If I Had to Get Sober Again, I'd Do These 5 Things

Hey everybody, welcome to the Addiction Unlimited podcast where you get to learn everything you want to know about addiction and recovery. I'm your host, Angela Pugh, co-founder of Kansas City Recovery, Life Coach and Recovery and Alcoholic. To learn more about me, you can listen to episode zero on your podcast app or find us on the web at AddictionUnlimited.com. Hello my friend, welcome back to Addiction Unlimited, I'm your coach, Angela Pugh. Today we're going to do something a little different. I was thinking the other day if I woke up tomorrow and had to start my sobriety all over again, what would I do? Not what would I know or what books would I read or what podcasts would I listen to, but what would I actually do? And the funny thing is, after 20 years sober and coaching thousands of people and watching people succeed and watching people struggle, I realized I wouldn't really do anything differently. I actually got a lot of things right, completely by accident. Not because I had more answers than anyone else or I had some magical advantage, but because I had reached a place where I was completely exhausted. I wasn't trying to negotiate anymore, I wasn't trying to prove that I wasn't that bad, I wasn't trying to figure out how to keep alcohol in my life, I was done. I fully surrendered. And I think surrender is one of the most misunderstood words in recovery. I think people hear surrender and they think it means giving up or like something's wrong with them or they're weak or something. I don't know, like they're losing, but I think it's the exact opposite. Surrender is the moment you stop fighting reality. It's the moment you stop trying to make alcohol behave the way you want it to. It's the moment you finally say, okay, I can't live like this anymore. Something has to change. And once I made that decision, everything else got simpler, right? Easier, necessarily, but simpler. So today I want to walk you through the five things I would still do if I had to start over tomorrow because these aren't trendy recovery hacks. They're principles, right? Foundational principles. And I think they'll help you whether you're on day one, day 30 or even if you've been sober for a few years and you're just feeling kind of stuck. The very first thing I would do is stop negotiating with alcohol. This is something I did without even realizing how valuable it was or what a major effect it had on my whole journey. And I think this is where so many people are fucking this up from the first minute. They're not really trying to quit drinking. They're trying to figure out how to keep drinking without the consequences. And listen, I get it. I did that too. I tried rules. I tried controlling it. I tried promising myself I'd only drink on certain days. You know, I'd tell myself this time will be different. I'll only have two. I'm going to try extra hard. I'll only drink one drink an hour. I made every deal you can imagine. None of them worked. Eventually, I reached a point when I realized something really important. The negotiation was the problem. As long as I was negotiating, I was keeping one foot in my old life and one foot in the life I said I wanted. You can't move forward like that. Imagine trying to go across a river with one foot on the dock and one foot in the boat. As soon as the boat starts moving, you're going in the water. So all of that, maybe just one, I'll start Monday. I can drink on vacation. This time I'll stop after two. I'll just get through this wedding. Every one of those thoughts is a negotiation. When I got sober, I stopped negotiating. I know that sounds overly simple, but it really was that simple. When my brain would start chirping, like, are we going to have a drink today? This is what time we usually start drinking. Do we want a drink? We could have a drink. Nobody would know. When my brain would start in with all that drama, I had one answer. No. We don't drink anymore, dude. Figure something else out. That was it. No debate, no committee meeting, no weighing the pros and cons, no maybe tomorrow, no all start over next week, just no fucker. We don't drink anymore. Because here's what I finally realized. Every time I entertained the conversation, alcohol had another chance to win. Every negotiation gave it another opportunity to convince me. So I stopped giving it opportunities. I made one decision and then every decision after that became much easier. Because I wasn't deciding every Friday, whether I was going to drink, I already decided we don't drink anymore. So the question wasn't, should I drink? The question became, okay, what am I going to do instead? And that one shift changed everything. Because recovery isn't just about saying no to alcohol. It's about teaching yourself that alcohol is no longer one of your options. When alcohol comes off the table completely, your brain has to start looking somewhere else. It has to learn new ways to cope, new ways to celebrate, new ways to relax, new ways to deal with stress. That's what happens in recovery. You can't build a sober life while you're still protecting the possibility of drinking someday. That's why I say surrender is so important. Surrender is simply the moment you stop arguing with reality. You stop asking, but what if I can moderate someday? But what if I'm different this time? But what if I only drink on vacation? To stop trying to solve a problem that has already answered itself? And once I stopped spending all my energy trying to solve the alcohol problem, I finally had energy to solve the life problem. That's when recovery really started. sobriety happened today, I quit drinking, recovery happened the day I started building a different life. For me, those were the same day, but they're not the same thing. And if you're listening to this today and you're still negotiating, I want you to ask yourself one simple question. What am I trying to save? Am I trying to save my health, my relationships, my peace, or am I trying to save alcohol? Because you can't save both. Eventually, one of them has to go. The second thing I would do, and this is exactly what I did the first time, is I would stop hiding. And I want to be really clear about what I mean. I'm not saying you have to post on Facebook that you're quitting drinking. I'm not saying you have to tell every person you know your whole life story. You get to decide what's private. Privacy is healthy. Secrecy is different. Secrecy is driven by shame. Secrecy says, "I hope no one finds out. I don't want people to know I have a problem. What if they judge me? What if they think less of me?" That