Grief and Sobriety

I didn’t expect to go through so much grief in sobriety. I thought I would stop drinking…and my existence would magically get ‘better’ or ‘easier’’.

I was unprepared for how much life would change. And all of the feelings that would come up as a result of quitting drinking.

The grief of letting go of identity:

I prided myself on knowing my wines. Of being a ‘wine drinker.’ Of knowing who I was and what to do with myself when entering a social situation. I drank from the time I was 15. I drank more of my lifetime than not. I am still discovering the ways that alcohol formed my way of being from the ages of 15 - 36. We can't really comprehend how much alcohol normalization is baked into our culture. It - the use, normalization, the glamorization, that it's the default go-to of any high or low in life...it’s the water we swim in. Learning to de-identify with that means grieving things that I can’t even articulate…but only things I can sense.

The grief of letting go of friendships:

The grief of realizing that some friendships might be more accurately described as drinking buddies. We don’t talk about this a lot in female/female-identifying relationships. That we have ‘drinking buddies.’ But I realized that when I quit drinking, that’s exactly what some of those relationships were. And because I didn’t have the proper language to describe those relationships, it felt confusing to let them go when I stopped drinking.

The other way sobriety affected friendships was decreased availability. When I was drinking, I didn’t consider the importance of having a relationship with myself. Ever. It was just family, work, friends. When I got sober, my relationship with my self went to the top of the list. That created a ripple effect in all of the other relationships…including even the most supportive, or supportive-seeming friendships.

The unprocessed grief from my drinking days, now ready to come to the surface:

There were many big life events and losses that happened during my 21 year relationship with alcohol that went unprocessed. Drinking became my coping mechanism for any ‘too much’ feeling including sadness and grief. The alcohol effectively froze my grief so I didn’t have to deal with the overwhelming feelings associated with loss. When I stopped drinking and started to learn how to regulate my nervous system, that grief had permission to thaw. To be seen. To be acknowledged. And continues to ask to be processed.

No one really warns you of this.

It reminds me of parenthood - in the way that no one tells you how hard it’s really going to be.

I believe one of the reasons is because we are trained to only talk about the Good things in parenthood. Or the Good things that sobriety gives us. But…when that isn’t our experience, we internalize it and think there’s something wrong with us. Maybe it’s because we feel so isolated in our experiences and the shame feels so awful, that we don’t talk about it. And the cycle continues. And continues.

But shame can’t survive in the light. That’s why it’s so very important to get support during sober journey: to shed light on where the shame lives within your story and your body: so it doesn’t overtake you and compromise your sobriety and goals for a better, more aligned life.

If you are feeling grief and shame in your sobriety, I want you to know how completely normal that is. It’s just that no one talks about it. That continues to be the reason I share what I share. So you (and I) don’t feel so isolated in our feelings. To normalize the difficulty of sobriety, of generational trauma and of…being a human in this world. If you are feeling the isolation of sobriety and are wanting support, let’s connect.