Getting Clean is Just Step One: Why I Kept the Obsession and How I Rebuilt My Nervous System
As every addict knows, getting clean and sober is just the first step.
The rest of it is learning how we want to face life on the other side of that.
This is what worked for me:
Expanding Your Capacity: Finding a Reason Bigger Than Your Self-Abandonment
1. Have a reason bigger than yourself
For me, that reason was my sister. My husband. Eventually, it was also for me. But that came later.
Living with addiction is an endless cycle of self-hatred and denial. Denial of the pain, the self-abandonment, and the fact that life is actually better without the addiction. We look through rose-colored glasses and find ways to justify the behavior so that we can keep it safe.
Because we believe it’s what keeps us safe.
But in order to justify this behavior, it means we also have to overlook all the ways we’re self-harming. And by overlooking ourselves again and again, we develop a pattern of distrust. Of disappointment. We begin to believe that we are not really worth all that effort, anyway.
So this is why it’s important, especially at the beginning, to have a reason bigger than yourself.
I could stand to disappoint myself, but I could not stand to disappoint my sister, over and over.
I could stand to lose myself, but I could not stand to lose my husband.
These were things I wasn’t willing to trade long-term. It took me years to realize, but when I did, it made the decision a lot easier to stick with. Once I told my sister my intent to get clean, I knew there was no going back. Telling her had made it real.
Survival Mode & Ritual: Replacing Dysfunctional Patterns with Somatic Action
2. Have something you can replace the repetitive action with
Addiction is as much about ritual as anything else. Humans thrive on ritual. We develop patterns and once something becomes familiar, the predictability of it offers comfort in and of itself. Even if the behavior is dysfunctional.
I quit coke March 2020, at the beginning of a two-year lockdown. This was actually what helped. The huge pattern interrupt introduced a huge, even if somewhat forced, opportunity. Bars were closed, gatherings were forbidden, but yoga studios stayed open.
I went to yoga obsessively. I went to the gym obsessively. I went on walks obsessively. I went to work obsessively. I smoked weed obsessively. I’m not going to sugarcoat it - I was an obsessive person. Getting clean isn’t clean. It’s dirty and we have to fight dirty. And oftentimes, that means replacing one obsession with another (or a bunch of others).
From High-Alert to Homeostasis: Learning to Stay and Feel
3. Let the new repetitive actions show you something
So what was the point of all these new habits? Was it just to replace one addiction with another?
At the beginning, that’s definitely what it felt like. But after months of yoga 5 days a week, I found myself doing something I wasn’t able to before.
Stay still, and feel.
It was a mindfuck. It was so relieving. And also what I’d been fighting for years.
And what did showing up to work not hungover all the time do? I started realizing that complaining and feeling sorry for myself and wishing things were different and blaming other people did absolutely nothing. That if I wanted to have a different experience, I had to be the one to do something about that.
During the height of Covid I was managing five projects - different sites, different teams. It was during this time I learned the importance of emotional intelligence and how to move closer towards being a leader rather than a people pleaser. I learned the value of staying calm, because I had experienced volatility and how harmful that could be.
And what did the gym/walking every day do? It turned my anxiety way down. It gave me an outlet for pent up energy or lingering frustration and a place to have some quiet to think. Walking especially gave me the most insights into the ways I was still holding on or being dishonest with myself. It gave me time to review (and okay sometimes obsess) but most days I’d see a new perspective by the end of the walk.
Creative Resilience: Building the Muscle of Personal Authority
4. Find a way to be creative
For so many of us, our addictions “set us free” in a way. It set us free from our overthinking brains, our neurosis, and the impossible burden of responsibility we felt over everyone and everything.
It was a mental vacation. Especially if we felt we couldn’t take a physical vacation (due to feeling responsible for everyone and everything).
A year and a half into doing yoga, I was chatting with a friend from the yoga studio who said, “Have you ever considered becoming a teacher?”
And to my own surprise, I answered without hesitation, “Why not? Yeah, that could be fun.”
It wasn’t long after that I applied for my first Yoga Teacher Training.
Being in a learning setting again (that wasn’t work-related) was so fun, exciting, and new. I hadn’t been in a classroom environment for years. The last time had been an evening Poetry 101 class at a community college when I was 30.
Yoga philosophy blew me away. The poses were one thing, but the actual core 8 limbs of yoga felt like what I had been looking for, put into words and something I could study - and again, that word, feel - my entire, confusing, meandering life.
The creativity of planning and leading a class filled a part of me I didn’t know was there. And - here we go again - I was obsessed.
There was no question I was going to be a yoga teacher as soon as I got my certificate.
I started promoting myself as such right away (yes, it was scary) and got a few private clients and secured teaching jobs at two local studios (yes, I doubted myself). But I knew the only way to get better was to do it. To call myself it.
That this felt so much better than working in construction, I was going to make it work somehow into a career pivot.
Integration: Ending the Resistance to Yourself
5. Recognize your inner gangster
Basically once you do one scary thing you didn’t ever think was possible, you have started building a muscle.
Getting clean was the first rep. After that:
Becoming a yoga teacher. This was the next scary thing.
Getting my Pilates teacher certification. Not so much because I loved Pilates, but because I wanted to be mentored by the person teaching the certification. Training under her changed my belief in myself.
Thailand. I did my 300 hr YTT and quit alcohol and weed (the next big scary thing). I learned how to sit in meditation multiple times a day and not freak the fuck out.
Life Coaching Certification. I went to take counseling courses after work and completed my certification.
Quitting my job. I had just put my dog down that morning. Her last gift to me was one day you will die. Stop doing what you hate. Choose something else.
The Confrontation. I stood up to the scariest person in my life and confronted them about things we’d all pretended were okay. Saying it out loud meant I no longer had to carry it all for us.
Starting my own business. Holy fuck. This was way scarier than quitting my job. Talk about facing all the monsters under the bed.
Vipassana. I went to a 10-day silent meditation retreat, where I learned how to sit in meditation for 11 hours a day and not freak the fuck out.
Setting boundaries. I learned how to set boundaries with my business, my clients, and with Instagram, my main marketing tool at the time.
I channeled my obsessive energy into doing something that would build, rather than destruct.
And by doing so, learned how to finally quiet the obsessiveness.
By learning trust. By seeing that all my anxiety had been centered around wanting some type of certainty or control. And that by realizing again and again that I had evidence I could trust myself, certainty and control no longer mattered.
All of this sucked at one time. Because it made me doubt myself. It made me scared. It made me resist. And it brought out new versions of myself over and over - each time less scared, with less doubt, and a whole lot less resistance to what is.
Which brings us all the way back to the beginning.
Addiction kept me in a comfortable bubble that made resistance the obvious choice. Why face what is if I didn’t have to? I could have stayed there forever if I wanted to.
But what I’ve realized is this: All resistance is resistance to ourselves. And we are the only person we have to live with for the rest of our lives.
I was so tired of fighting. Fighting who I was, who I knew I needed to be, at the risk of letting other people down. At the risk of losing them. At the risk of not being part of their story - and instead writing my own.
Every step back to myself has been worth it.
I’m proud to say - I did it for me.
Everyone’s path is unique. I’d love to hear what worked for you - and -
Wherever you are at with your journey, whatever you’re getting yourself out of, whatever wounds you are healing, you are still here.
Which means, everything is still possible.
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Learning to stay and feel is the hardest part of the process. If you want to explore how to move from a state of Survival Mode to Homeostasis, you can book a 1:1 session with me to begin mapping your own nervous system.
