Welcome to episode 2 of the sober and happy podcast. My name is Tim, and I will be your host. The goal of this podcast is to take you through my journey of getting sober, how I have overcome the difficult challenges that I have faced along the way, and how I have gone from a life of simply just being sober to a life where I am sober and happy.
In this episode, I want to discuss the importance of identifying the reason for getting sober, or what I like to call: “discovering your big Why” and the pitfalls in the idea that you must get sober for yourself.
You might hear a lot of talk about finding your why behind getting sober. I think there are actually three why’s we need to concentrate on during our recovery journey:
- Why we started drinking
- Why we continued drinking (even when it got bad)
- Why we want to quit drinking
I will discuss the importance of uncovering why we started and continued drinking in a future episode, but today I want to focus on the importance of first identifying the big why of getting sober.
When I first got sober, I would go to meetings and people would often ask me why I eventually got sober. I would tell them there were many reasons, but the biggest was I was tired of breaking my mom’s heart. I knew she constantly worried about me, and it was killing her to watch her son slowly kill himself.
Almost always I would be confronted with the idea that I can’t get sober for my mom, and that unless I decided to get sober for myself, I would certainly relapse. I would ask why that was and most people couldn’t really explain why. It seemed like one of the many things that were passed down as gospel through the recovery pipeline without anyone really stopping and asking if it was true.
Here is the thing though. At the end of my drinking and the beginning of my sobriety, I couldn’t get sober for myself. I did not think I deserved a better life.
In fact, in the last years or so of my drinking, I began seriously contemplating suicide. So much so, that I began planning how I was going to do it. Sometimes when I would pass out in bed at night, I would fantasize that maybe that might be the night I finally overdid it and if I was lucky, I might not wake up.
People often ask why I was suicidal, and didn’t I know that killing myself would cause even more pain than I was already causing through my addictions? I know that now in hindsight, but in the state of mind I lived in for many years, I honestly thought the world would be better off without me.
How could I be capable of getting sober for myself when I didn’t even feel I deserved to live anymore? Many of us don’t love ourselves enough that we feel worthy of a better life. But maybe you love your children enough to try. Maybe you love your spouse enough to get started. Or maybe like me, you simply want to stop breaking your mom’s heart.
I want to tell you, whatever your motivation is to start this journey to recovery is good enough. Others may not agree, but all that matters is that is good enough for you to get started.
One word of caution I want to talk about around using outside motivation to get sober is you cannot put conditions on your sobriety that is based on other people.
When you frame your “why” based on someone else’s response to you getting sober you are putting the responsibility for your recovery on them and their actions. We need to stop having conditions for staying sober based on other people. That is putting the burden on them and eventually, the blame on them if we relapse. We need to take responsibility for our drinking and our recovery.
For example, I was working with a guy that told me his reason for getting sober was so that his kids could trust him again. His oldest teenage daughter had lived through multiple relapses and understandably did not believe him that he really meant it this time and often would say things like “Why should I believe you that this time is different, we all know you are just going to relapse again”.
After one particularly bad blow-up and his daughter telling him that there was absolutely nothing he could do to regain her trust, he stormed out and went straight to the bar telling her on the way out the door that “well if you aren’t going to trust me anyways I might as well go drink”.
He came to my house the next day and explained to me that there was no point in getting sober if his daughter was not going to trust him again. After a long discussion, he realized a few things:
- He was putting the responsibility for his sobriety on his daughter.
- When he relapsed, he was also putting the blame for it on his daughter.
He realized that he needed to reframe his “why” for getting sober. With his permission, I would like to share with you what he came up with:
“I want to get sober so that I can be the best father I can be to my children. I will be the father that they deserve. Someone they can count on in the difficult times and the good times. The type of dad that shows up no matter what”
I asked him how that type of father would act. This is what he wrote down:
- I will have compassion for what I have put my kids through and give them the proper time and support for their healing.
- I will be fully present in their life.
- Instead of drinking when things get rough, I will show up instead. No matter what.
See the difference? He took the responsibility back. There are no conditions. There is no timeline. It simply is him showing up every day for his kids. It is simple, it is beautiful, and it was effective.
It took time, effort, and compassion, but through showing up every day he not only regained that trust in his children, but next year he is going to be walking his oldest daughter down the aisle. He is a completely different father today; in fact, you can say that today he is “The best father he could be to his children” which was exactly what he set out to be.
Hopefully, as you listened to this story, your mind started wandering to what your why might be. Discovering your “why” doesn’t have to only be at the beginning of your sobriety either. Maybe you have been sober a while and simply are not happy with your life right now. You can create a “why” for motivation from going to from simply being sober to living the amazing life you are capable of living.
Don’t overstate your “why”. My friend from the story before wanted to create a huge list of demands on himself for being a good Dad. He wanted to commit to showing up to every sporting event, every parent-teacher conference, being home for dinner every night, etc.
The list was long, and it was setting him up for failure. You need to give yourself permission to not be perfect. Life circumstances happen, and I didn’t want him to think he failed as a father the first time he missed dinner because he had to stay late one night at work.
