17. The power of sobriety
Have you ever had a drink to relax from a hard day? Or to loosen your inhibitions to help you socialize at a party? Have you ever smoked marijuana to calm your anxiety or to feel more playful? Maybe you’ve used other substances — cocaine for the rush, heroin in pursuit of euphoria, psychedelics to alter perception. Maybe you just experimented. Or maybe you began to use it, or them, a lot.
In this culture, we’re taught to medicate ourselves out of pain or discomfort, whether the distress is physical or emotional. We’ve been convinced that altering our mood or our level of awareness is the right response to uncomfortable feelings. But those feelings provide us important information about ourselves and our environment, and when we shut them down with a drink or a pill, we deprive ourselves of knowledge that might motivate us to take action to improve our circumstance.
From the time I was a very young child, I was taught to medicate myself. Was I lonely? Bored? Restless? Anxious? Have some sugar! I was taught to use cookies and candy and ice cream to occupy, comfort, and reward myself. I was allowed to have as much as I wanted because sugar was the drug of choice for my grandmother, who raised me until I was five. My parents continued to allow it after that age because nobody really cared what I ate as long as I was quiet and didn’t bother anyone, and because they were self-medicating too. Research tells us that children of parents who abuse drugs or alcohol are more like to do so themselves.
I’d eat donuts in the morning, SweeTarts sequestered in my desk at school, ice cream after school, fudge at night. The sweet rush kept at bay my anxiety, loneliness, and anger; I just needed a steady supply.
We now know that consuming a lot of sugar has serious consequences for our health, from obesity to diabetes to heart disease. But sugar also triggers the release of chemicals that stimulate the pleasure center in our brains, including opioids and dopamine. This can literally set us up for addictions to other substances.
My parents were hard and consistent drinkers. Their behavior showed me that one cannot get through the day without altering one’s consciousness by means of alcohol. They taught me how to mix drinks for them. They invited me to taste their cocktails. My parents had an ethos of drinking; they sneered at New Year’s Eve as “amateur night.” They took pride in their consumption, its daily-ness, their ability to get up and go to work the next day no matter how much they had drunk the night before. Once I turned 18, my stepfather began to give me fifths of Scotch and tequila in my Christmas stocking. Drinking was a family ritual, and it was expected I would uphold the tradition.
The first time I got drunk I was thirteen; I was nervous about going to my first dance, which was at a church. At sixteen I got a fake ID and began to drink more regularly, first the sweet wines cheaply purchased at the liquor store around the corner from my high school, then hard liquor. I waited until I’d graduated high school before I added marijuana, then LSD, then whatever I could get my hands on. I was proud of my ability to drink more than the men I drank with then, proud of my ability to get high and still perform my tasks at work. The goal was to not be myself, not feel my feelings, to not be present in my life. I didn’t see then that I was robbing myself of power.
Have you used mood altering substances — legal or illegal — to help you avoid uncomfortable feelings?
Escaping my feelings — of discomfort, of alienation, of anger — was a great relief to me. I thought I was a lot more fun when I was loaded. People who knew me didn’t necessarily experience it that way. I was checked out emotionally, not present for myself or for anyone else who wanted to connect with me. Or I was over-the-top emotionally, experiencing everything as betrayal or abandonment. I would often take crazy risks.
I was lucky in many ways; I never wrecked the car, got busted, or lost a job over my usage. But I certainly behaved in ways that were inconsiderate and ill-considered, both in my efforts to obtain illegal substances and while under their influence. I was shocked when a colleague questioned my fitness to lead an artistic project because of my habit of constantly being stoned. Or when friends told my girlfriend at the time that they thought I was cruel to her. I couldn’t perceive myself the way others were seeing me; I was numb to the effects my behavior was having on those around me.
I stopped drinking because of another girlfriend; I wanted her to stop drinking so I offered to do so as well. It would be later that I would come to understand that as codependent behavior. I didn’t go through any process to facilitate recovery, not 12-Step meetings, not therapy. I just stopped. I didn’t miss drinking that much, probably because I continued to smoke pot, daily, several times a day, for another six years.
What made me finally get completely sober was that I started to experience negative health consequences; I was lethargic, having headaches and recurrent depression. I had always promised myself that I would stop if I felt drug use was impairing my health, and I could no longer deny my symptoms.
On January 15, 1984, I spent the morning marching in the first Martin Luther King Day parade in Los Angeles, along with other members of my white antiracism group. When I got home, I started to roll a joint and then thought, “Maybe I just won’t do this today.” That extremely limited commitment was key; if I had declared, I’m never going to get high again, I would never have succeeded. Not today was a decision I could live with, and I could make that decision anew each day. In 12-Step meetings they say, “One day at a time,” and although it would be a few more years before I attended any meetings, the wisdom of that slogan was incredibly helpful.
