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Collective Resilience

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“The human capacity for burden is like bamboo—far more flexible than you’d ever believe at first glance” – Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper

Resilience is the capacity that a person has to adapt and readily recover from adversity. It is evidenced in the picture that contrasts the mighty oak that fought the wind and was broken and the willow which bent with the wind and survived. Recovery from addiction requires resilience. There are many up-and-down experiences. Addicts must develop the capacity to adapt in order to do recovery on life’s terms. As life unfolds, plans are foiled and people disappoint. Flexibility is necessary in order to maintain long-term sobriety. Chaos gives way to calm in recovery when an addict practices resilience. 

Resilience is a recovery quality that increases when exercised and practiced. The following suggestions will help you strengthen the practice of resilience in your recovery.

  1. Stay positively connected to at least one other person in recovery. Resilience tends to wilt in isolation. Recovery requires connection to others. When a sense of community wanes, addicts withdraw and close their heart where they need to be open. Twelve-step meetings are designed to accelerate connection and openness. However, large meetings make it difficult to be open. They trigger isolation for some in recovery. Building resilience in a large meeting requires the same commitment to connecting with others that is necessary in a small meeting. Go out of your way to have coffee and conversation with at least one person. It will greatly increase your capacity for resilience.

  2. Make meaning from mangled moments. These are moments in life where nothing goes right. Thank God this doesn’t happen all the time! Yet, when they do occur, it seems like they always occur. During these times you can get caught up in moaning and groaning. Long-term complaining will snap serenity and threaten sobriety. Take a deep breath and then let go. It’s just one of those days! Step back and learn from these mangled moments. There are priceless lessons you can gain when things go wrong. Practicing gratitude will help you open your heart and make meaning out of mangled moments.

  3. Help someone else when you are in the midst of your own trials and trauma. I learned this from my mom. There were always trials for her in raising 12 kids. There would be one crisis after another. What kept my mother sane was that she always had her eye on others whose struggles were greater than hers. In our community, there was the Fryman family who had 22 children. My mom was forever gathering clothing and food for this family whose trials were greater than hers. There was a poor woman in our community known as Sister Harris. My mom would have her iron our clothes for 50 cents a basket because she needed the money. When the clothing came back with a musty smell my mom made us put up with it because Sister Harris needed the money. My mom seemed to gain inspiration for her own trials by helping someone else. Try this in your recovery. It will inspire you while you increase your resilience.

  4. Imagine a positive future. My mom used to imagine what it would be like to take a vacation to St. Louis, only 2 hours away from where we lived in East Central Illinois. I sat with her at the picnic table in our backyard listening to her daydream about a trip to this favorite city. I developed deep satisfaction saving money from my paper route and mowing yards to make this trip possible for my mom. It was a future vision that propelled me through my childhood trials and tribulations. Creating a vision for the future will help you stay the course in your recovery life of sobriety. When times get tough, maintaining an unspeakable imagination for the future will sustain you and create a way through the agony of craving. Keep your eye on the prize of a positive future. It will strengthen resilience in your recovery.

  5. Simply forgive! In the aftermath of addiction carnage, resilience increases when you simply forgive. Forgiveness means to let go and not hold against. You must first forgive yourself before you will effectively forgive others. You forgive yourself for doing the same thing in principle as that which was done to you. Though you didn’t commit the same behavior in like kind, you did so in principle when you consider times when you did what you wanted, when you wanted it, regardless of its impact on others. This is a universal principle of offending that all humanity has engaged in at some time in their existence. When you forgive yourself, you create the necessary resilience to forgive someone else. This is the secret to getting out of your own emotional prison from a hurt perpetrated by another. Forgiveness requires that you believe in your capacity to forgive. The word “believe” is an Anglo-Saxon word that means to live in accordance with. Therefore, you must live out forgiveness of self and others daily. Seldom is forgiveness a one-and-done experience. Most often, it requires a daily practice of letting go and not holding a grudge against yourself or others. This practice increases resilience.

A 12-step community is a place to practice collective resilience. Every person within the community struggles with the same issues of craving and need for sobriety. The power of resilience can deepen in a collective way. Collective resilience encourages collective courage. In a 12-step community, everyone is invited to deepen the practice of resilience while facing the adversities that are inevitable in the recovery journey. 


A 5 Tool Relapse Recovery Plan: Tool #4

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Coroners do autopsies when they think it is important to determine the cause of death. Autopsies can be very sophisticated and detailed. They determine the cause of death, the time the individual died, and a host of other specifics that are important. Sometimes performing an autopsy gives resolution and sanity to love ones while they grapple with the unknown. Answers to questions like “What and why did this happen” are often clarified from the results of a thorough autopsy. Science uses autopsy results to assist in the cure of disease. Healthcare workers utilize autopsy results to create protocols to keep others safe from toxic and high-risk infectious diseases. 

