The Key to Staying Sober

You’ve probably heard the idea that connection is at the centre of recovery. From the twelve-step movement, to Facebook groups, to Johann Hari, connection with other people is hailed as the key to staying sober.

And it is important. It’s one of the four key parts of the sober equation that I talked about in “How to Maintain Sobriety After Addiction Recovery” (hyperlink please). In fact, you can argue it’s the most important of all.

Connecting feels good

Two other parts of the equation, emotional intelligence and trigger management are in many ways about building and strengthening relationships. Emotional intelligence is obviously about connection, but trigger management is also a way of navigating social situations. And that would be pointless if you weren’t interested in strengthening connection.

There’s an irony in that isn’t there? Many people drink because they believe that it helps them connect with others. In fact, we all believed that at some point. It often feels that way – at the beginning.

It starts off feeling sociable, but it ends up leaving you alone.

I have a feeling that you know what I’m talking about, but just in case you don’t, this process was vividly demonstrated on the podcast recently. When I interviewed Martyn Davies (hyperlink to episode 53 please) he spoke of how his usage started off being social, but ended up isolating him.

Which means that sobriety must involve reversing that process. Getting out the other side is always about building connections and strengthening relationships. You can hear that in every single podcast episode we’ve ever recorded.

But it is hard…

We often lack the skills needed to build meaningful relationships: self-awareness, honesty, self-regulation, abilities like talking about feelings, socializing and understanding emotions. Which is basically why I’m writing this and why you might want to take a look at “Maintaining Sobriety while Socialising” (hyperlink please).

Let’s get into it. Let’s take a look at what you need to rebuild connections and power up relationships.

The Support Network for Life After Alcohol

Connection is key. Great, but connection is a nebulous concept – who should we be connecting to? As with so many things, it depends.

There is no optimum size for a support group. That would be weird, you’d end up saying things like, “I’m sorry, I can’t talk to you because my friendship group is currently full”. Some people prefer a few close friends, some people want to know everyone a little. Neither is wrong, it’s simply a matter of knowing yourself.

What’s the right support for you?

The thing about answering questions for yourself, is that it helps if you actually think about it. In that spirit, you can divide your support network into a few sections.

● Family

● Partner

● Friends

These sections can in turn be divided into subgroups, your parents as opposed to your children or different friendship groups.

Once you’ve recognised each of these groups you could begin to ask yourself some questions about them. Such as:

● Are you happy with your current relationship with these people?

● How would you like these relationships to be?

● What can you do to close the gap?

That might be a useful exercise, but if you have three groups, several of which are composed of multiple subgroups, and three questions for each, that turns into quite a few questions. My intention is not to overwhelm you. You could simply ask, “Where should I begin?”

Is it with your family?

You can’t pick your family. Relationships with your parents, siblings and children is a big and complex area. What’s the one relationship you might focus on?

Is it a partner?

Romantic relationships are also pretty big. Unsurprisingly, they get affected by drinking. They can also be seriously affected by getting sober. If you’re currently in a relationship, then it’s worth considering how it’s working.

Is it friends?

Maybe your family is good, and your romantic life is solid, but maybe you need to prune your friendship tree. Or maybe you already have and you're thinking about building new sober friendships.

One of the problems with articles like this is that they end up being fairly exhaustive, which can be exhausting itself. It’s absolutely not the case that you have to sort out all these relationships in the next week.

By thinking through these areas, it should become obvious which ones need the most urgent attention. Focus on those. And don’t get hung up on the others. If you’ve worked out that they need attention, then you’ve made a start. But you only have so much attention – do what you can and be kind to yourself when you think of the rest.

Relationships that Help You Stay Away from Addictive Behaviors

All relationships are a double-edged sword. They have high potential benefits and high potential harms. You may have noticed but love is basically the process whereby you show someone your weakest, most vulnerable aspects, so that they can use them against you.

While I’m being a bit flippant, it highlights an interesting idea about relationships. For them to be supportive, they must be open. Being open leaves you vulnerable and this means relationships have the potential to be destructive. This is fundamental to connections; for them to work they must have the possibility of being both good and bad.

Potential is one thing, what’s happening day to day? You can place any relationships on a spectrum, with supportive on one side and destructive on the other. This gives us four different types of relationship:

● Good

● Bad

● Indifferent

● Mixed

In truth, no relationship is 100% good. Unless you happen to know someone who never has bad days, all your relationships will have ups and downs. Still, you can broadly categorise all relationships into one of these four categories.