After an accumulation of several not todays, I began to notice that I hadn’t been getting high for a while. I was initially concerned that I wouldn’t be able to write anymore; getting high had been part of my creative routine. I worried about how I would get through a workday; marijuana breaks were built into my schedule. And I couldn’t imagine how I was going to face socializing with people without medicating myself.
I did continue to write, though, and I took a more responsible job and my friendship circle shifted; I started to interact more with women who were also not getting high.
If drinking or drug use is or has been part of your lifestyle, have you ever contemplated stopping? If you did stop, what kinds of things changed for you?
I wish I could report that everything was fine then, but anybody in recovery will tell you that sobriety is about more than no longer ingesting substances. Stopping the habit of self-medication is a necessary first step toward sobriety, but it’s just the beginning of the process. It was not a big leap for me to go from getting stoned to working all the time, the latter garnering me lots of praise and social approval, except from friends and loved ones who protested that I was still absent.
I was also stuck in an addictive pattern of parallel relationships. For years, in my twenties and early thirties, I felt compelled to be involved with more than one romantic partner at a time, often without the knowledge of those partners. I couldn’t leave one partner without have another lined up, because I was terrified of being alone. It was like chain-smoking, lighting the next cigarette off the faltering embers of the previous one. I caused pain and turmoil to women I claimed to love, and I recreated the turbulence of my childhood home with the daily drama such arrangements ensured.
Can you identify other addictive or compulsive patterns that you adopted in order to keep uncomfortable feelings at bay?
By the mid-1980s, I no longer drank or took drugs. I had instead transferred my addictive patterns to work and relationships. It was the evident misery that parallel relationships were creating in my life that moved a friend to recommend a ten-week workshop for Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACA). As I mentioned in “The Power of Responsibility,” this workshop was taught by Jael Greenleaf, whom I had when I first came to the Woman’s Building.
The premise of the workshop was that as children of alcoholics, we had learned behaviors that did not support our growth into healthy adults. ACAs are inclined toward patterns of addiction and patterns of codependence. Codependency is a state in which we focus on another person’s addiction and attempt to “help” them, which has the unintended outcome of enabling their behavior and the unacknowledged effect of ensuring that we never address our own issues.
Greenleaf’s workshop helped me to understand my life and my behavior in new ways. In my dysfunctional family I’d learned methods of coping that had been essential to my survival as a child but did not set me up to flourish in adulthood. When parents are unstable, children feel their job is to reduce anxiety in the family. Some of the ways I tried to do that were by becoming my mother’s confidante and trying to comfort her; never talking about my own feelings or what was awry in our household; feeling responsible for my own needs and not expecting my parents to take care of them; and tolerating as normal neglect, abandonment, inconsistency, and criticism. The ACA workshop was the true start of a recovery process for me, a process that, by the way, is lifelong. As they say in 12-Step meetings, “There’s no ‘ed’ at the end of the word ‘recover.’”
Do you find yourself behaving in ways that may have been essential skills to survive a difficult childhood, but which don’t work that well anymore, now that you’re an adult?
One of the assignments Greenleaf gave was to attend 12-Step meetings and I chose Alanon, the program for family members and partners of alcoholics and addicts. I was no longer struggling with drinking or taking substances; not doing so had become easy. But I was very much struggling with feeling like I had to take care of and be responsible for everyone in the world except myself.
Both the ACA workshop and Alanon allowed me to reflect on my own patterns of thinking and behavior. I saw I often gravitated toward extremes in my choices; moderation was a concept I scarcely understood, one that seemed bland and uninteresting. I saw how I often responded to conflicts by escalating the drama of them, rather than looking for ways to de-fuse, resolve, or cool them down. Greenleaf suggested that such tendencies might point to adrenaline addiction. Having grown up in a stress-filled household, my body was accustomed to the surge of this hormone that increases heart rate, breathing, and metabolism in response to stress. Just like the lab rat that keeps pressing the lever to receive a reward, the more I could keep my life in a state of tension and upheaval, the more of that powerful hormone I produced. That’s why I didn’t need to swallow substances anymore; I could, through my life choices, induce in myself a chemically altered state.
I also saw how often I had the urge to “help,” even when that help was unasked for or even unwanted, and I saw how much of my identity was rooted in being that “helper,” rather than focusing on how to attend to myself. This is not an uncommon condition for women; our social role is often defined by the way we provide assistance to our parents, partners, children, family members, bosses, or coworkers. Service to others is of course an uplifting virtue (to be further explored in “The power of service”), but not if it is the only one that is valued, and not if we serve others at the expense of taking care of ourselves. Alanon taught me to keep my eyes on myself. Since the Covid lockdown, 12-Step meetings can be accessed online; a link appears in the Resources section at the end of this chapter.
