by A Women in Sobriety | Jul 9, 2014 | Addiction Articles, Sobriety For Women
Written By: Katie Schipper
Giving Back Is Whats It’s All About
You Get What You Give
There’s a saying in recovery that gets repeated so often it sometimes loses its power. It goes a little something like – you’ll get from your sobriety exactly what you put into it.
This initially sounds like another annoying cliché that at some point had meaning, but it’s much more than that. The truth is, recovery can be viewed as a metaphor for the rest of your life. What you put in, you’ll get back (and usually, you get back a little more than expected).
Giving Back and Learning to Try
The early stages of recovery are usually very uncertain territory. Even if you’ve tried to get sober before, or gone for periods of time without drinking or using, the time it sticks is usually a particularly desperate time. Now, this isn’t always true, but seems to happen a lot. Desperation is one of the best gifts an addict or an alcoholic can receive, but with desperation comes fear and uncertainty about what to do next.
That’s why a drug rehab for women, an IOP therapy group, counselors, and people in meetings suggest the freshly sober woman doesn’t wait to focusing on her recovery.
There’s a window within this desperation that’s opened by pain. Once that pain begins to subside, the window starts to close. At some point, if work on your recovery hasn’t begun, the initial pain and desperation will have subsided enough that reasons for staying sober magically disappear. At this point, drinking and getting high seem totally reasonable. However, if you start making changes while this window is open, there are some pretty immediate benefits.
It’s in this space that newly sober women discover the value of trying. Many of us feel like we’ve been trying desperately for months, years, and lifetimes to effect a change, yet nothing’s happened. Most opportunities come up as dead ends in active addiction. Even for those women who managed to maintain a home, or hold onto a job or relationship, there’s usually a pervasive feeling of emptiness and self-doubt. Those feelings make the idea of trying for anything sound overwhelming. On a personal and individual level, you have to be fed up with yourself to the point that change and effort seem the better option.
One of the beautiful truths of recovery is that from that place of desperation often comes a wellspring of hope. Still, the only way to get there is to try, in spite of past experiences that taught you trying’s fruitless.
This is the “giving” portion of getting back what you give. You have to try. You have to show up in spite of changing moods and circumstances. You have to put forth an effort regardless of how you feel.
Read more about becoming grateful through giving! It’s so easy!
Getting Back What You Give
The flip side of giving back and trying and working and consistently showing up is what you get in return. The reality of giving is that it has very little to do with what your actions. It has more to do with the willingness to try giving.
The idea isn’t to reach a certain step, or a certain life goal, or a certain benchmark by a certain time. The idea is to move through recovery with your eyes ever on willingness, honesty, faith, and other ideals of spiritual growth. With those concepts as your focus, the universe (God, your Higher Power, who or however you conceive of a loving consciousness) gives back to you endlessly. Of course, there are material gifts for hard work (if you get a job and save money, you can move into an apartment and buy a car, etc.), the real reward take the form of what we sought in the bottle, the pill, and the powder. The real reward is peace. Peace of mind, body, and soul.
What you find when you give yourselves to recovery is that within you there’s a treasure you can access at any time. It’s always been and will always be there. That is what makes the work, the seeking, and the effort so worthwhile.
Read about the blessing you get in sobriety from giving
by Sally Rosa | Jul 3, 2014 | Addiction Articles, Sobriety For Women
Written By: Katie Schipper
Staying Clean But Living Dirty
Trying to stay clean while living a dishonest life isn’t easy. It’s possible, but not easy at all. Not many people can do it. If you’re in a twelve-step fellowship, you may watch it happen. Usually, when someone’s sober while living dirty, it’s because she’s in a pretty intense state of denial about how she’s really living.
The reason it’s so hard to stay clean and live dirty isn’t complicated. You’re in a program that preaches honesty at every turn. Meanwhile, you’re living a lifestyle that requires lying! These opposites can’t work together for very long. The truth is that sometimes it takes time, a lot of time, for a woman to realize she’s lying to herself. It happens as a process and with support.
What about working a job that, at its core, is based on lying, misleading, or dishonesty?
Justifying Dishonesty
A couple of things come up right away when talking about dishonest jobs. There’s the idea that if enough people do it, as a group, they can convince themselves that it isn’t that bad, or that they aren’t at fault because they’re just doing their job. There’s always, ALWAYS, a justification for being dishonest. If people couldn’t justify living a lie, it wouldn’t be so easy to do at first. Dishonest jobs may also come with perks that make the lie seem like less of an issue. Maybe a dishonest job pays better or has better hours. It might have outcomes that are desirable and make your life easier. But at what cost?
