Connection and Addiction

It’s been said often that connection is the opposite of addiction. In fact, I said it at the start of this article – Support Networks for Staying Sober and Healthy (hyperlink please). It gets repeated because it rings like some mighty doorbell of truth..

Because alcohol blocks meaningful connection, sobriety should start to unblock it. The benefit of alcohol-free living has to be that it destroys the barrier to connection and allows it to flow like the mighty Zambezi.

But there’s more to it than that, the support of other people helps but it’s only part of what keeps you sober. When you have deeper, compassionate relationships, drinking yourself into next week looks deeply unattractive. Ultimately, relationships become more important than the drink ever could.

Once you reach that point – you ain’t going back.

But there’s more to it than that, the connection born of sobriety isn’t just about other people. It’s about so much more than your relationships. Which is precisely what this article is going to dig into.

What’s the true meaning of connection?

Connection with what?

Connection is a very big word and the number of things you could connect with is probably endless. You could make your own list but here are some ideas to start with:

● Connect with your sense of self

● Connect with your emotions

● Connect with your hobby

● Connect with your spirit

● Connect with your mission

● Connect with your body

● Connect with your passion

● Connect with your god

● Connect with your purpose

● Connect with your identity

That’s barely scratching the surface.

Many of the sober superstars build connections in several of these areas. They often don’t do it consciously, who wakes up and says “Today, I’m going to connect with my purpose!”? But that’s what they do.

Through learning, action and reflection they connect with their purpose. And on the way they begin to understand much more about their identity and sense of self, their passion and mission and if they accidentally get into endurance morris dancing they discover a bit about their bodies too.

You're probably wondering, if much of this connection comes from just getting on with life, why do I need to think about it?

You can do it by accident, but you can also be more deliberate about it. You could identify an area you aren’t strong in, let’s say connecting with your emotions, then you could consciously move closer to it.

Understand Yourself, Understand Sobriety

If you listen to the 60 or so episodes of Flat-Pack Sober you will hear an awful lot of self-awareness. Partly that’s the essence of the animal, you must have a degree of self-awareness simply to talk about yourself! But it’s also because sober superstars are very self-aware people.

It’s funny how self-awareness tends to blossom after you stop putting an awareness limiting drug into your body every day. Yes, most people get more conscious when they stop drinking but the superstars have usually done something else as well.

They’ve learnt stuff, done stuff and reflected on it all. They’ve read, listened, tried, failed, tried again and absorbed a lot. As much as anything, that’s what builds personal recognition.

Sure, you can take surveys and personality tests, these can offer you some insight. But all you are doing is learning a new concept, trying to implement it and then reflecting – or using metacognition if you like words like that.

The short answer is always: Learn, Act, Reflect. That’s how you figure out who you are.

Service and Addiction Recovery

Which is a fine way of arriving at the idea of service.

Without wanting to get into any arguments about the precise meaning of step 12, it’s where AA commitment to service comes from. Even if you’ve never been to a meeting in your life the idea of helping people probably chimes with you.

Humans are a social, cooperative species, the service of others is buried deep in homo sapiens DNA. It’s something that comes naturally to you. And it’s definitely worth giving into that urge.

Science types have proven that serving others, in particular by volunteering your time, makes you happier, makes you more self-confident, improves your physical health and can even advance your career.

Incidentally, volunteering for a local organisation is an amazing way to meet new people – and build connections with them.

For AA this service should be focused on helping other people who have a problem with alcohol. Which is great. You probably feel indebted to the people who helped you get sober so why would you not want to pay it back?

But you don’t have to. There’s a world full of problems out there and they all need robust and compassionate people to address them. Maybe your skills, your passion, your contacts, will take you to working in another area.

For example, Gethin Jones (episode 47 please hyperlink) doesn’t directly work on helping people to get sober. But as he’s one of the country's leading prison reformers you could give him a pass. His life is service. He’s just following his skills, his passion and his contacts.

How you Solve Problems Alcohol Free

One of the things that keeps coming up during Flat-Pack Sober episodes, is how the sober superstars take what works for them and ignore the rest. This is one of the biggest advantages of self-awareness.

And it is one of the most important ideas that constantly gets ignored. All advice is bad, but some of it works. The trick is, of course, to figure out which bit works. But here’s the thing, no advice works for everyone.

Most gurus will tell you that everything they say works. But this isn’t true (remember all advice is bad). The fact that they’ve tried out everything they are saying is no guarantee it’ll work for you. It only proves it’ll work for them. And you’re not them.

As Suzanne McConnell points out in her excellent book “Pity the Reader”, even greats like Kurt Vonnegut fall into the trap of methodolgism: believing that what works for you will work for other people.

Once you understand how you solve problems, you can listen to advice and intuitively know whether it’ll work for you. Even better, you won’t feel bad for not adopting some esteemed sage’s pronouncements because you’ll know that they’re not for you.

