At Least I Am Not On Fire
And other idiosyncrasies of the alcohol recovery journey
Like many people who suffer from alcohol abuse disorder, more plainly known as alcoholism, I’ve used a lot of methods to stay sober and pursue recovery. I share a detailed reflection on my decision to stop drinking here, but, in this piece, I want to talk about that nuance between sobriety and recovery — a topic too often wrought with fear-based controversy.
I was fortunate to wake up one morning and just say, “No more,” and stop drinking, no second thoughts. I come from a genetic heritage of cold turkey quitters when they, like me, simply got tired of the drama they caused to themselves and others. One day my grandfather was mainlining martinis, the next day he was mainlining Shasta cola. This concerned me largely because I always got the olives from his martinis — appropriate for a child — and I was sad there would be no more olives. On the upside, there was no more yelling, either.
But that was a different time, those crazy 1980s, and when I quit drinking I lived in the middle of Manhattan, where my entire lifestyle and career bonding ritual centered around alcohol. Pop’s social life and career as a corporate leader for a current Fortune 150 company in Manhattan also centered around these things, but he was long retired by the time he stopped his armchair sipping and slurring.
So, here I was, staring out my 31st-floor apartment window at the New York City skyline, saying, “No more,” and while the desire to drink was completely gone, I had no idea how to stay in that mode. I got Naltrexone from my doctor, which isn’t a cure-all because you can still get hammered on it (I did the field research a year prior when I mildly considered stopping). I tried some sober buddy apps, but those were full of seemingly miserable people who literally could not stop. Against my preconceived notions, I gave Alcoholics Anonymous a try. And it fit — for a bit. It mostly helped me because it brought me some accountability in structure with meetings to start and with the 12 Steps, which I do believe are magical, even if a lot of the rest of the program has been severely bastardized by “intergroups” and “group conscience.”
I treated all of this like I did most things: balls to the wall. I didn’t just do 90 meetings in 90 days; I did 174. I started my steps after month one; I finished them by month five. The ones that scare most people (the one around rigorous accountability and the one around rigorous amends) empowered me, whereas they trip many others up. I loved it. I was hungry to learn. I was hungry to heal. I was hungry to grow. I was hungry to understand my faith and what part that played. I was hungry to do right by others. I was hungry to help others learn what I learned. It worked for me.
Until I didn’t.
It was somewhere in my fourth month, between steps 10–12, that I said, “Sobriety is not enough for me.” In A.A., “The only requirement for membership is the desire to stop drinking.” Abstinence from alcohol was a commitment I made to myself, and while the program helped solidify that decision between witnessing what we call “yets” (people who unfortunately only stopped after doling out more pain than you did) and the words of fellows who shared their stories (though most focused on abstinence vs. recovery) none of it taught me how to stay sober without white-knuckle gripping meetings every day for the rest of my life. That was a conceptual nightmare. Especially since the adage that “meeting makers make it” is not true (lots of chronic relapsers never miss a meeting), and I know some addiction clinicians that argue meetings are merely addiction transference. I think it depends on where you are in your program, to be honest, but after a while, I agree. Early on, I NEEDED those meetings, but after four months, if I needed commiseration and connection with others afraid of an inanimate bottle to keep me from the sauce, it meant to me that I had failed.
I’d rather be a drunk.
But I also didn’t want to be a drunk, so I started looking into other options to help me. I had been seeing a therapist who specialized in addiction recovery from day three as well, who diagnosed me in maintenance mode after four months. She is the one who truly taught me how to stay sober — working on my “underlying causes and conditions” that caused me to want to numb, not necessarily drink, but having been terrified of drugs since I was a littlun’, alcohol had been my only option. She gave me a checklist of thoughts I could replace and rewire my neural pathways like a workout for the brain, “I want to drink slash numb” was replaced with, “I enjoy feeling even the sadness because I grow.” She taught me how to meditate and go within and examine what was happening inside; before this, I was terrified to be alone with my unnumbed mind. She gave me a relapse checklist, knowing that relapse has nothing to do with where you are and what is around you, but everything to do with your mental state, that I kept handy but never had to use. My work with her is what led me to learn how to stay sober.
And, this is where we get to sobriety vs. recovery. In my personal opinion, sobriety is abstinence from the drink, recovery is when you grow as a human and start to live a bigger, more honest life, preferably with purpose. Hence my earlier concern that “Sobriety is not enough for me.” My sponsor at the time didn’t get it. “You just need more meetings,” she said. “No,” I countered, “I need more tools and I need more time and I want to build a big beautiful life outside of the rooms.” I think the kicker was when I shared in a meeting that I was agonizing over trauma from a dear friend’s unaliving, and the response from other A.A.s was “At least you’re not drinking!” Sure, I was a puddle on the floor who could barely breathe and hyperventilating and battling my own potential ideation, but, “At least I was not drinking.” Well, yeah, at least I am not on fire, too. I knew then I had to get to real solutioning because I was not going to find it here.