Whatever treatment center for women you go to, one of the first things you learn (and hear over and over and over…and over) is how crucial honesty is to recovery. You hear how this means honesty in every area of your life. Once again, that doesn’t mean every lie you’ve ever told is suddenly going to come to light. Remember, denial is the foundation of addicts’ lives. Hey, we’re so good at denial that sometimes our lies feel like the truth! That’s why it’s so important in early-recovery to find people (like a sponsor and a support network) that help you tell the true from the false.
Making Choices and Sacrifices
The truth about having a dishonest job in sobriety, and being aware of that dishonesty, is that eventually it’ll catch up to you. This might take the form of a spiritual crisis, like a return to self-loathing. It might be an eventual loss of what having a dishonest job got you in the first place. It might be a relapse.
Dishonesty and losing the willingness to confront challenges is usually a stepping stones to deciding that getting high or drunk is a good idea. No one is perfect and no one is asking us to be perfect. The idea is to gather enough willingness and awareness that we can look at something (like a job opportunity) and reasonably decide whether it’s moral, honest, and worthwhile.
To put it another way – it’s better to make eight bucks an hour as a grocery checkout person, than to have a baller job with lots of cash at the price of sacrificing your integrity. Know why? Because there absolutely are things that money can’t buy.
by Fiona Stockard | Jun 19, 2014 | Addiction Articles, Sobriety For Women
Written By: Katie Schipper
Romantic Relationships in Sobriety Can Be Healthy!
No, but seriously. Wait.
That guy/girl/whoever you met in your treatment center/halfway house/that meeting that you can’t live without? You can. Just wait. The crazy thing about waiting is that you might find out your tastes aren’t quite what you thought they were. Thirty, or sixty, or ninety days off your lifetime of smoking/snorting/shooting drugs and drinking? Yeah, you probably don’t know what you want!
So wait. You might grow (shocker!). You might change. You might actually realize there’s something to be said for getting to know yourself and your inherent value. You might learn that what’s inside you is so much bigger and so much better than an attachment to another human.
Before we start new relationships, we have to fix our old ones!
First We Must learn to Love Ourselves
That doesn’t necessarily mean wait a year. After all, a year is just an arbitrary, man-made measure of time. Some people might get well before a year is up. Others, most others, probably need well over a year to undo a lifetime of diseased, insane, chemically affected thinking and acting.
It isn’t the year so much that matters, but rather the time you’ve given to the two most vital, lasting, and important relationships in your life: the one you have with God/Higher Power/the Universe/etc. and the one you have with Yourself.
Here’s the thing, we’re phenomenally adept at bulls**ting ourselves. Nowhere is this more apparent than when we are describing why, contrary to all popular evidence, we’re ready to be in a relationship when we’ve done no meaningful work on rebuilding the ONLY relationships that matter!
It’s a cliché, but it doesn’t matter because it’s true! We can’t fully love someone without learning how to love ourselves. That doesn’t mean we aren’t capable of love, or that we don’t care about others, or anything like that. It means that until we’ve built a solid foundation of self-esteem and self-love (spoiler alert: that doesn’t happen overnight, or in a month, or in three months) we’ll use the other person to fill a void, or feel better about ourselves.
All of these things that we do in addiction recovery programs, all of the work, and soul-searching, and praying, and meditation – it’s designed to connect us to a God of our own understanding. Guess what? This God already lives within each of us. If we seek it in another person before we seek it in ourselves, we’re doing ourselves a huge injustice. We usually pay for it, too. Maybe not right away, but any relationship that’s put before those two most vital relationships will eventually crumble.
Safe relationships? Whatever happened to safe sex?
Let the Right Relationship Present Itself
As for the actual steps for getting into a healthy relationship? There aren’t any. If you can honestly and earnestly say that you have a solid relationship with yourself and God, then chances are you won’t be actively seeking a relationship. Usually, faith that the right relationship will present itself in your life goes hand-in-hand with those two things.
The beautiful thing about unreservedly loving yourself is that you get to a point where you won’t settle for less than you deserve. You’ll have this gut instinct that explains what this means for you. So, if you want to get into a healthy romantic relationship, the first thing you should do is wait.
by Fiona Stockard | Jun 16, 2014 | Addiction Articles, Sobriety For Women
Written By: Katie Schipper
Pets Are A Lot Of Work
Animals, yay! Pets are one of the greatest little joys in this life. They become part of your family and are absolutely worth every vet-bill, clean up, and minor annoyance. Pets are the best.