To become a bit more aware of how you solve problems check out the Flat-Pack Sober quiz here (hyper link please). It’ll help you to understand how you approach problems. Once you know you’re more reflective you’ll ignore people who tell you to get stuck into a problem. Or if you’re a social problem solver you’ll learn to swerve the idea that the solution to your problem can be found in a book.

Sober Values

What’s important to you?

That’s a big question. If asked, people favour honesty over lying, they favour clean over dirty and they favour humour over boredom. But that doesn’t make them all equal. Some people are driven by honesty, or cleanliness or joking. Some are less bothered about them.

People are a patchy work of values and priorities. But one thing is for certain, your values change when you stop drinking. For one thing, you stop valuing getting your hands on another drink.

Maybe the dishonesty that typified your drinking career has swung toward a desire for honesty. Maybe letting yourself go when you were drinking has transformed into a need to be well turned out.

You discard your drunken values and replace them with sober ones.

But what are those values? What is important to you? If you can already reel off a list, great. If not, it might be time to do some thinking.

It’s a simple task to unearth your values. Grab a sheet of paper and write down a few sentences about how you want to behave. It might help to think about how you want to show up in particular categories, such as:

● Family

● Friendships

● Work

● Money

● Community

● Faith

● Hobbies

● Fitness

● Health

● Learning

You don’t have to have values for all these areas, some of them might not be a priority right now, and that’s fine.

Once you’ve got some words down on the page, it helps to put them into an order of priority. Not all values are created equal. You don’t have to order them in strict priority, you may wish to order them based on how well you’re doing in each section. At the top would be everything you feel you need to work at, the ideals you want to get closer to.

This isn’t just a one-time job. It helps to revisit this list and remind yourself of how you want to be. And it’s important to revisit them every three to six months to check if the priority has changed or if anything new has come to light.

The Purpose of Life After Alcohol

There is probably no bigger question than what’s life for?

Connecting with meaning is one of the dense and thorny tasks of sobriety. It’s one thing to get sober but it’s quite another to find a cause worthy of your energy, your focus, your sobriety. So, what’s it going to be? What’s your life for?

Maybe you already know. Maybe all you want to do is help other people get sober. In one of the recent episodes Patrick Ruddy (hyperlink please) talked about how much of a role Quit Lit had played in his journey – once he had the mental space and the energy, all he wanted to do was write a book. Which is great.

There are many ways to help people get sober. Yes, you could become a sober coach. But this involves training (expensive) and marketing (not enjoyable) and running a business (annoying). Yes, you could start an AF brand but everything just mentioned also applies.

Thankfully, there are other routes. You could help out with one of the group programmes. Organisations like SMART recovery, Recovery Dharma, LifeRing and yes, AA, are always looking for people to help. You could help at a meeting, mentor people or start fundraising.

There’s plenty of other organisations, like Alcohol Change UK for example, that could do with more money so if fundraising sounds like fun, then there will be a queue of people wanting to talk to you. You could also start campaigning.

There are many injustices around alcohol that need to be dealt with: pricing and availability, advertising, alcohol education, taxation, recovery services, ongoing support, and on and on. You could fill a life with just one of those. Campaigning comes up a lot in Flat-Pack Sober, an episode that covered many of the issues was with Trevor Twohig (hyperlink episode 30 (I think)).

And that’s just alcohol! There are many, many other problems that need to be sorted. Look at your values, find something that resonates with them and start.

The most important thing to do is to start. Gandhi possibly, maybe, might have said,

“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”

You can never be too sure how genuine quotes like that are but it’s way too true not to mention. Don’t spend a lot of time imming and amming about the right course of action – act.

How Other People can Help

Once you’ve defined your values and plotted out your mission then you need to get started. Yes, you can just throw yourself into things, but it might be a good idea to get some help.

There are many ways to go about that but there’s a lesson you can learn from Martin Luther King. On 28th August 1963 over 250,000 people marched on Washington in search of freedom. They were treated to one of the greatest pieces of oratory the 20th century ever heard.

The “I have a dream” speech has also been seen by a few people on YouTube, one version has over 26 million views and there are many others. How do you get so many people to listen?

The short answer is that Martin Luther King had clarity. He was very clear about who he was and how he worked. He was very clear on his principles and his values. He was very clear on his mission. Moreover, he didn’t just know it, he lived it.

You know that he was a principled man, he lived his creed of nonviolence, even in the face of intolerable provocation. You know what his mission was, in fact, you even know what he dreamt of. The whole speech is an invocation of the world he wanted to live in.

Because you know who he is, and what he stands for you want to help. His clarity is infectious, his clear purpose grabs us and drags us along.

Which is why it’s important to start with yourself. If you want other people to help you to achieve your goals, you must be very clear on what those goals are. It’s not passion that attracts help and support, it’s focused passion.

The irony is that Martin Luther King didn’t sit in his bedroom pondering stuff and then emerge onto the stage fully formed. He sharpened his passion on the whetstone of connection. He forged his values and principles in the fire of life.

The trick, then, is to use connecting with other people as another way of strengthening your connection with yourself, which in turn will strengthen your connection with other people.