Using his story as an example, I want you to write down your why. You should state it as the person you want to become versus how people are going to respond to you. Who is the future version of yourself that you would be proud to become? As you change into the person in that statement, often the results you desire are going to come naturally in the process.
Once you have your “why” written down, I want you to anchor it. Writing it down is a huge step, but I want you to feel what it would be like to live that life. Close your life and imagine an event where you would know that you became that person.
Maybe it is getting that job offer for your dream job, a realtor handing you the keys to your first house, sitting on a beach with your family during that dream vacation you have always promised them, or simply hearing a child say “Mom, I am proud of you”.
Whatever it is imagine that moment like you are living it today. What does it feel like? (PAUSE HERE)
Sit with that moment and experience it for as long as you like. I find it helpful once you are in the peak of feeling that emotion, get out your phone and use the voice recorder and tell yourself who you are going to become and how wonderful you are going to feel in that moment. Then down the road when you hit a rough patch and don’t think you can go any further, play it back to yourself. It will help you get back to the state of that moment when you were filled with hope.
Often, people, I work with struggle with picking one thing. It is perfectly OK to have multiple reasons for getting sober. For example, my big “why” was to quit breaking my mom’s heart. But it was also important to me to be someone people could count on. That included friends, employers, other family members, and even people I just met.
When you have multiple why’s, it is important to prioritize them to not try to change everything at once. That is a recipe for getting overwhelmed, burned out, and eventually being in danger of what I call the “F-it zone” where you are one life circumstance away from thinking it’s just too much and giving up.
When I first got sober, I had a huge list of things I felt I needed to accomplish to feel like I fixed my life. After graduating with my bachelor’s degree in my 20s, I planned on getting my master’s degree, but my drinking was already at a level where I never pursued that, so it went on my list, and early in my recovery I enrolled and began seeking that. What I found is the amount of time required for school was negatively affecting more important things in my life at that time, like rebuilding relationships and focusing on my recovery. Eventually, I had to drop out and I felt like I failed once again. If I would have prioritized things first and looked at what each of those things demanded, I would have realized that at that time in life, it should have not been a priority.
The other thing to realize is it is OK to change your mind and priorities. As you grow, your priorities will change. What may be important to you at this point in your journey may not be high on the list down the road. I have never gone back to get my master’s degree. I realized at some point that it would not add to my life or career, would take a lot of time away from other things that are more important to me, and would require me to take out student loans again right after I finally paid the old ones off. Realize that changing priorities is not giving up. It often is just focusing on what now is more important.
Once you know your “why”, don’t just wing it and try to fix everything at once. Write out the things you need to do to become the person you are destined to be. Break that down into consumable bites and then write out the actions that you need to take to
For example, right now one of my big “why’s” is to inspire people to blaze their own path in their recovery journey so they can rediscover joy in their life. As a statement alone, that won’t get anything accomplished. I will just wander around trying things and years down the road will realize I have not accomplished anything.
To avoid that, I needed to decide what that looked like and wrote down a list. One of the items on the list was to launch this podcast. To accomplish that, I needed to write down the tasks required, such as buying recording equipment, getting cover art created, learning how to edit audio, picking a host, and finally recording and publishing the content. It is a lot of work but broken up into tasks it seemed much more achievable and way less overwhelming.
There is so much more I want to accomplish beyond the podcast, but by breaking everything out and prioritizing it, I realized that although I want to do so much, right now in this moment of my journey, it is OK to focus on just this right now and I can explore the other items on my list later.
When you look at your list of the items you want to tackle, I also find it helpful to identify the potential obstacles between where you are now and where you want to be so you can start working on those. If you want to buy a house for your family but have bad credit, you must tackle that obstacle. If you try to avoid it, you will never get that house. So, you would look at what is required to clean up your credit. It may be changing your current spending habits to stop accruing debt and paying it off instead, looking for side gigs to make extra income to pay off the debt faster, etc. But if you don’t have a plan to tackle the challenges between where you are now and where you want to be, the chances of you getting there are very small. Don’t rely on luck, make your own luck.
Most importantly, check in on your progress. This not only will help keep you on track but in those moments when I think I am not doing very well, it is always helpful to look back and see how far I have come already.
And here is the beauty of working on becoming the person that you want to be. At the beginning of my recovery, I shared that I was not capable of getting sober for myself because I didn’t believe I was worthy of a better life. I just wanted to quit breaking my mom’s heart.
As I changed into the type of person that wouldn’t break her heart, I continued to grow and became someone my mom is extremely proud of and brags about me to everyone.
More importantly, somewhere along that journey I realized I also became someone I am proud of, and although I couldn’t get sober for myself, today I stay sober because I love this version of me so much, that I would never dream of going back to who I used to be, and I can’t wait to discover the future version of myself.
And that is what I hope for you on this journey.
If you found this helpful, please share, like, and subscribe so that more people can join us on this amazing journey. New episodes come out each Friday, so I look forward to connecting with you next week. And as always, thank you so much for listening, and keep living sober and happy.