Millions of people suffer from the disease of addiction. Admitting that your life is powerless and unmanageable because of your drug of choice is a tough step to take. However, admitting relapse failure after getting into treatment is also difficult. Most addicts who relapse either don’t tell anyone or admit it to support people and try to distance themselves from the painful relapse as quickly as possible.

A lapse autopsy around addictive relapse is crucial to long-term sobriety. Admitting the relapse and moving forward with determination to abstain without insight into the build-up behaviors that triggered relapse is a guarantee to repeating destructive behavior. A lapse autopsy is a powerful tool to identify what happened that created relapse and what needs to change to avoid chronic failure. Consider the following steps toward completing a lapse autopsy. 

  1. Write out or tell someone what happened in complete detail. It is important to turn over every stone of your relapse behavior to help you see clearly what happened. When you minimize and gloss over thoughts and behaviors leading to and engaging in relapse behavior, you will miss what is needed to establish a strong intervention.
  1. Identify environmental influences. The environment you live in makes a big difference toward relapse prevention. Think about the relationship conflicts, stress factors, and physical experiences that contributed to your vulnerability to relapse. Unresolved tension in a partner relationship can trigger mistaken beliefs that lead to relapse. Stress build-up from relational, financial, sexual, physical, and parental struggles all influence the possibility of relapse. Take stock of the environment that encompassed you leading up to and including the time you relapsed. Assess the experience of deprivation that fuels entitlement. What were you deprived of? Were there successes that you experienced that were uncomfortable and triggered undeserving thoughts of self-sabotage? You will need to go slow and carefully examine the environment to learn of its influence toward your relapse.
  1. Examine your thoughts leading up to the time you relapsed. What you think about expands. It is critical to examine the mistaken beliefs that marinated in your mind before acting out. If you tell yourself that you are not enough or that you are a failure etc, then in time you will create the data to support that belief, which will convince you to produce more of the same behavior to support your inner thoughts. This is why it is crucial to be aware of negative cognitions so that you can change your thoughts which will help you change your life. 
  1. Be aware of the progression of thoughts and behaviors that lead you to acting out. When you anticipate someone rejecting you it triggers a victim-posture attitude. A mask is needed to hide your shameful thoughts and you seek to emotionally isolate to avoid the uncomfortable build-up. Fantasy helps you vacate discomfort which eventually triggers inappropriate addictive fantasy. Optimistically you begin to select a strategy to pursue your addiction while grooming yourself and others in ways that enable you to pursue your secret desires. After you relapse you tell yourself that you need to stop and misplace the responsibility for acting out on some person or force outside of your control. You then reconstitute with behaviors that would indicate to others and yourself that you are not the kind of person who would addictively act out. These steps toward relapse can happen as quickly as the snap of a finger. It is necessary to utilize the lapse autopsy to slow your thinking and to be aware of the negative progression of behaviors that gave birth to relapse. 

Map out what you will commit to doing differently to avoid relapse. This includes consideration at every level of activity. Some people think that it is necessary to go back and do all the steps again or to attend 90 meetings in 90 days because of their relapse. Maybe so. However, a lapse autopsy will help you clarify where you got off track so that you can specifically target interventions that will help you return to the space of relapse prevention. 

After you complete your lapse autopsy it is helpful to sit down and review each misstep with your sponsor or support friend and clarify what you will commit to do differently with each misstep. 

The lapse autopsy is necessary to create clarity in the presence of chaotic relapse behavior. It helps to create grounding and bring you back to center to continue your recovery journey. 

Essentially, a lapse autopsy is what every sports team does when they study film from a previous game. This is the way they learn and improve. It is true for businesses that take time for quarterly and yearly reviews. The lapse autopsy has proven to be an excellent tool for long-term sobriety.

A Five Tool Relapse Recovery Plan: Tool #1

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In baseball, a 5-tool player is one who excels in hitting, fielding, speed, hitting for power, and average. There are not many major league players who demonstrate all these skills during any given season. In 2022, Paul Goldschmidt of the St. Louis Cardinals was such a player. It is even more rare for a player to demonstrate these skills throughout a long career. Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Mickey Mantle, and Barry Bonds are all iconic players who demonstrated these five tools throughout their careers. 

Long-term recovery from any destructive behavior requires a commitment to change and new behaviors must be incorporated to replace old destructive conduct. There are five tools necessary to achieve long-term sobriety in addiction recovery. Today, I will discuss one of the tools and follow up with subsequent blogs to cover the other four.

Failure is a reality in almost all aspects of life. Everyone desires to relate to short-term accomplishment and success. But long-term achievement requires more, including the ability to manage failure. People highlight spectacular victory but longevity teaches how to handle human shortcomings. 

It is a common response to lower your expectations when encountered with failure. Sometimes it is helpful like when you attempt to achieve unrealistic expectations. However, in many cases lowering expectations is an attempt to soothe yourself from the sting of failure. Addicts tend to scale down expectations for sobriety after they announce their successes in a 12-step meeting but then slip into old destructive patterns of behavior. It is easier to lower expectations than to learn from the disappointment of failed behavior. 

