting. Alcoholic gets shitfaced after having one sip of a drink at a party and AA friends drag her out of a bar. Alcoholic is sober one year, speaks at AA meeting, and then eats cake. 

    And it isn’t just people on the outside. If I told an AA meeting I was having wine once in a while, the group would tell me that I am headed for certain demise.

    To be clear: I am not advising anyone who wants to stop drinking or who is currently sober to try sipping alcohol. Having any amount of alcohol while “in recovery” is a controversial topic and beyond the scope of this article. We all need to do what works for us to stay sober and healthy.

    But in my experience, there’s a difference between sipping and slipping. Before I received my depression diagnosis, there was one purpose to drinking: get drunk. Now that I manage my mental health properly and no longer self-medicate with alcohol by drinking to excess, I don’t have the desire to abuse it.

    Sipping vs. Slipping

    One week into my sobriety, I did come close to slipping. I’d had dinner with a friend after work and on the walk home I started to white-knuckle it. The walk was a landmine of my drinking haunts: the old man bar at the halfway point, the liquor store a couple blocks from my apartment, the fancier bar after that, and then, one building away from mine, another bar.

    Keep walking keep walking keep walking, I coached myself. You’ll go home and answer those emails and have mac and cheese for dinner. Then you’ll go to sleep and get up early tomorrow for your jog to the AA meeting.

    I made it inside my apartment with no detours. But then I checked my email and I read a piece of good news that I had been waiting months to hear. That’s when my resolve wavered. I wanted to celebrate, and my first thought was: Prosecco!

    I paused. I thought about it. What would happen if I did buy that Prosecco? I knew that I would drink it in its entirety by myself. Bottle done, I would head to the bar around the corner and have some more, and finish the night with my usual three-whiskey nightcap.

    I knew that meant I would not wake up early the next day to jog to my morning AA meeting. I knew if I didn’t go to my meeting I was probably going to take the day off being sober, and then the next one and the next.

    What stopped me from drinking that day wasn’t the thought of a horrible hangover, or even the prospect of soul-blackening shame, but the knowledge that my good news would not be any better if I drank to celebrate it. By the same token, the need to celebrate my little victory as a means to offset my usual sadness wasn’t really necessary, because I knew that sadness wasn’t going anywhere—with or without booze. If drinking wasn’t going to make things better—and I knew it wouldn’t—why bother?

    It was years before I recognized I was chasing a feeling of false relief that would never last long enough. Abusing alcohol was, in fact, only making me more sad and depressed. Once I understood the why of my drinking, I was no longer compelled to drink to excess. I had neutered its power over me.

    Will I Be Kicked Out of the Recovery Club?

    Up until I wrote this, I was hiding my sips from all but my closest friends, because there is no vernacular in recovery to explain it. It’s simply easier to say I’m sober, and play along with others’ commonly-held picture of what recovery looks like. That’s easier than opening myself up to the judgment of those who are in recovery—and even those who are not—who will tell me I will fail, as I was told so many years ago by people who had sipped and ultimately slipped. They’d say that by doing this, I cannot consider myself sober. 

    I’d be kicked out of the club.

    As they are, though, my sips are an indulgence, equivalent to the dessert I have a forkful of but don’t need to finish, or an expensive pair of heels I’ll try on, but talk myself out of buying. The sips aren’t samples of what I miss, and they aren’t tests of will. Along with the taste of the wine itself, there are overtones of pleasure and victory and a hint of bitterness mixed in with my relationship to alcohol. The bitterness isn’t because I want more: it is the memory of that never-ending chase and where it led me. The bitterness is the reason I only want a sip—a sip I will continue to take, at my discretion, because I want to, and still remain sober.

    View the original article at thefix.com