Living a self-shame-based life in which I had to remind myself daily that I used to be quite the jerk, wasn’t doing it for me. How did I get to higher self? How did I achieve self-energy? How did I fix what made me want to numb so I didn’t even need the exercises my addiction therapist gave me?
So, next, I got a recovery coach, or a “go-to guy” as we like to call him. Someone with decades of sobriety who started in A.A. but had also spent years exploring other ways to recover — and even worked in a rehabilitation center. He opened my mind to so many different perspectives, from A.A. circuit speakers who even challenged how the program was spreading in ways unintended by the founders to different philosophers, public speakers, spiritual perspectives, and so many other assets my mind didn’t even know existed. We’ve spent thousands of hours on the phone over the last 21 months of my 25 months of sobriety, and we focused on recovery. Yes, I needed to get “time over target” but I also needed to learn how to be a whole person who wasn’t afraid of what made me drink in the first place.
Side note: Alcoholism is a disease, it’s a disorder, it’s an allergy, it’s a… whatever. None of that debate applies to my story. All I know is, that once it went inside of me, I could not stop, and I became a monster.
As best I could, disease or not a disease, allergy or not an allergy, I wanted to become a person who did not want to numb. I’d gone far beyond abstinence from drinking at this point. And, I still didn’t want it. Yay, I was still not on fire. I’d entered into the mental state of “How do I keep from wanting to numb?”
So, I did the next step: trauma therapy. If you’ve read my other stories, you’ll learn a bit about where some of my trauma comes from, but what I have so far published barely scratches the surface. I found an amazing trauma therapist who had an air of spiritualism about him that resonated with me (I am a spiritualist who practices what many might call “light work” or others might call “witchcraft,” but I think the former is more accurate — I know real witches, they are far more interesting than me). He specialized in Internal Family Systems (IFS)-led Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). He did his proper intake with me to ensure I was a viable candidate for such (e.g., not dissociative), and we dug into the depths of my ghost memories. It was brutal. More brutal than stopping drinking. More brutal than some of the things I did while drinking. We reprocessed all of that grief and anger together and then identified what parts of me I developed to survive. We introduced me to them, so I could understand my inner workings and how to relate, manage, and start parenting my inner child (who has turned from a terrified creature to a girl with pigtails on a pink swing) — and even shadow work because, in my not so clinical opinion, our shadow is where our magic lies. If we can bring that forward into self-energy, we can be unstoppable.
Now, did this all magically turn me into a better and recovered person? OF COURSE NOT. I had to re-learn every human interaction as a sober person and apply these new tools and awareness levels. Sometimes, it went amazing, and I brought people closer to me. Other times, it went awful because I subconsciously hid behind the trauma work and lashed out at people who tried to love me and the monster was back, even sober. I can honestly say it’s only been since June 2024 that I could truly operate out of self-energy, stop using my trauma as an excuse to put up walls, and prioritize loving others versus protecting myself from phantoms. Progress, not perfection.
So, wait, Jen, we were talking about sobriety. Yes, we were, then we started talking about recovery, which is where the real magic happens because that is what changes you as a person. And being faced with the option of living as the same person who simply did not drink vs. an evolved person who no longer had anything to numb was an easy choice. Who wants to white-knuckle grip their way through life? Surprisingly, a lot of people do, and I work hard to not let my desire for them to live bigger turn into judgment because I should know from my program(s) that their lives are none of my business. Even then, I have to be careful not to cast my ways on them, because my ways are not for everyone. Progress, not perfection.
So, where did A.A. go? It’s still here, sort of. I’ve been sober 25 months and I’ve consistently gone to meetings for a total of 12 of them and I’ve never once been compelled to pick up a drink (one day at a time)— even though I love to hang out at bars. When I moved to a new town and I had no one because I had screwed up the relationship I moved here for, I threw myself back into A.A. to find fellowship. I liked it, but didn’t love it, but I started helping others again. I was also still dabbling in The Luckiest Club and Recovery Posse and other types of recovery systems if only to keep building my custom program along with my coach and my trauma therapist.
I am grateful for sobriety. I am more grateful for recovery. I am even grateful to A.A. for jumpstarting me. But, for me, it has its limits, and I hit them. Outside of me continuing to work on the true parts of the program that helped me, on my own or with my coach, I am largely done with it. What will the next chapter of my recovery pursuits bring me? Who knows.
But at least I am not on fire.
