What I Learned from Giving Up Alcohol for One Year (Therapy Thursda...

One year ago, I decided it was time to get healthy. I had started on my weight loss journey, finally finding some success that motivated me to make more healthy changes and I knew that the nightly drinking habit needed to go. I wasn't quite aware of what I was doing at the time or how significant of a choice it would be.

My goal, at the time, was to stop drinking for one month and see what happened. As it turns out... I just pretty much quit... and didn't pick it up again. I have had maybe three times of drinking since then, but all they did was really point out how much a shitty, negative, all encompassing effect it has on my mental health.

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These are kind of obvious, but weren’t enough to inspire me to quit in the first place. They were nice side effects, though:

I saved money. Even though I drank at home, and cheaply at that, it was still a daily cost that I was incurring. Giving it up left a little bit of cash in the budget that hadn’t been there before.

I started feeling much more positive. I knew, logically, that alcohol was a depressant. More on this below
Physically, the excess weight just continued to fall off. Once I found ways to sleep, it became less and less of a temptation. I had been using it to calm my anxiety so I could sleep at night and the lack of it was HARD... but once I got over the hump, my sleep improved. I wasn't waking up after 4-5 hours of sleep because the alcohol had worn off.

I had to avoid making plans for a while. I don't have the type of friends who would every give me a hard time about drinking. I'm not sure I've ever had those kind of friends. However, I also didn't want to tempt myself by going places where drinking was the normal thing. To be fair, this wasn't something I did often, but I did end up leaving a friend hanging on a fairly big event because I couldn't commit to going and was feeling really fucking anxiety ridden about cancelling. It was a shitty thing to do, but in the end, I couldn't bring myself to stop my self imposed... abstinence.
The Vicious Cycle I couldn’t seem to get past the vicious cycle of alcohol making me depressed = needing to escape from my shitty feelings. It was really fucking difficult. Then add on top of that the fact that giving up alcohol results in extra anxiety and insomnia at first… well, it was really hard for those reasons alone.

I had to deal with myself. A large part of my drinking was self medicating. I was using it to avoid dealing with some of my own shit. To be fair to myself, I did deal with a LOT of shit and get through some major emotional trauma. I was generally fairly hardcore about wanting to deal with my shit, but still… the daily grind of having so many emotional struggles is wearing, to say the least. Giving up that crutch gave me the ability to start dealing with things (most apparent in my physical weight loss, but it went so far beyond that. I’d stopped drinking for 6 months before and hadn’t seen anywhere NEAR the same level of changes. Not with my weight, my emotional health, none of it. This time it was significantly different. I may get into my thoughts on that in the future… but for now, let’s just say that this time it was SO much more productive of a change than it had been in the past.
I had to forgive myself. One thing that I am proud of is breaking so many generational cycles of dysfunction/abuse with my own children. We cut toxic family out of our lives and raised our children in a completely different environment. This was one toxic behavior that followed me and although 99.9% of the time, I only drank at night, I know that the effect that had on stunting my emotional health wasn’t good for any of us.

A large part of me wanted to beat myself up for that, to just do the whole self abuse thing that had always been my habit. However, I also knew that if I really wanted to heal from this, from all of it and not be dragged back into the cycles of abuse, I had to forgive myself. That was hard, but I think that it was part of the reason that I feel so… free… from it all. In a way that hasn’t happened before. Not ever.

All in all, I feel better. Stronger, emotionally, mentally, physically. This was the time, and whether it was just timing or my circumstances at the time that made it easier for me, I’m not sure. Maybe it was a combination of things. Looking back now, a year later, I am so glad that I was able to make this choice and that it didn’t have an even more negative effect on my life than it did. I’m very fortunate and I am grateful.

I am big on "keeping it real" in life. I'm pretty fucking real with everyone, including my friends, my kids, my husband and I like to think... with myself. I'm often in a mindset of trying to figure out what makes me tick, what causes me to make the choices I make.

THIS, however, was one way in which I hid from my own self. I kept this veneer of the appearance of happy... or at least, maybe more like content. Maybe it's just what I needed at the time while I worked through other shit. That's not an excuse, I mean I wish I'd made different choices, but what's done is done.

I hate to think that I just have 15 years of regret just sitting there, weighing on me, accomplishing nothing. If I've learned nothing else this year, beating myself up doesn't cause anything good. Dealing with shit and moving along is the only way I can go on. So that's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to give myself some grace and I'm going to give myself some credit for making the change when I did. Better late than never...

That being said, this was a bit of an emotional thing to write and I need to bring it to a close. I'm feeling quite a bit more... raw than I expected to be after writing this. I really thought it was no big deal, but DAMN.

I’m happy answering questions and will probably write more on this subject later. I know I will. At any rate, thanks for reading my rambling…

If you’re interested in more thoughts, I made a video about this, too. It's mainly just more of me talking about other aspects of this issue. How it started for me, a tiny bit of my history, etc. I may post that tomorrow if anyone wants to see it. For now, I'm going to leave you with this (something that's fairly unlike me, but I couldn't be more serious...)