Pets are also a lot of work. They aren’t just little toys. No, they’re living creatures that require attention, care, and money. Wanting the joy and companionship of a pet is normal, but should you get one fresh out of a treatment center for women? Should you get one right out of your halfway house? What are some factors to consider before you do get a pet?
Waiting For The Right Time
There are a lot of common recovery suggestions that don’t actually come from twelve-step literature. One of the most popular is to stay out of a relationship for your first year sober. Another is to wait the same amount of time to get a pet.
It doesn’t always make sense in the moment. These suggestions only reveal their importance in hindsight. That’s why they’re very often ignored. Our ingrained need to get what we want when we want it makes us stubbornly choose to jump into things. We often do whatever looks good in the moment, with little consideration for what the long-term outcome may be.
Consider getting a hobby before you get a pet!
Things to Consider
First of all, consider what foundations you have in your life. If you’re newly sober, do you have a steady job that allows you to be self-sufficient? If the answer is no, then you can’t afford a pet. If it’s yes, then ask yourself if you have a routine that allows you to focus on the things you need each day. These are things like meetings, working with a sponsor, attending any therapy you might do, going to work, or going to school. If you have a routine, and there’s time in it for a pet, then it becomes a matter of practicality.
We’re capable of doing all the things that so-called normal people do. There’s no reason we shouldn’t have pets that we love and care for. There’s nothing that says we aren’t responsible enough for a pet. In fact, the woman who’s active in recovery is often an example of responsibility!
Are you looking for love and companionship? Learn how one woman found love in sobriety!
At the risk of over-therapizing the issue, it’s worth considering if you’re buying a pet to fill some void, or offer a temporary fix to a bigger problem. The reality with every addict and alcoholic is that we’re spiritually sick. We frequently look to things outside of ourselves for fulfillment. Animals are without defense and it’s unfair to make them yet another victim of our own need to feel better.
Ideally, like with most major life changes, you’ll give yourself ample time to work on you before getting a pet. Remember, there’s no rush! Waiting to make such a large decision makes it that much more beautiful when you do get a pet. That way, you enter pet ownership out of love, not loneliness. You know that you have the means and wherewithal to care for another living creature.
by Sally Rosa | Jun 3, 2014 | Addiction Articles, Sobriety For Women
Written By: Katie Schipper
Clichés are those really annoying phrases we hear so often that they lose all meaning. We hear them often in twelve-step meetings. Clichés are repeated because they’re recognizable and often seem to be a go to for old-timers and sponsors.
AA has a lot of clichés! It’s easy to look at them as annoying, but in reality most of them have a lot of weight and meaning. Sometimes, we just have to hear them in the right context. When that happens, something clicks. What was once a played out cliché becomes something valuable. So, get over your resentment and start to learn why some clichés are important!
New to meetings? Read about some twelve-step meeting etiquette.
AA Clichés – Giving Them Back Their Meaning
Most of the go-to phrases in AA can be found posted on the wall of any clubhouse or meeting room. Let Go and Let God seems to be a good place to start. This cliché is an easy target because it’s an over-simplification of something that most alcoholics are miserably bad at doing – giving up control! So, the natural tendency is to hear this and sneer.
For us alcoholics, the fact is the truth is almost always simple. We don’t have a complicated solution. What we’ve found over and over again, and is shown in both our addiction stories and our sober transformations, is that we’re at our worst when we’re grabbing for control. So, this simple cliché, to let go of our desperate need to control not just what’s in front of us, but even our drive to control outcomes, turns out to be powerful. Let God take the wheel. That’s simple, but like everything else in AA, just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s easy.
So, next time you hear someone say Let Go and Let God in a meeting, think about what that really means. Think about how beautiful it is when that cliché works in our lives.
Need help picking a sponsor? Here’s a few pointers.
Another cliché that’s almost impossible for newcomers to make sense of is One Day at a Time. Like letting go, learning to make a home in the present moment is an endless gift.
One of the hurdles that frequently emerges in early-sobriety is the concept of not getting stuck in the future. To quote a wise Jedi Knight, one should always be mindful of the future, but never at the expense of the present moment. This idea is the crux of this cliché. One Day at a Time also goes beyond present moment awareness, to the ever-present and inescapable fact that every sober person has a daily reprieve. We’re only sober insofar as we put in the work to not pick up a drink or a drug, today. Tomorrow, we’ll get the chance to try all over again.
The list of clichés could go on and on (and on and on and on), but the bigger idea is to realize that even if a slogan’s annoying, or doesn’t have personal value to you, it comes from a meaningful place. As for those rare slogans that are just stupid? Well, we can ignore those!
