Therapy
How to Stay Sober
What is Sobriety?
Our founder, Zach Gerbholz, spoke at length about the nature and meaning of sobriety in his post My Last Day With A Sober-Minded Alcoholic Grandmother. We encourage all readers to enjoy that article as it will enhance the scope of understanding in tandem with this article!
Essentially, sobriety is a consistent, proactive effort to renew our minds daily.
Other, more mainstream, definitions focus on the idea of recovery and strategies to deal with inevitable urges that arise from the poor habits we developed while in the throws of addiction. For many, total abstinence is likely the goal. Statistics show, however, that setbacks are common.
An estimated 80% of people who sought long-term sobriety had at least one relapse (Moos RH, Moos BS. Rates and predictors of relapse after natural and treated remission from alcohol use disorders. Addiction. 2006;101(2):212-222. doi:10.1111/j.1360-0443.2006.01310.x)
Nature or Nurture? How to Become & Stay Sober
The avenues of achieving our initial sobriety vary from person to person. Many proclaim an ulterior God saved them from themselves, others take a more practical approach and claim consistent and daily effort slowly removes them from their addiction.
One of the more important steps to take to ENSURE sobriety, is to change one’s environment.
We become locked in an endless dance with our addiction. If we are to recover, we must break the cycle of old places, people, jobs, and things.
A traditional approach is tried and true Alcoholic’s Anonymous. There is an abundance of experience and evidence to suggest that AA works for many people. However, it is not exclusively an AA claim to efficacy. Any mutual support group has been shown to decrease chances of relapse and ensure life-long abstinence from substance use disorder.
How to Stay Sober
The age old advice for staying sober is as follows: “Don’t drink/Do drugs and go to meetings”. If this works for you, please engage with it strongly!
However, for most, sobriety requires attention to personal details and a level of complexity in approach. By complexity, I do not mean complicated. Once our internal complexities are solved and strategies implemented for identifying triggers, stressors, life management quirks, and everyone’s personal nuances, sobriety becomes a new, simple, norm. In fact, reduction of complexity into a new simple approach for life is precisely what the process of getting sober is.