E334: Why We Resist Sobriety and What Acceptance Looks Like at Every Stage

0:00Angela Pugh: There's a difference between knowing that you need to get sober and accepting that you need to be sober. A lot of us know for a long time. We know that drinking is hurting us, that every attempt to control it leads us right back to the same place, that we feel better when we're not drinking, and we've all collected plenty of evidence that alcohol can't be part of our lives in the way we wish it could be. but knowing all of that doesn't necessarily mean that you have accepted all of it. You can be sober while some part of you continues to search for a different answer. Maybe enough time will reset me.

0:42Angela Pugh: Maybe I could have alcohol on vacation or special occasions. Maybe sobriety is what I need right now, but it doesn't have to be forever. The negotiation can happen before you quit, during early sobriety, and even after you've been sober for years. It just changes form. When you're sober curious, you might keep creating new rules or taking temporary breaks, but you're still hoping to find a version of drinking that works. In early sobriety, you may be abstinent, but you still feel angry, deprived, or preoccupied with the question of whether or not this has to be permanent. And in long-term sobriety, you probably don't seriously consider drinking, but maybe you resent the fact that you have to be different from other people, or you may fantasize once in a while about getting a little break.

1:39Angela Pugh: acceptance doesn't mean that you're happy that you don't drink or that you never miss alcohol never have a craving or feel grateful every day that you get to be sober you don't have to pretend that not drinking is great at first alcohol probably represented relief reward social ease excitement belonging or permission to finally stop thinking and doing even if it stopped reliably giving you those things you can still grieve what you wanted it to be acceptance just means that you stop treating that grief as evidence that the decision is still open for debate you can feel sad that you can't drink the way that you wish you could and stop searching for a way to make drinking possible again.

2:30Angela Pugh: The opposite of acceptance isn't sadness, it's continued negotiation with reality. And when sobriety stays an open question, every difficult moment becomes another opportunity to reconsider it. Is sobriety really necessary? Has it been long enough? Could I handle it now? am I really going to do this forever? All of that keeps alcohol available as a possible solution. So instead of asking what you need or how you want to respond to the moment, you return to the old question of whether or not alcohol could fix it and whether you can figure out how to give yourself permission to drink. Acceptance changes the question.

3:14Angela Pugh: It goes from can I drink now to given that drinking is no longer an option for me, what do I need now and what am I going to do next? That gives you more agency and power. You stop investing so much energy in trying to change reality and you begin using that energy to build a life within the reality that you have. So in this episode, I want to talk about why accepting sobriety can feel like such a loss, how resistance shows up differently when you're sober curious in the first six months or so or years into sobriety, and why you can accept that you have to be sober without liking it, feeling peaceful about it, or pretending that it's fair and great.

4:14One reason that acceptance is so difficult is it feels like a big loss. When people say you're not giving up anything by getting sober, I get what they mean.

4:26Angela Pugh: We're giving up hangovers, anxiety, broken promises, and all the instability and shame that comes with drinking. But alcohol served a purpose in your life. If it had never given you anything that you valued, you wouldn't have become so attached to it. When you realize you're probably someone that can't drink in the way you wish, you're not just facing the loss of a beverage. It's more about the loss of a familiar way to change how you feel or to take a shortcut. This loss is real, even if alcohol stopped working very well for you. The brain doesn't calculate value using an accurate summary of every drinking experience you've ever had.

5:09Angela Pugh: It learns from reward, relief, repetition, and cues. So if drinking repeatedly reduced discomfort or gave you a burst of pleasure, your brain learned that alcohol was valuable. And over time, alcohol-related cues, like the time of day, finishing work, going out to dinner, or feeling stressed, can begin generating anticipation before you even drink. And that anticipation survives long after the actual experience of drinking has become a letdown. This is why you miss alcohol even when you don't miss what your drinking was like. We get attached to the promise of what alcohol was going to do, not the full reality of what it consistently did.

5:57Angela Pugh: And there's another loss underneath it, the loss of the future where you finally learned how to drink normally. maybe you imagine that once life became less stressful or your mental health improved or once you took a long enough break that you would be able to return to alcohol with a completely different relationship you'd be that kind of person that can have a couple drinks feel satisfied and stop thinking about it you could get to keep the parts that you like without experiencing the obsession, loss of control, anxiety, and shame. And accepting sobriety means grieving that imagined future too.

6:38Angela Pugh: And this is where it helps to distinguish between grief and resistance. Grief is like, I wish this could have been different. Resistance is more like, because I wish it were different, I'm going to keep treating it as undecided. Grief allows you to acknowledge that something mattered to you and letting it go hurts. Resistance uses that pain as a reason to continue searching for another answer. Acceptance requires you to admit that alcohol did give you something, but then the overall cost was too high. You can miss the immediate relief while also knowing that that relief wasn't free. You can miss the anticipation and the fun without forgetting where your nights usually ended.

