A Sobriety Story by Debbie

Here is the first sobriety story from a reader named Debbie who has recently given up drinking alcohol. I am proud to announce that I have another taker for my guest post request.  Debbie is newly sober and is on her way to the first month of sobriety. Here is the first part of Debbie’s story, Debbie will be writing a guest post about her sobriety journey on a weekly basis. I am very excited to share this with you and I want to thank Debbie for sharing with us.

Debbie’s sobriety story is very real and is an inspiration, especially to those who have been thinking about giving up alcohol or are newly sober.

“What Happened When My Feelings Came Back” by Debbie

As a child, I learned that it was easier to ignore my feelings rather than have feelings that I was not allowed to express. In fact my mother once said that she liked me because my emotion never varied, she liked that I was never too excited, never cried, never got angry.

Nothing bothered me. For a long time it didn’t matter what people said to me or how they treated me, because I couldn’t feel a thing.

 I thought that I could just switch my emotions back on when it was safe to, but of course it was never safe, so emotions stayed buried, through high school, university and then out into the work world. 

There are so many things that I had to learn about my emotions:

• You can’t switch them on and off whenever you want.
• Emotions are a good thing. If you can’t feel, it’s hard to make meaningful connections with other people. It’s hard to make decisions about life: what career, whom to date, whom to trust. If you can’t feel passion or hate or anxiety or boredom on what basis do you make those decisions?
• When you start to feel again, you’ll have to deal with emotions relating to things that happened years ago, long after you can confront the people who hurt you.
• It takes time to learn to identify what you are feeling and then to learn healthy ways to experience the emotion and then release it.
• You will express your emotions in some way. For me it took the form of binge drinking, and eating until I could barely breathe. I’d eat so much that I’d feel full for the next 24 hours.  

However, with the growing pains come boundaries:

• Boundaries, Oh the Joy!: After years of allowing people to treat me badly I was finally able to end a lot of unhealthy relationships. It’s been lonely for sure especially because I have trouble making friends but at least I no longer have the anguish of people treating me badly.
• Its much harder to become enmeshed with other peoples emotions. When you have no emotions there’s a void in your life and its easy to ‘catch’ other people’s emotions.
• Feeling is joined my instinct and intuition that is allowing me to grow into the person I’ve mean to be.
• Making decisions is a lot easier. I’ve accepted the fact that I don’t like my current field of occupation. I’ve made decisions about where I want to go and how to do it.
• When I’m unhappy I no longer drink to forget the problem, I try to change what’s bothering me.
• Understanding my feelings meant understanding that my addictive behavior and acting out was not confined to my addiction to alcohol. I ate, and spent money the way I drank alcohol: with reckless abandon. Now that I’ve stopped drinking, its been much easier to stick to my diet. Granted its only been 16 days but I usually fall off the bandwagon by day 3.
• I stopped worrying about how I should be feeling and just allowed myself to feel. I had no idea how much effort it took to convince myself that I really liked certain people, or didn’t mind my weight,  or didn’t care that my life was slowly going to pot.

I hope that you enjoyed Debbie’s story. Debbie also writes a blog about Recovering From Alcohol Abuse

If you would like to share your sobriety story on Recovery Princess please send me an email at madison @ recovery princess.com

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