kind of secrecy keeps you trapped. Because thoughts get louder in isolation. Shame grows in isolation. The stories you tell yourself become more believable when nobody else ever hears them. That's exactly how addiction wants it. Addiction loves secrecy. It loves darkness. It loves convincing you that you're the only person who thinks this way. You're the only one who keeps breaking promises to yourself. You're the only one who can't figure it out. None of that is true by the way. One of the best things I ever did was tell people. I was very proud. I told everybody, "You don't have to tell everybody. You just have to tell the right people." In my radical honesty, something incredible happened. As I shared myself in who I am and what I was doing, I got the opportunity to get really positive and incredible feedback and reinforcement. I was shocked by how positive everyone was. A minute I stopped carrying everything by myself. I wasn't carrying everything by myself anymore. That's when I learned something that has become one of the biggest lessons of my entire recovery. You cannot heal something. You're consistently trying to hide. If you're spending all of your energy trying to look okay, trying to convince everyone you're fine, trying to protect your image, then you have very little energy left to actually get better. Recovery requires honesty. Not public confession. Just honesty. Honesty with yourself and honesty with other human beings. Because when those thoughts stay trapped inside of you? In your own head, they grow. When you say them out loud, they almost always shrink because secrets die in the light. You've probably had this happen before, like something's eating at you for days and you finally talk to a friend about it and halfway through telling them about it, you think, wow, this doesn't sound nearly as true as it did in my head, right? Or after that conversation, like, oh my god, I feel so much better. That's what honesty does. It puts reality back in the room and recovery needs reality. So if I had to start over tomorrow, I wouldn't hide. I would find safe people. I would tell the truth about who I am and what I'm going through and I would let someone walk beside me because none of us were meant to recover alone. And I did this not only by going to meetings, but by sharing the actual truth with the people around me. Okay, the third thing I would do or that I did is I would make my world very small. You guys hear me talk about this stuff all the time and I know that probably sounds strange because we live in a culture that glorifies more, right? More commitments, more events, more invitations, more productivity, more everything. But recovery doesn't need more. recovery needs space to breathe, especially when it's new. When I got sober, I wasn't trying to prove how strong I was. I wasn't trying to show everyone I could still go to happy hour. I wasn't trying to see how many parties I could survive or testing myself. Those are amateur moves. I wasn't trying to whitenuckle my way through every temptation just to prove a point, right? I gave myself permission to have one job. Get sober. That was it. I went to meetings. I spent time with people who supported my sobriety. I went home. I rested. I ate and I repeated that over and over again. And I didn't apologize for it. I think one of the biggest mistakes people make is expecting themselves to live exactly the same life just without alcohol. Same schedule, same friends, same parties, same stress, same routines, just don't drink. It's just asking way too much of yourself. You're trying to change one of the biggest coping mechanisms you've ever had. Of course, life is going to look different for a minute, and that's okay. In fact, it's necessary. If you broke your leg, nobody would expect you to run a marathon while it healed, right? You'd slow down. You'd protect it. You'd give it time to get stronger. Recovery deserves that same respect. It doesn't have to be forever, but for a little while. It's okay if your life revolves around getting well. It should. Because here's what happens. People say, "I don't have time for meetings. I don't have time to journal. I don't have time to work on myself." Well, somehow you always had time to drink. You always made time to recover from drinking. There was always time to lay awake at two in the morning, replaying everything that happened the night before, right? Alcohol demanded hours of your life every single week. Recovery is simply asking you to invest some of those hours back into yourself. And here's the beautiful part. The smaller I made my world in the beginning, the bigger my life became later. Because I wasn't shrinking my life forever. I was creating a foundation strong enough to build on. That's what you're doing when you temporarily make your life smaller. You're building your foundation. And once it's a little stronger, then you venture out a little bit. Okay, next thing. The fourth thing I would do is let other people help me. And yes, I know for a lot of us, that's easier said than done. Because if you're anything like me, you've spent most of your life believing you should be able to figure it out by yourself. You don't want to bother anyone. You don't want to look like you don't have it all together. You don't want people to think you're a mess. You don't want to ask for help. So you tell yourself, I've got this. I'll figure it out. I just need to try harder. But here's the truth. The same brain that got you into this mess isn't the brain that's going to get you out of it. You've heard me say this. I couldn't use my broken thinking to fix my broken thinking. When I first got sober, I didn't even trust my own thinking. I couldn't. It wasn't trustworthy. My brain had spent years convincing me that drinking was the answer to everything. Celebrate drink, bad day drink, stress drink, lonely drink, anxious drink. My brain had one solution for every problem. So why would I suddenly trust it to lead me into recovery? I didn't. It just didn't make sense. So I learned from other people's experience. I listened. I asked questions. I took suggestions. Not because those people were smarter than me. Not because they were better than me, but because they already solved the problem, I was trying to solve. Right. They already had the answers. They had peace. They had freedom. They had a life that wasn't controlled by alcohol. And I definitely trusted that more than my crazy thoughts. That's wisdom. I think sometimes we confuse independence with strength. Right. They're not the same thing. Real strength is being willing to say, I don't know how to do this yet. Can you