No Alcohol Needed

You know the feeling.

You’ve had a pretty decent day at work. Productive, fairly low stress, and you’re in a good mood. You have no intention of drinking.

In fact, you’re looking forward to enjoying another sober evening, and waking up tomorrow feeling glorious. But you walk outside, get in your car, and suddenly all you can think about is stopping by the liquor store on the way home.

“What on earth?” you think to yourself.

But the pull gets stronger and harder to ignore. And suddenly, almost without thinking, you turn into the liquor store parking lot and stop for a bottle of wine on the way home.

It’s almost like autopilot. And it’s kinda scary.

So What Gives?

When it comes to triggers of the alcohol habit, I divide them into two basic types: automatically triggered urges, and emotionally triggered urges.

And sometimes those automatic ones can be the toughest ones to fight. (read more ⬇️)

Things you do because you’re trying to be a kind person… but they’re actually hurting you more than you realize:

(These are things I always did because I thought I was “supposed” to… until I learned something different.)

- Always keeping the peace, even if it means ignoring how you actually feel
- Feeling guilty when you disappoint someone (even when you were doing something that honored yourself)
- Changing your personality based on who you’re around (anyone else out there an award winning chameleon?)
- Constantly apologizing for things that aren’t your fault
- Feeling selfish for taking time for yourself
- Feeling more valuable when you’re rescuing or helping someone
- Saying yes, even when it leads to resentment or frustration (and telling yourself that’s what thoughtful people do)
- Keeping other people comfortable at the expense of your own comfort

Do any of these sound familiar?

These are all codependent behaviors that we learn throughout life - survival skills that we adopted long before we realized they were hurting us.

And when you start taking steps - even tiny little baby steps - toward changing some of these, so much of the emotional weight of life gets lifted.

If this list sounds a little uncomfortably familiar, this week’s podcast episode was made for you.

Janice Johnson Dowd, LMSW and Sean Rollinson, LPC join us talk about what codependency is, how it shows up, why it hurts so much, and what steps we can take to move in a healthier direction.

Look for No Alcohol Needed: the Podcast on any listening platform, or check out the link to the YouTube video in the comments.

The most common complaint we hear from people is that they want to quit drinking and they know they need support, but the meetings they’ve tried have been kind of awful.

We get it.

If you’ve had some pretty bad experiences with support groups or meetings and it makes you hesitant to try ours, we just want to share a bit of our philosophy with you so you can see if it sounds like a good fit.

- We aren’t a ‘program’ and we’re not going to push any version of a program on you. We’ll help you figure out what you need, and we’ll support you in whatever that looks like.

- We don’t expect you to be religious if you aren’t. We’re also totally okay if you are.

- We aren’t going to shame you. It’s not our style.

- We believe in empowerment. You don't have to live in fear your whole life.

- We think life without alcohol is about a whole lot more than following rules and giving things up. Life without alcohol is about making space for more of what matters, not just fighting cravings and reminding yourself every day that you don't drink anymore.

If this sounds like it could be a good fit, we’d love to have you join us tonight - or any Monday night. We meet on Zoom, it’s free, and we’ll support you wherever you’re at. 8:30pm EST / 6:30 MST.

I’ll drop a link in the comments with more info about how to join us, or you can always just send us a message.

Rumi said: "As you start to walk on the way, the way appears."

When you enter a new season of life, it will feel like you're walking in the dark. Like you have no idea where you're going.

It can be scary. Terrifying, even. It's leaving behind your comfort zone, headed into something you can't even imagine yet.

That's okay. It's normal to feel scared.

This new season is built on a thousand tiny steps that feel like they're in alignment with who you want to be.

Just keep taking one right step at a time.

I drank to dull the pain.

The shame, the insecurity, the regret, the anxiety, the grief. All of it.

And it worked.

The pain wasn’t as sharp. I didn’t have to learn how to feel it - it made this little protective bubble around me so that I could just ignore it. It couldn’t quite pe*****te my heart.

But that’s not all it dulls.

It also dulls the joy. The happiness, the gratitude, the wonder, the love.

It dulls the things we live for. The memories we want to hold onto forever. The things that light a fire in our souls.

You can’t selectively numb.

Emotional pain pierces deep into the heart. When you’re not used to it, it feels overwhelming. It feels impossible to stand it. But with time - with practice, with skills - emotional pain becomes bearable.

And the reward is that you get to experience a kind of joy that you’ve likely never felt before.

Give yourself the gift of learning to sit with your emotions. Learning to feel them. Learning that they hurt, but they aren’t permanent.

Because when you do that, you’re giving yourself the gift of happiness. And I want you to know what this kind of happiness feels like.