Sober Motivation: Sharing Sobriety Stories - Nine Questions to Reflect on If You're Struggling with Leaving Alcohol Behind

Episode Date: February 20, 2025

In this episode, we explore nine critical questions designed to help those struggling with sobriety consider their relationship with alcohol. Addressing the personal and emotional costs, the episode delves into the importance of support systems, the fallacy of 'doing it alone,' the pitfalls of waiting for the perfect time to quit, and the common yet unique nature of drinking stories.    

Welcome back, everyone, to another episode here. This is not going to be a story episode. This is just for anyone who feels they're struggling with getting or staying sober, putting down the alcohol. And here are nine questions I want you to consider. Ask yourself this. What is keeping alcohol in your life costing you? We obviously have the surface level stuff that may or not be obvious. Hangovers, increased anxiety. How are you showing up daily? And some deeper effects are not really knowing how to work through our emotions, relationships with others, relationship with our self-worth, and our ability to fully experience life. Over time, we also lose trust in ourselves as the cycle continues. Think about all the mornings that we wake up and we commit to, we took it a little bit too far the night before

or so we say today, I'm not drinking, or this weekend I'm not drinking, or for this event, I'm not drinking, or I'm just going to have one. And we constantly just break those promises with ourselves. That doesn't really set us up for a good standard of living. If we're saying we're going to do stuff when we don't follow through with it, every time we don't follow through with it, it actually makes it easier the next time to not follow through with stuff. It's like, well, I've done it before, so I'll just do it again and what's the big deal?

So we lose that trust with ourselves over time. Second question, don't you think if you could do it on your own you already would have? It's so interesting. right, with the countless messages that I've gotten over the years. That's where everybody says, I'm drinking again. And I'll ask them, you know, what's going on? Do you have any support or you plugged into anything? And nine times out of 10, 97% of the time is not plugged in with anything.

And it's not like you have to be plugged in with any of the traditional routes. But most people find it extremely helpful to be plugged into a community or therapy or fellowship groups or at least sharing with. people around us. It just can't continue to be this big secret. It makes it really hard. Your drinking has been getting progressively worse and just one drink always ends you up in the same place and sometimes maybe a tougher place than you were before. It's a story a lot of people share about things progressively getting worse every time they go back to drinking after maybe taking some time off. What if it was easier with time to have no alcohol, than it was to have one. That's exactly what happens. Are you waiting for the perfect time to quit

after that holiday, after that next vacation for the new year? What magical event are you actually hoping for on those dates? Because there will always be another birthday, another event, another Super Bowl, another vacation, another summer. So if that's the way you're approaching this, you really need to dig deep and say, why is that a thing when there's going to be more? Do you feel your relationship with alcohol is unique? Listening to over 200 stories here on the podcast and working with hundreds of people over the years. We all have our own unique path for sure. Everybody has their own unique journey and people in their life and everything you do. That we know. But if you've been listening to the show for a bit, the drinking stories are a lot of like. The way they progress,

sometimes what brings it on. It's a lot of the same stuff. Because sometimes I feel like we can talk ourselves out of actually struggling with alcohol or having a problem with alcohol or alcohol not benefiting our life by putting ourselves on the sidelines to say, oh no, it looks so much different for me. Things look so much different for me. I've got a handle on everything. But if you're here, you're listening to this episode, there's something that's nudging you in this direction. And it could be a variety of different things. I don't know exactly what it is for you listening on the other side of this episode, but there's got to be something there. There's a level of awareness there that alcohol is not in line with who you want to be or even who you are right now.

There's some friction there. And you're thinking about saying goodbye, to alcohol and moving on, but a lot of stuff comes up when we do. So I always encourage people to listen to stories, like check it out to see if there's other people out there who you can relate to that we're able to find a way forward. Do you believe the story that it's never worked before so there's no way it can work now? Oh, I often think about food that I didn't like when I was a kid. Tomatoes specifically. I hated tomatoes. But now tomatoes with a little bit of salt and pepper one of my favorite things ever. It's incredible how things changed because it's all about just trying one more time.