7:27You don't have to grow out of it, hate alcohol, or feel grateful to be sober to quit drinking. You just have to accept that your time has passed and it is what it is. I had a lot of resistance because I thought accepting that I had to get sober meant I was a weak-willed loser with no self-control and no one would ever want to associate themselves with me and I would never have fun ever again for the rest of my life. Obviously with those beliefs it was going to be pretty difficult for me to stay sober and this is why it takes so long from when we begin questioning our drinking until we actually stop drinking because we have to break down these beliefs or accept some of them continued negotiation keeps alcohol available as a possible option even if you're not drinking part of the brain is still evaluating alcohol whenever you become uncomfortable and then before you know it you go on vacation and you ask whether sobriety really has to apply there you'll just get back on track when you get home right the brain is constantly making predictions about what will help us feel better reduce discomfort or move us towards a reward if alcohol repeatedly provided fast relief in the past then stress loneliness boredom anger or social discomfort will activate the expectation of alcohol before you consciously decide what to do.

8:58Your brain has learned that this internal state is a problem for you and that alcohol is the fastest, most familiar, and most reliable response based on what you've done in the past. When you continue treating alcohol as negotiable, the brain still compares it with every other option. Do I tolerate this feeling, ask for help, leave the situation, or drink? Do I let the craving pass or is this the night when drinking might be worth it? That decision-making process directs more attention towards alcohol, so then you start imagining the relief that it's going to provide and the immediate reward becomes more vivid in your mind while the delayed cost becomes easier to minimize.

9:49Acceptance changes this. Instead of continuously asking, can I drink, you ask,

9:56Angela Pugh: since I'm not drinking, how am I going to respond to this? And that totally redirects your problem solving. If alcohol is still an option, you remain focused on whether or not you can drink, and then you feel deprived and hopeless when you try not to give in the end. That doesn't get you anywhere. If alcohol is a non-negotiable, you have to identify the actual experience and figure out how to cope with it for real. Am I overwhelmed, lonely, overstimulated, disappointed? Do I need rest, connection, exercise, a boundary, or just time? The first way doesn't solve your problems at all. It just keeps the focus on alcohol.

10:40The second way is how we learn to live without alcohol. Alcohol gave you one response to many, many different problems. Acceptance forces you to stop calling every uncomfortable state a drinking problem and identify what kind of problem you actually have. And that's what gets us somewhere and helps us feeling better in life. Avoidance is the attempt to escape, suppress, or control unwanted thoughts, emotions, physical sensation, or memories. Avoidance isn't always unhealthy, but problems develop when immediate relief becomes your primary response to any uncomfortable internal experience, especially when that relief strategy, aka alcohol, creates larger problems in your life over time.

11:34Alcohol is a very efficient form of avoidance because it changes our state quickly. When we remove it,

11:42Angela Pugh: the emotion doesn't automatically become easier to tolerate. At first, you're just going to feel exposed to discomfort and you're not going to know what to do. And this is why accepting sobriety involves a lot more than knowing that alcohol is bad for you. You have to have willingness to experience these uncomfortable moments that you can't immediately eliminate. Willingness doesn't mean that you have an exceptional amount of discipline or that you're just really good at suffering. It just means that you make room for an emotion, craving, or thought long enough to choose your behavior instead of automatically organizing your behavior around making that experience stop and this is a big part of flexibility the ability to remain in contact with what's happening internally while acting in a way that reflects your values and long-term goals and flexibility is a very important outcome of a successful sobriety journey not flexibility that you can drink here and there flexibility in your thinking okay don't get any ideas.

12:58Angela Pugh: But let me give you some examples. So if you feel anxious at a party, flexibility doesn't require you to become calm before you make a good decision. You can feel anxious and choose to leave early. You can feel awkward and push yourself to talk to someone. The internal experience and the behavioral decision don't have to match. This is also why trying to force yourself to never think about alcohol is not acceptance. Monitoring your mind for forbidden thoughts can make those thoughts more significant. You can have a drink would be nice right now type of thought without it becoming a whole thing.

13:38So my point is with repetition we create new learning and new pathways and new defaults. Stress can be followed by asking for support, exercising, or cleaning. the end of the workday can be followed by real rest not just turning off your brain pretend rest social discomfort can be followed by tolerating feeling awkward or just leaving the old association will probably never be completely erased but it doesn't have to be the only response that your brain knows how to do acceptance can begin behaviorally long before it feels emotionally complete so meaning you can act like you accept it while still thinking it sucks so like noticing the thought that maybe you could drink again and then choosing to tell someone about it asking for support before you're desperate practicing ways to rest celebrate connect and cope that don't depend on changing your state as quickly as possible, you're allowed to say, I wish this wasn't true, but I'm going to live according to what is true and real.