The good, supportive ones and the bad, destructive ones are kind of obvious and don’t need much elaboration.

Arguably it’s impossible to have a completely indifferent relationship. Even if someone would go no further than lending you their phone to make an important call, they can’t be totally detached. Given that about 50% of people would lend their phone to a stranger, I doubt you have many completely indifferent relationships. You probably know people who on balance don’t really help or harm you – maybe I should have just called them uninvolved.

In many ways, mixed relationships are the worst. Because you never know what you’re going to get, they make you uneasy. Will this person be helpful, supportive, even loving? Or will they be critical, mean and hateful. Along with destructive relationships these are best avoided.

Maybe it would help you to think through some relationships in your life and ask where they sit? When this idea was first explained to me, a couple of relationships immediately sprang to mind. Those are probably the ones to consider, then act on.

In an ideal world, all relationships would be supportive. A number of indifferent relationships may well be inevitable. But you’d have to think long and hard about continuing a relationship that is harming you psychologically.

The reason we often continue these relationships is because we don’t feel like we have any choice. We feel obliged to continue them because of history or genetics. Or we just feel trapped, like there’s no chance of existing away from this relationship.

The truth or importance of all of that is difficult to unpick and is probably best accomplished with the support of a good friend, sponsor, mentor or therapist.

Love and a Sober Lifestyle

There are a variety of opinions about sobriety and dating. Some people say, “Don’t date until you’ve been sober for X number of years”, some people say, “Mind your own business, it’s my life”. I am not an expert of sober dating, mostly because I’ve been married longer than I’ve been sober (yes, I have a very understanding wife).

Love can be amazing but…

I don’t propose to write an article about sober dating. I do, however, think it is your life and if you want to get into a relationship then you’re best placed to make that call. Obviously, you should be careful. As we’ve just identified the stakes are high – romantic relationships can do wonders for your sobriety, offering true and much needed support. Or they can throw you from a great height onto the jagged rocks of despond.

Which might be why some people advise not to do it until you have some sober time clocked. However, just because it’s a place that angels fear to tread, it doesn’t mean they don’t put their feet onto that ground, it just means they don’t rush in – because they’re not fools. Neither are you.

If you’re already walking through the minefield of commitment, then you’ll want to make the best of it. Just as drinking has an impact on serious relationships, and so can getting sober. Some relationships don’t survive one partner getting sober, others flourish. But they always change. Because sobriety changes a person’s mental, emotional and physical life – that’s going to impact on a relationship.

Let’s take a quick look at the difference between drunk and sober relationships.

Alcohol-Free Living is Living Differently

I hasten to add, there isn’t a serious psychological theory about sober relationships and drunk ones. But there’s an idea that typifies the difference between the luminous relationships I have now and those I had in the half-light of my drinking life.

There are only three ways of approaching a relationship.

● What’s in it for me?

● What’s in it for them?

● What’s in it for us?

The problem with the first two approaches is obvious. If you are only thinking about yourself then you’ll always be taking from a relationship, no one likes that. If you are only ever giving to a relationship, then the chances are you're being used.

The only sensible approach to a relationship is combining the two – working out how we can both get our needs met is the way to make relationships work. By asking “What’s in it for us?” we’re making sure everybody gets something.

This is what the author and therapist Terrance Real calls relational thinking. There’s a lot of depth and understanding that sits below the idea but it is pretty simple. If we approach any relationships by thinking about “us” rather than “you and me”, then the relationship will be better.

Often, when we drink, all we think about is ourselves. We are only interested in, “What’s in it for me?”. Actually, we’re mostly interested in “What’s in my glass?”. Our priorities get squeezed down to very few things, but those things are always about me, never about anyone else in the relationship.

Now, I’m not saying that all drinkers are selfish, evil people. Far from it, what I’m saying is that if you drink enough, you tend to focus more and more on the drink. Eventually you get to the point where you prioritise the drink over everyone else. I’d like to think I didn’t get all the way there but there was certainly something self-serving about many of the relationships I entered into while drinking.

Interestingly, the opposite can also be true: people drink to cope with their tendency to forgo their own needs within relationships. It’s very easy to drink as an attempt to handle the constant demands of “What’s in it for them”.

Moving from me to us

The key to developing truly sober relationships is to develop relationships that meet the needs of all the people in them. This is of course the only sustainable form of relationship, because making sure that everyone gets what they need benefits everyone in the relationship.