I mean, we can get a little bit of time not drinking an alcohol-free life or sobriety life and then go back to drinking and beat ourselves into an oblivion that we're back to a place where we never wanted to and the shame piles on and the guilt piles on. But the reality is this. Right now in our lives, we are exactly where we are. We can't go back and change what was. we can't change the fact that we had that last drink. There's nothing we can go back and change about it. All we have is right now. So this is really something to plug into just because it didn't work.

People who are alcohol-free or sober are people who simply just tried one more time. And it's that one more time where maybe the light bulb went off or maybe you looked at things through a different perspective and you're like, oh, now I see it for what it is. what is holding you back from making the changes, fear of rejection, wondering who we will become, or who am I without alcohol? How will I work through the feelings? How will I start dating again? How will I connect with my partner? Maybe if they're going to continue to drink. How will I meet people? How will I deal with the hard and happy times in life, the fear of failure or the feel of success? What if this actually works out? What if it works this time? Like, I give it one more try.

Like, maybe that's something. And when I relate back to my own story, I was so used to always coming up short in so many areas of my life. Like, this actually working out was extremely scary to me. I was used to a lot of failure, a lot of disappointment. So it actually working made me feel very uncomfortable that I could change my life in this way. A lot of things will come up, but it's about getting honest with ourselves and figuring out which things are fact and which things are myths.

You know, like you will find dates again. People do, you know, in the alcohol-free world and sobriety world, like you do. It might take time. It might take time. It's not going to happen overnight. And how are you going to meet people like you will? of course you will and you'll learn a lot about yourself going through this process

that one drink is costing you a lot more than you may realize and it's good to have an honest look at the impact alcohol has on your life you know maybe it's not that your life is completely in the ditch and you've hit this massive rock bottom and everybody's kind of wondering why you can't quit a lot of people share the story that nobody around them would really even know that they had this secret internal struggle with alcohol. That's all, that's all you need. All you need is something inside saying, I just, I'm not liking the direction this is headed. Why is it so difficult when I commit to myself and I say, Brad, you're not drinking this week. And then a couple days later, I find myself drinking again. But everything else in my life is

together. It's just this one thing. What if it all works out, you know? What if it doesn't turn out to be as scary as we think? What if we begin to develop more healthy ways to navigate life, things that bring us joy, connections, and authenticity? At its core, alcohol doesn't add any value to your life. It takes away from it. It may feel like it makes things more exciting or easier in the moment, but in the long run, it limits your emotional depth,

personal growth, and ability to experience true freedom. Sobriety, on the other hand, expands your world. It opens up possibilities clear, thinking, real relationships, and a stronger sense of purpose. In my experience, nobody was coming to save me. Everybody tried that. And it worked a little bit to build a little bit of a foundation, but it wasn't until I was interested in changing my own life that I could start to move in that right direction and build the momentum to say, you know what, enough is enough. I was sick and tired of ending up at the same place over and over again.

And saying goodbye to alcohols and drugs and everything for me was the best thing I ever did. It was slow and steady. My life didn't change overnight. It actually got a lot tougher in the beginning because I didn't know how to work through emotions. I didn't know how to do a lot of things in life. And I had to learn those things. But the most important thing here is that all of this stuff doesn't have to happen

overnight. Just like your alcohol use progressed over the years, you're not drinking life is going to follow a progression as well. Everything is not going to just change that one day. But the interesting part about it all is, nothing can change until we walk away from the alcohol because that just keeps us stuck in the same cycle, the same hamster wheel. I wanted to put this episode out there because I get questions all the time about these things specifically. And I think it's a thing maybe we can reflect on, just to look at these questions and reflect on them and maybe think a little bit deeper as I just sort of scratch the surface on some of this stuff. But it is a challenge at times to get back to everybody's messages. So I want an

episode that I could send people to if they're like, hey, I'm stuck or I'm thinking about getting started. Where should I start and say, hey, maybe these are some questions that you should ask yourself to see how you want to move forward. So if you enjoyed this episode, send me a message on Instagram. I would love to hear it. And the stories will be back really soon. And I'll see you on the next one.