15:03Acceptance looks different at each stage of sobriety. So if you're super curious, acceptance may mean becoming willing to stop protecting the option to drink long enough to discover what sobriety can actually do for you. And what I mean by that is when you're still deciding whether or not you need to quit

15:23Angela Pugh: it's very easy to organize sobriety around your eventual return to alcohol. You take a month off but the whole month is just a countdown. you notice improvements but you evaluate them against what you believe you're missing out on you make it through a difficult friday night and then you interpret the difficulty as proof that sober life is restrictive rather than evidence that you're just in an adjustment period you're technically sober but you're not fully participating in it part of your attention remains focused on when you can drink again what the rules will be and whether this break has finally made you capable of controlling it.

16:08Protecting the option to drink feels reassuring because then you don't have to face the loss and all that grief and stuff I was saying at the beginning of the episode. You don't have to decide that you can't drink anymore.

16:21Angela Pugh: You just have to not drink right now. But why build new ways to relax if you expect to return to drinking soon? Why learn to socialize sober if you consider it a temporary thing? Why examine what alcohol was helping you avoid if you plan to drink again once the break is over? So you take a break, but you don't learn a ton from the break. Coming at it from a place of acceptance, you start noticing what happens to your mood, energy, self-respect, relationships, and your ability to trust yourself. You give sobriety enough attention and investment to become something more than just not drinking for a set amount of time.

17:07If you're in early sobriety, acceptance may mean allowing cravings, grief, anger, and resentment to exist without treating your emotions as instructions. A lot of people expect that once they make the right decision, they should feel good about it and just move on. And when they don't, they question the decision. If sobriety is right for me, why do I still want to drink? Why am I so angry? Why do I feel so deprived? Early sobriety is asking you to stop using your emotional state as the decision maker in your life. If every difficult day becomes something you have to fight through, then your decision to not drink is always going to depend on how you are feeling right now.

17:56Emotions are real and valid, but they are not instructions or things to fix. A craving tells you that your brain expected alcohol, not that drinking is the right idea or that you're a loser for having a craving. Acceptance in early sobriety looks more like, I feel this and I'm going to practice not impulsively acting on my feelings.

18:21Angela Pugh: And that doesn't mean ignoring the emotion either because emotions contain useful information. A strong urge to drink at the end of every day may reveal that you're exhausted, overstimulated, or struggling to transition out of responsibility mode. Resentment or awkwardness at social events may reveal that you haven't learned how to connect or have fun without alcohol yet, and so on. And this is one of the deeper skills of sobriety, learning that an internal experience can be acknowledged without needing to be immediately resolved. You can have a craving without needing to make it disappear. You can feel deprived without needing to prove that you're not deprived.

19:06You can allow these emotional waves to move through you while keeping your

19:11Angela Pugh: behavior under your control and not the control of your emotions. And over time, if you keep practicing this, you learn something really important. Feelings can be intense without being permanent. And even better, you can remain responsible for your choices while you are having these emotions. And then long-term sobriety, which is beyond two years of continuous sobriety, creates a different kind of acceptance problem. As your life becomes more stable, the reasons that you need to remain sober become less visible. The better your life becomes, the easier it is to believe that sobriety has become unnecessary.

19:53Angela Pugh: You could also resent anything that reminds you of your history. Attending a meeting, asking for support, newbies in sober communities, or admitting that alcohol occasionally sounds appealing. Maybe you believe that a fully healed person would no longer need to think about sobriety at all or do anything. But doing the emotional work takes time. We accept ongoing forms of care and maintenance in many areas of life without viewing them as failures. Strength is impermanent because you exercised really consistently last year. A relationship doesn't remain close because you communicated well five years ago.

20:38And similarly, your mental health doesn't sustain itself indefinitely without giving it some attention. Long-term acceptance is less like remaining vigilant because you can't trust yourself and you could spontaneously drink at any moment. it's more like I know what allows my life to work and run and I'm willing to keep taking care of things.

21:03Angela Pugh: We want to make choices that support all the hard work that we've done instead of making comfort-based choices that are dependent on our emotional state. So acceptance is not like a milestone that you hit it evolves over cut that out. Resistance keeps part of your attention attached to an alternate reality where alcohol eventually becomes easy and uncomplicated for you. Acceptance gives you all that energy back and you can use it to understand what you actually need, strengthen your capacity to experience discomfort, and create a life that's not waiting for alcohol to become available again. It is a hard process and it takes time to reach acceptance for all things for drinking for other instant gratification self-destructive comfort habits that we do in relationships that we eventually leave all of it it all takes time and if this episode resonated for you we're going to talk about it together next week on september 23rd inside living a sober powered life.

22:12I want to explore where we are in the acceptance process and how resistance may be keeping us mentally tied to alcohol. We'll also talk about what accepting reality could look like as an action, even if you're not totally sold on it yet. Living a sober powered life is for people who have decided to quit drinking and want support doing the deeper emotional work of sobriety. so if you want to join the conversation check out the link in the show notes and if you're already part of the group then thank you for doing your pre-work i'm looking forward to

22:48Angela Pugh: talking more about this with you next week

23:11See you later.