Sobriety can be an incredible way to shed relationships you’ve outgrown as well as find new ones that align with your new values. While it can be emotional and heartbreaking to watch some relationships veer off course, all you can do is trust that friendships will disintegrate or grow organically, and whichever direction they take is probably for a reason. This isn’t to say that all of your friends will be threatened, or that all of your friendships will change.
Enjoy healthy self-control, a centered enjoyment of life, and inner freedom.
If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse issues and want to get help, you can call or text 988 in the United States for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline who can connect you to substance crisis counselors. If you’re outside the United States, there are almost certainly resources in your area that you can connect with. Because sobriety is not always easy, and even if it’s improved most parts of my life, it’s also damaged a few. I think that anyone who is considering getting sober should know the full truth — not to be discouraged, but to be prepared. Enjoy the opportunity to learn about desire by not fulfilling it. Be more realistic about the actual rewards of indulging desires; enjoy waking up from the spells cast – “Drink this! Smoke that! Eat these!” – by addictive hungers.
Crazy Town Vocalist Shifty Shellshock’s Cause of Death Officially Revealed
However, the idea behind the Addicted-Self Model is that alcoholism, like many other diseases, is a physical ailment—one that there is no cure for, only treatments that can help alleviate the symptoms. And one of those treatments is to simply (or not so simply) avoid consuming alcohol or whatever substance is the object of the addiction. If you’re like most drinkers, you’ve likely surrounded yourself at some point with being sober sucks a group of people who also drink. I’d argue that many of us gravitated to a group of friends who have drinking habits that align with our own, and we did this because we didn’t want sober friends. The late Crazy Town vocalist Seth Brooks Binzer, better known as Shifty Shellshock, was clearly struggling and suffering with his addiction in the time leading up to his tragic death one month short of his 50th birthday.
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- Alcohol helped me forget my awkwardness and not-belongingness and it helped me talk to and be with people without my neck muscles freezing up (this is a thing that happens to me, I literally lose my neck function in large groups of people).
- Many newcomers wonder how long-time members can make these claims when sober members are still acting out.
- If people press that response, I’ll either stare at them and hold an uncomfortable silence (this is enjoyable at some point), or just change the subject.
- It truly is one of the best choices I’ve ever made.
New details have emerged now confirming Binzer’s cause of death. There are plenty of negative elements to getting sober too. And, although I absolutely believe that the positives outweigh the negatives, I also think that it’s essential that those of us who are sober talk about the bad parts too. Information and support for those affected by alcoholism/Alcohol Use Disorder.
The Downside of Sobriety: The 6 Things No One Tells You Might Happen If You Quit Drinking
You might think of sobriety as a kind of loss, but it’s actually fueled by a sense of gain. Sure, there’s a place for using your will. But studies show that willpower gets depleted fairly quickly in most people. Instead of willing yourself to avoid the bad, enjoying the good – the benefits of your sobriety – will naturally draw you in a higher direction.
How Do We Achieve Long-Term Sobriety?
The official certification came yesterday, which also marked the three month anniversary of Binzer’s death. Most deeply, enjoy relating to the world and to your life not gripped at the throat by desire. Enjoy the inner peace that comes from not being compelled to do things that may feel good in the moment but have big lingering costs for you and others.
It’s seen as normal to drink, and quitting that drug can feel like breaking a social pact. So your bold, life-improving decision to not drink will mean changes almost everywhere you look. Here are some surprising (and not-so-surprising) occurrences that will inevitably happen to your relationships, your identity, even your free time, and how I’ve learned to deal with each one. The life I had before I quit drinking was a lot like Groundhog Day; I was always waiting for it to begin and always reliving the same stuff, day after day, year after year.
