Dealing With The Confusions Of Early Sobriety

By Jean Kirkpatrick, Ph.D., WFS Founder; June 1986

 Finally, we have quit drinking and our world is going to be set right. Our marriage will now flourish, as it did in the early years, and all the problems with the children will finally be over. And thank heaven, the in-laws and parents will stop the constant haranguing about drinking. And it certainly will be a nice change to hear a few compliments for doing something about the drinking.

What a wonderful dream sequence! Very likely not a single one of those events will ever take place. And if you waste your time waiting for any of them to happen, then you are still dreaming.

For some very crazy and very human reason, we are under the delusion that when we quit drinking, everything in our life will be wonderful. When it isn’t we begin to think we did something wrong. Or we wonder if it’s really worth it, this life of sobriety.

But why isn’t everything wonderful? Why isn’t every problem solved? Why are some members of the family still angry, as if you’ve committed a crime? And why are the kids so belligerent? And why is it always so tense?

And why does everyone speak to you in such a dumb way, like you’re not present or conscious? Early sobriety is the time of our greatest confusion. While we are still in that peculiar state of expecting everyone to congratulate us, we find that that isn’t the reality of life.

Those who seem to make us feel good and who REALLY UNDERSTAND us are members of our group. THEY understand and they are the ones who tell us how wonderful we are for quitting.

But when we are away from our group, all hell breaks loose and we feel angry all of the time. Angry and frustrated and ready to scream. We think about drinking every once in awhile but then we remember the remorse and the guilt feelings and the headache and the depression and we decide not to go back to that.

But we can’t understand what is going wrong. Well, the truth of the matter is that nothing is going wrong. It’s just that two things are happening, both of which are at cross purposes. Your family is happy that you have quit drinking but the notion that they will probably display towards you in the beginning will be the anger they have been feeling for a long time.

They are not about to congratulate you. Instead, they finally want to tell you off… tell you how many times you spoiled their plans, how many times you insulted them, how many times they wished you were not a part of their family.

Your sobriety is finally a time when they see you sober and know that what they say to you will at least register in your brain. So their reaction to your sobriety will not be what you have expected. As for your kids, you now want to play Super Mom to make up for all the rough times but all they seem to do is stay away from home or yell at you.

Why? The reason for their reaction to you is that for the past several years, they have been taking care of you. They have looked over you, protected you, made excuses for you. They mothered you. They are not about to regress to the age they were when your drinking started to affect their lives.

And that is perhaps the saddest part of all in this scenario of sobriety. That part of your children’s lives is lost to you and that is one of the biggest causes for the guilt you will battle in your sobriety.

And that is why the WFS “New Life” Program can help you, because you will have to know that “The past is gone forever.” No matter how upsetting this fact of your life is … the lost years of your life with your children … nothing can be done about it except to accept that it is over, that you did the only possible thing for the disease you have  … stopped drinking… and that you are a changed woman who will now try to understand the distance your children are putting between you.

No matter how hard it will be for you to understand this, you must see that they are very, very angry with you because they missed you. They are hurting and have been hurting and they can’t just suddenly be happy all of the time about your sobriety. Sobriety does not make our problems go away.

Sobriety is a time when our problems seem overwhelming, because we are seeing them with sober eyes, with a clear mind, and then we are very confused. That is when we ask if it is really all worth it?

Of course, we know the answer to that. No matter how very bad things seem, there is no problem that drinking won’t make worse. If there is one thought we should keep uppermost in our minds, it is that drinking makes everything worse and there will always be a day when we must sober up and look at the problems.

That day cannot be put out of our lives. Our problems are there for us to deal with. Early sobriety is a time when we come up against several hard truths that whatever we must do in life, we must do for ourselves and give up waiting for someone else to do them for us.

Added to our feelings of guilt in the early days is the feeling of anger we also experience. We are angry because what we have put off dealing with, we must face and deal with it now. The time of postponement is over.

The time of doing is at hand. Even worse than the anger we feel is the feeling of fear. And anxiety. We feel incapable. We know we can’t do it. We know that this problem… or problems… is greater than we are and we just can’t do it! We are nervous, anxious, fearful and angry.

We are squirming with these nagging emotions. Where can we turn? This is the time when we must really live our new program, the “New Life” Program. This is the period when we most need the early morning time of meditation, when we can sit by a window and put our problems into proper order and sort out our emotions that are probably misplaced.

Remember the suggestion of thinking about our problems in relation to eternity? How serious are they? If we had just one day to live, which problem could we eliminate? Are these problems as devastating as we are making them? Do they all require immediate solutions and/or decisions?

This early morning time is when we must begin to understand the strange reactions of our family. It is the time when we must know that our stopping drinking was, and is, the most important decision we have ever made in our lives. We now know that we are the victim of the disease of alcoholism and that we cannot tolerate alcohol in any form.

And learning that this has been the cause of our inability to control our drinking, or our lives, is a relief. We had thought we were horrible persons. But now that we know, we must grasp life and be on top of it, not be swayed or overcome by fear and anxiety.

We know that we must practice feeling like a competent woman and then we will know that we are, because we will find this to be true. And this time of morning meditation will help us to understand our fear, our anxiety, our anger, and our guilt, and we will know that none of this is justified.

Every day we will make certain we have the morning period of meditation to get our emotions right so that we are comfortable with ourselves. And we will know that we are capable of handling the daily pressures. And we will try to understand the anger of our family. And we will know that we have compassionate and understanding friends in our group.

And we will know that every day we get better and life will be very rewarding. And we know now that all of this does not happen overnight… as we thought it would when we got sober, when we expected magic to happen and it didn’t.   

(This article is from The Collection of Sobering Thoughts Booklet, Volume 11 and copyrighted by Women for Sobriety, Inc., PO Box 618, Quakertown, PA 18951.)