Please do not loathe yourself

When I’m talking about substance abuse, I often say ‘it’s just behavior’. The point of this isn’t to diminish the harm you may have done to yourself or others, or to minimize the consequences of drinking. It is to get you to separate the behavior from your character and personality.

We are much more than the label people put on us due to our substance abuse. I don’t use the term alcoholic because I don’t find it helpful (you might). There is no shared definition of the term—there are other threads on this topic if you’re interested. I have no less than 18 different definitions of it, many of which contradict each other. But even if you do use the label, it isn’t the first, the last, or the only thing that you are.

Everybody has behaviors that could be described as addictive. The question is whether they have become unhealthy or are interfering in any way with the other parts of our lives. Substance abuse exists on a continuum from total abstinence to total immersion. Some people go from heavy to moderate or no substance abuse—and back—at different periods of their lives. Others trade one substance or behavior for another, to varying degrees. The world isn’t divided into normal drinkers and alcoholics. We aren’t different or separate, and we aren’t alone.

Maybe it would be a useful exercise to write what you are. All the things you can think of: the ways you define yourself by what you do, by what you believe, by what you care about. If you choose to put ‘alcoholic’ or addictive person into that description, fine—so long as it’s only one of the many things you believe you are. There’s a complete person there, and our obsession with altering our mental state has sometimes blinded us to the other facets of our personality.

It’s interesting: if you ask most men ‘what are you’? they’ll answer first by telling you what they do. If you ask many (possibly most) women, they’ll answer by who they’re related to or care for—what they perceive as their roles. People with self-image issues will list their personality ‘defects’ (‘I’m a procrastinator’), while narcissists will rattle off their special talents (‘I’m a great singer’).

We are all those things—our jobs, our hobbies, our behaviors, our characteristics, our beliefs. So take a moment to write a paragraph describing who _____ is. You could even post it here! The order in which you put things can be revealing about the priorities in your life: first on my list now would be ‘father’, but I’m afraid that might not have always been where I’d have put it on the list.

Describing who you are can be a useful step towards making some long term goals, because the next logical questions are....who do you want to be? where do you want to be in your life five years from now? how do you want to get there?

If you have trouble imagining things that far ahead, don’t worry. That is far more normal than actually having and acting on clear long term goals, especially when we’ve been abusing substances. When we’re doing that, we tend to be just ricocheting from one emotional condition to another. Life seems more like a roller coaster than a caravan. Developing emotional control goes hand in hand with seeing and working towards long term goals. Just imagining a brighter future is one of the benefits of long term sobriety.