help me? And here's something I've learned from coaching over the years too. The people who struggle the most are often the people who insist on doing everything alone. Not because they're not capable, but because they're isolated. They're trying to solve every problem inside the same mind that created all the fear, shame, and anxiety. Recovery was never meant to be a solo sport. Whether your support comes from meetings, a coach, a therapist, another recovery community, it doesn't matter what matters is that you stop believing you have to carry all of this by yourself because healing happens in connection, not in isolation. And the last thing I would do, and honestly, this is what everything else has been leading up to, I would stop making alcohol the center of the story. I know that sounds weird, but hear me out. If your entire recovery becomes about alcohol, thinking about alcohol, missing alcohol, fighting alcohol, avoiding alcohol, then alcohol is still running your life. It's your higher power. It's just running your life from another direction. The goal isn't to spend the rest of your life resisting alcohol. The goal is to build a life where alcohol doesn't fit anymore. A life that is fun and fulfilling and peaceful, so alcohol just doesn't make sense. Recovery is learning how to sit with your feelings instead of running from them. It's learning how to have hard conversations, how to set boundaries, how to disappoint people without falling apart, how to calm your own nervous system. It's learning that boredom won't kill you. And anxiety is survivable, right? It's learning loneliness doesn't last forever. It's learning to trust yourself again. Those are the things that change your life. Quitting drinking is one decision. Recovery is thousands of tiny decisions. It's the decision to take a walk instead of pouring a drink, to ask for help instead of pretending you're fine, to tell the truth instead of hiding, to feel your feelings instead of numbing them. Those little decisions don't seem very exciting in the moment. But over time, they become your identity. One day you wake up and you realize everything's different, right? You don't spend every day thinking about alcohol anymore, not because you have this incredible willpower, but because your life has gotten so much bigger. You've built friendships and confidence. You have peace. You built a relationship with yourself that doesn't require escape. And that's the life I want for you, not just a sober life, a free life. Because sobriety is quitting drinking, recovery is becoming the person you were always capable of being once alcohol stopped getting in the way. And if I had to start over tomorrow, I'd do exactly what I did the first time. Surrender. I would stop negotiating, stop hiding, let people help me and make recovery my priority. And then I'd get busy building a life I was excited to wake up to. Because at the end of the day, that's what recovery has always been about, not losing alcohol, but finally getting your life back. So if you take nothing else away from this episode, I hope it's this. Recovery isn't about finding the perfect strategy. It's about making a decision and then honoring that decision one day at a time. I didn't stay sober because I had more willpower than anyone else. I stayed sober because I stopped negotiating. I wasn't hiding. I let people help me and I gave myself permission to make recovery my priority. And then I spent years building a life I was capable of. life that I didn't need alcohol to survive. And that's what I want for you. Because I know some of you are listening to this today and thinking like, oh, I've already tried. I've quit 100 times. Maybe I just don't have what it takes. And please don't confuse repeated attempts with failure. Every time you've tried, you've learned something. The question isn't whether you're capable of recovery. Of course you are. The question is whether you're willing to approach it differently. Because what I know after coaching thousands of people over the last 20 years, the people who build lasting sobriety aren't the strongest. They're not the smartest. They're not the ones with the easiest lives are the most money. They're the ones who stop trying to do it alone. They're the ones who stop protecting alcohol, who become willing to build something better. And you can easily be one of those people, no matter how many times you've started over, no matter how much shame you're carrying, no matter how long you've been stuck, you are one decision away from changing the direction of your life, not because everything changes overnight, but because every great recovery starts with one honest decision. Remember what I said to my brain, we don't drink anymore, dude. Let's figure something else out. And if you want help figuring out what that's something else looks like, that's exactly what I do. Whether you're just getting started, you've been stuck in the cycle of quitting and starting over or you've got some sober time, but know you're still carrying around the same anxiety, the patterns, the same emotional baggage, I can help go to addiction unlimited.com/call and book a call with me if you're ready to get serious about change. We'll spend some time talking about where you are, what's been keeping you stuck and what the right next step looks like for you, addiction unlimited.com/call. And if we're a good fit to work together, I'll tell you what that looks like and what program is the best fit. There are options to work directly with me as low as $600 all the way up to $3,500. Either way, you don't have to keep trying to figure this out by yourself and ending up back at day one. When you're done screwing around with all the drama and you're exhausted with wasting your time over and over again, I'm your person addiction unlimited.com/call. Thank you so much for spending this time with me today. And just this episode helped you. Would you do me a favor and share it with someone? Recovery spreads one conversation at a time and you never know who might need to hear this. I love you my friend. Thank you for being here with me today. I hope you're having a fantastic day and I will see you next week. You've reached the end of another great episode of the addiction unlimited podcast, Candid and Honest Conversation about addiction and recovery. Be sure to visit us at addictiononlimited.com to join the conversation and access show notes and links to everything we talked about. Love this episode. Please take 30 seconds to subscribe, rate and review on iTunes to help us improve and give you the information you want. Thanks for listening. See you next week.