Cognitive therapy can help you recognize and shift negative thought patterns and behaviors, empowering you to take control of your mental health. These processes are vital for individuals to successfully overcome addiction and maintain long-term recovery. I truly believed there was no hope for me and that I was somehow special. Sure, other people could quit drinking and turn their lives around, but they didn’t know what it was like to be me. I had to care about my sobriety more than I cared about my own ego or feelings.
Dual Diagnosis 101: How Mental Health Disorders and Substance Use Disorder Often go Hand in Hand
This is the hard part, but it’s also the most rewarding. When you do start to deal with your problems in healthier ways (and you will), you are going to feel completely transformed and unstoppable. You will have strong days when you feel like you can take on the world. And you will have days when every minute feels like a struggle.
Establishing a Sober Lifestyle
And then you are hit with the inevitable trigger. For many people it’s simply the fact that you’ve finished work, maybe had a semi-shit day, and your brain is craving its little release. Whether you have one day sober or 10 years, recovery presents challenges.
Addiction Therapy Programs
Alcohol and drugs cover up pain and suffering. They cover up all of that “stuff” that happened that you don’t want to deal with. But, being sober commonly causes people to fear that pain coming back.
Sobriety Fear #6: You’ll be bored.
If a booked social calendar is important to you, you’ll find ways to be proactive and realign what you do to fit your new lifestyle. You will have good days, hopeless days, and every other sort of in-between day on this journey. Eventually, you will have to decide who to keep in your life and who to let go.
Most Common Reasons People are Afraid to Get Sober
Over time, our ability to cope and come up with solutions that work for us becomes easier and easier. The first thing is that sobriety can be a really hard thing to face for a lot of addicts. There’s the chance that they might not make it through it, they could fail, and then there’s the pressure to succeed. There’s a fear of a life without the ability to ever drink or take drugs again. Staying sober means staying clean, and that alone can be a scary thought for many addicts and alcoholics. For some, the thought of detoxing, working through rehab, and succeeding at recovery scares them.
How to Make Exercise a Regular Part of Your Addiction Recovery
Life in sobriety will not be the same as life living with substance abuse – it will be so much better. And in the meantime, being sober will allow you to make more meaningful, lasting friendships based around ‘real’ things as opposed to intoxicated interactions. Many people struggling with addiction want to get sober, but share fear of being sober common fears about what sobriety entails. Let us take this opportunity to refute these fears and show you why getting sober is better than you realised. It is very normal in the early days to feel like you’ve resigned yourself to a life of misery by quitting alcohol. Those early days of sobriety may leave you feeling hopeless.
- I am not the only one who feels the way I felt.
- We’ll also provide specific steps to take when your heart starts racing and your mind starts wandering.
- This fear is common, but by looking at the sober community, you can see that those thoughts are not true.
- There’s a fear of a life without the ability to ever drink or take drugs again.
Similarly, there are many people who drink and use drugs because they feel more fun, daring, likable, and interesting when under the influence. Removing the thing that they believe gives them more charisma or self-confidence around other people can trigger the very real worry that they won’t like their sober self. If you’re asking this question, you’re not alone. Many people drink and do drugs precisely because they don’t like who they are and want to dull the sensation of their shame, self-loathing—even self-hatred. The prospect of being without the one thing that relieves their sense of low self-esteem and lack of self-love can be very scary.