Further, I learned that the only way to shift an unhealthy pattern of engagement with another person was for me to behave differently. As long as I focused my efforts on trying to change another person, nothing would ever change. When I started acting differently with them, the dynamic could not help but shift. This re-orientation of my thinking was the real beginning of my sobriety.
Eventually all this exploration led me into psychotherapy. My therapist provided a model of bonding I hadn’t known in my childhood. It took years for me to unearth and recognize my authentic self, so habitual was my inclination to put on the mask of who and how I thought I was supposed to be. It took more years than that to become willing to show that authentic self to my therapist. She was patient with me and stayed steady while I continued to resist. Finally, after many years, I finally learned to trust — myself and her.
She’s also the person who recommended I try yoga. Although I had been in therapy for a long time, I still had trouble tolerating and sitting with my emotions; I believed they would overwhelm and destroy me. Either I would be totally shut down and have no idea I was feeling anything, or I would be hysterical.
I believe my therapist suggested yoga because she thought I would learn some tools to calm myself. Perhaps she was aware of my tendency to somatize, to experience my emotions through physical symptoms — headaches, tight neck and shoulders, skin rashes, upset stomach — and thought a physical practice would complement our talk therapy. I doubt she imagined what a profound transformation it would bring.
My therapist’s suggestion of yoga led me eventually to Kundalini Yoga, where I learned that chronic stress affects the nervous system. Trauma or chronic stress in utero and as a baby or young child can actually prevent the physical nervous system from fully developing. Sustained stress and trauma results in imbalances in hormones and neurotransmitters; as mentioned earlier, this sets the stage for addiction. The sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight response) is often in a state of chronic hyperarousal, while the parasympathetic nervous system (responsible for “rest and digest” activities such as sexual arousal, salivation, tears, digestion, and elimination) is underactive.
Kundalini Yoga helped me to address these issues in the following ways: Controlled breath and movement increases the circulation of energy through the body, allowing it to release blocks. Specific patterns of movement cause the glandular system to secrete, reregulating the body’s chemistry; this helps to strengthen and steady the nervous system.
These glandular secretions also strengthen the organs, which can be compromised by stress and trauma as well as by substance abuse. The kidneys can be weakened by fear; the liver can be depleted by too much anger. Additionally, the liver is the organ responsible for filtering all those substances we put in our system. Being in a constant state of fight-or-flight also raises one’s blood pressure, which in turn puts a high demand on the heart.
Finally, Kundalini Yoga can provide meditation practice to calm our minds, literally slowing our brain waves, and clearing trauma out of the subconscious.
Practice: Sober curious
(If you want to listen to this practice, click here.)
For those interested to explore sobriety but who are not yet ready to make an ongoing commitment, there is the “sober curious” movement. This began in the United Kingdom and has been adopted in the United States, particularly by Gen Z. People who want to reevaluate their relationship with alcohol agree to participate in either Dry January or Sober September, making a one-month commitment to forego alcohol.
• Some participants might undertake this month of sobriety with their
significant other or in a group of friends; others make the decision to
pursue it individually. They might post about it online or keep it
private. Increasingly, some cities have “sober bars,” where one can get
a variety of non-alcoholic beverages, or “mocktails” in the familiar atmosphere of a bar or club. Such establishments provide the social benefits of congregating without alcohol consumption.
• Studies show that even a month of abstaining from alcohol can
produce great benefits, from improved sleep and weight loss to money
saved and better skin. Even when people return to drinking after the
month is over, many of them report that they drink less than before.
Some people decide they enjoy their sobriety or don’t enjoy the
negative effects of alcohol and continue their abstinence beyond the
30 days. Not drinking can become a habit.
***
Sobriety helped me to become more present, aware, and authentic. Now with the use of breath and meditation, with a connection to an energy greater than herself, GuruGrrrl is able to meet any circumstance, challenge or delight.
What might your journey look like? What might you imagine for yourself as possible? What might you stand to gain by giving up self-medicating?
References
Gonzalez, Irina. “What Is Sober September? the ‘Sober Curious’ Movement Is Spreading.” The Temper, The Tempest, 17 Sept. 2019, https://www.thetemper.com/sober-september/.
“Meditation for Healing Addictions.” 3HO.Org, 20 Nov. 2020, https://www.3ho.org/3ho-lifestyle/health-and-healing/meditation-healing-addictions-0.
Further reading
Find 12-step meetings and other recovery resources at:
https://www.12step.org/social/online-meetings/.
This is a complex tool with many different facets. The “How It Works” tab will help you navigate to find what you’re looking for.
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