“A man who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than is necessary.” --Seneca

In countless meetings and online interactions with my sober friends, I’ve heard a common lament:  “I don’t know if I can go the rest of my life without drinking.”  Well, of course that is difficult to conceive of.  What are you going to have for dinner for the rest of your life?  How are you going to pay your bills for the rest of your life?  How will you maintain your health for the rest of your life?  Those are unnecessarily large ways of conceptualizing your future.  It’s too much information.  We can’t process like that.

Don’t let me beguile you, Dear Reader with false analogies.  Specifically on the question of drinking, is it not a legitimate question?  Can one really commit to living the rest of one’s life in a state of sobriety?  Can we make such a decision and follow-through with it?  I think we can.  First, we should address the imperative to do this.

I am of the belief that alcoholism is a permanent state.  I do not believe once a person has become alcoholic they can return to normal, moderated drinking.  I’m not just basing that opinion on my failures.  I’m not so vain to assume that because I can’t do it, no one can.  I base my opinion on the experiences of others, as well.  I have seen people with lengthy sobriety have a slip turn into a relapse and have that turn into a complete regression to pre-recovery state.  It is not a unique phenomenon to my experience, either.  I’ve read plenty about it.  If we assume that this is not universal, I think we can at least accept the premise it’s extraordinarily unlikely that any of us who have sunk to alcoholic drinking for any significant amount of time can go into a period of remission and return to non-alcoholic drinking.  The risk of relapse is so high I simply could not, in good conscience, recommend anyone try it.  So, there’s your imperative:  your drinking will likely never return to normal once you are an alcoholic and as such, the best preventative step you can take against the annihilation of your body, mind, and soul is to abstain from drinking for the rest of your life.  

Having established the imperative, let’s try to look at the objective in a more manageable way.  I don’t want to throw platitudes or empty slogans at you, Dear Reader.  I know you are too smart for that.  So, don’t begrudge me the oft-repeated mantra, “one day at a time.”  If you cannot conceive of not drinking for the rest of your life, don’t look at it that way.  Wake in the morning and promise yourself you will not drink that day.  Keep that promise to yourself and repeat it the next day.  And the next.  Not only does this approach re-focus us to our most immediate threats to sobriety, it prevents the despair of being overwhelmed by the daunting mission of lifelong sobriety.

Dear Reader, resist the temptation to project yourself forward in time to events yet to happen and worry about how you will remain sober for them.  Do not cast yourself into the future to meet anxieties and challenges that are not immediate to keeping your daily pledge to yourself to remain sober.  It is simply too much.  How will you stay sober through the death of a loved one?  You’ll likely have a better idea of that when the time comes to address it.  More pressingly, how will you stay sober tonight.  Draw your focus to that.

Unstated so far in this examination is the fact that the thing you are worrying about might not happen.  Take, for example, the dreaded time period after a medical examination and before diagnosis.  That’s an incredibly stressful event and our instinct of self-preservation (somehow still intact through all the preceding self-destruction) kicks in.  The mind courses through myriad hypotheticals.  The heart quickens.  The stress response is activated.  The brain tells you it can slow down with alcohol.  You will need a different defense mechanism to this positive feedback loop of anxiety.  So, remember this:  most of the hypotheticals you are imagining are not going to take place.  In fact, it may be that you get good news instead of bad.  What good was all that worry, then?  None, whatsoever.  We as recovering addicts have a lot on our plates, even on a good day.  To pile unnecessary stress onto ourselves for no reason whatsoever is to jeopardize our sobriety and our sobriety is the best tool we have to deal with life’s challenges.  Without it, we are lost.  So, we must protect our sobriety from unnecessary stress and direct our focus and worries to the immediate threats to our recovery.

This is not to say there is no point in having plans for the future.  Plans for the future will keep us going through hard times.  It’s okay to have hopes, dreams, and plans.  What is not okay is to spend one’s time and energy fretting about distant concerns before it is necessary to do so.  This robs us of the daily joy of our recovery and causes unnecessary suffering.  Dear Reader, I hope you will meet challenges as they come with a clear head and with the confidence in yourself you’ve gained from your recovery from addiction.