Ultimately, this means we must start thinking about “us” rather than “you and me”. If we think separately then there is a way that I can win and you can lose, or vice versa. But if we think collectively then we can only win or lose together. There’s the key point about considering our relationships from the standpoint of “us”.

Sober relationships are about “us” and they’re the antidote to drunken self-focused relationships.

Healing Rifts after Quitting Alcohol

Let’s face it, we’ve all done stupid things. Some of those things damaged relationships. Some of the time we were way too focused on “What’s in it for me”, rather than thinking about everyone in the relationship.

Often the work of sober relationships is the work of rebuilding. In many ways, our relationships must recover too.

If you have lost touch with someone and you’d like to change that, then the first thing you’ll have to do is get in touch. If it’s been a while, then that’ll probably scare the butterflies out of you. But it's what you must do. And the result will probably be a lot more pleasant than you expect.

If you are in contact with someone but the relationship has got tricky, here are a few ideas that you can use to start the process of renewal.

Start with relational thinking.

Begin by realising that for the relationship to work, it must be a “What’s in it for us” kind of affair. Grab hold of the simple idea that the only way that you can win is if you both win.

Listen

At the end of the solar cycle people want to be heard. For most people, being understood does way more than being apologised to. Listen, understand, empathise.

Show don’t tell

There’s no point in telling people you’ve changed, they’re only going to believe you if you behave in a different way.

The sad news is that sobriety isn’t enough.

It might sound harsh but just turning up sober probably isn’t going to slice the cheese. You probably need to show them that you don’t behave the way you did when you were drinking. After all, a sober jerk is still a jerk.

Being sober doesn’t always stop you being annoying

I’m not saying you're a jerk; in fact I’m not even saying that you’re not working on yourself – you wouldn’t be this far down the article if you weren’t! What I’m saying is that when relationships break down it’s not because of the alcohol, not really. It’s because of the behaviour that alcohol causes.

Trust me on this one, if you behave in a particular way for twenty years then stopping drinking won’t just make you act differently. The bad news is that it takes work. The good news is that sobriety is the best platform for doing the work.

Sober People Versus Sober Places

Friends are an important part of our support network. After all, who else can we complain about our family too?

When we drink, we often skew our friendship group towards people who drink. Which may

mean that we have to completely revamp our friends when we get sober. Sure, group programmes and sober communities can fill the hole, but it doesn’t work for everyone.

Maybe you’ve had a realisation that runs something like this, “I spent years defining myself as a drinker, now I’ve spent years defining myself as sober and I’m not sure who I really am?”.

Or maybe you just want to widen your circle of friends. Either way, it helps to think beyond sober people and start to think about sober places.

Sometimes people get stuck on the idea that they can only socialise with sober people. While it’s obviously easier (and way more enjoyable) to socialise with people who aren’t drinking, it’s important to realise that people don’t need to be full-time sober. They just need to be sober when they’re with you.

In other words, what we need is often sober places rather than sober people. Let me give you an example.

I skate every Friday evening. No one drinks while we do it (because that would be stupid). It doesn’t really matter what they do when we finish. They could go home and drink a slab of beers, it wouldn’t matter because when they're with me, they’re sober.

Sober places are great places

If you don’t like skating there are many other things you could try: dancing, campaigning, crafting, martial arts, local politics, volunteering, some sports are even pretty sober.

The key is to realise that you can broaden your circle if you’re happy to meet people when they’re sober rather than trying to meet people who are always sober.

People are Sober Inspiration

Learning to manage triggers is obviously important to remaining sober. Access to housing, health care and transport are obviously things you need to build a sober life. But don’t underestimate how important other people can be to a complete and joyful recovery.

In fact, I’m going to go further, what’s the point in recovering on your own?

Surely one of the major joys of getting free is that it allows you to improve and deepen your relationships. Coming out of the fog of alcohol is like coming out of solitary confinement. It’s great to see people again but it can be a bit full on.

Still, it’s worth it. Persevere, because the benefit of connecting with others is that it deepens your connection with yourself. It can be scary to face up to it, but you’ll never really know yourself by staring into the mirror, you’ll only figure out who you are by what is reflected from other people.

But don’t take my word for it, Gandhi is with me on this one,

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

Which is a particularly interesting observation from a guy who spent a lot of time sitting on the mat staring inside himself. The truth is out there, we just have to go and look.

The connections are out there, you just have to go and look. It’s scary. It requires getting past a lot of emotional and mental baggage. But it’s worth it.

Best of all, you don’t have to do it alone. Connecting with others is the antidote to that fear.