Relapse vs lapse are often confusing terms. Relapse behavior for an addict is a reconstitution of old destructive patterns in behavior that engages acting out with a drug of choice. Lapse behavior includes indications of failure in attitude and action around addiction management. It involves behaviors that are short of addictive acting out but engage high-risk patterns of thoughts and behaviors that inevitably do lead to actions of relapse. 

There are very few addicts who do not relapse after engaging recovery, no matter the program. All addicts and everyone else fail with lapse behavior. This is simply a human element that touches everybody. 

Addicts must learn how to extract the fruit of meaningful lessons and then throw away the rind of failed experiences. This treatment of failed behavior is absolutely critical to anyone who has successfully created long-term sobriety. 

Tool #1 is about how to address times when you fail and stumble into old destructive patterns of addictive behavior. You learn what to do when you determine to quit destructive conduct but after your best efforts find yourself back to where you started. You learn how to manage times when you feel defeated with a strong urge to give up. Here are a few considerations to think about:

Tool #1: Engage in a Relapse Litmus Test 

Geoff Hewitt wrote a poem about a sailor who was lost at sea and somehow made his way to the shore. Exhausted he fell asleep on the shore only to have the tide come in and sweep him back to sea. This is the story of many addicts in recovery. Managing recovery failure embraces the following components that comprise tool #1.

(a) A beginner’s attitude: The challenge of showing up every day hungry for one thing that will keep you sober and growing. This becomes more difficult the longer you are sober. The tendency is to lose urgency and back off from cultivating personal growth. On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your beginner’s attitude toward recovery? Will you take the initiative to examine where you got off track from your recovery program? Are you willing to do what you need to do to get back to where you need to be? These are the questions required about the humility needed to engage a beginner’s attitude. 

(b) Honesty: Recovery requires honesty. Deep emotional honesty is difficult to achieve. Few people achieve this level of honesty. Face the questions: Where am I dishonest with myself? Who have I been dishonest with? Am I willing to make amends and restitution for my dishonesty? Who will I be willing to be accountable to? These are important litmus test questions to guide you through failure. 

(c) A willingness to do something different: Albert Einstein’s famous quote “you can’t solve a problem with the same mindset that created it”. Twelve-step communities like to croon “Insanity is doing the same thing over and again, expecting different results”. Ponder what it is that you would be willing to do differently to accomplish the level of sobriety you desire. When you don’t know what to do, brainstorm with your 12-step community for solutions that make sense. Are you willing to go to any length? What would you do differently in the next 24 hours/week/month? 

(d) Do whatever it takes to stop the slide of acting out: When skiing on a steep slope and you fall and uncontrollably cascade down the mountain, you do whatever it takes regardless of how it looks to get stopped! Even if you look like the abominable snowman coming down the mountain, one thing matters and that is to stop the fall. It takes the same urgency and burning desire to stop the slide toward addictive behavior. There must be a burning desire within your heart. Although determination alone will never keep you sober, you cannot recover without it.

Taming Your Critical Voice

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“The older you get, the more you understand how your conscience works. The biggest and only critic lives in your perception of people’s perception of you rather than people’s perception of you.” ― Criss Jami, Killosophy

A man and his son were once going with their donkey to market. As they were walking along self-consciously the man began to wonder that others might think “You fools, what is a donkey for but to ride upon?” So the man stopped and put the boy on the donkey, and they went on their way.

Later they passed a group of men, and the man began to worry that these guys might be thinking that “See that lazy youngster, he lets his father walk while he rides. So sheepishly the man responded to his inner conflict by ordering his boy to get off, and he got on himself. But they hadn’t gone far when they passed two women. Now he feared that one would say to the other “Shame on that lazy lout to let his poor little son trudge along.”

Well, the man was perplexed with frustration and did not know what to do. Finally, he took his boy up before him on the donkey. By this time they had come to the town, and he was convinced people were staring at them as they rode their little donkey. He became overwhelmed with shame wondering if the men were thinking “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself for overloading that poor donkey of yours — you and your hulking son?”

So the man and boy got off the donkey. To address his shameful thoughts he decided to cut down a pole, tied the donkey’s feet to it, and raised the pole and the donkey to their shoulders. While they walked along with their donkey tied in this position, the man was convinced that others were scoffing and laughing at him. When they came to a bridge, the donkey getting one of his feet loose, kicked out and caused the boy to drop his end of the pole. In the struggle, the donkey fell over the bridge, and his forefeet being tied together, he was drowned. 

When you worry so much about what others think you can tie yourself in knots with your own critical voice which pulls you away from doing logical and next right steps. Addicts struggle with their own critical voice all the time. This struggle is likely the greatest hindrance that sabotages long-term sobriety.

Taming the inner critical voice is a challenge for everyone, addict and non-addict alike. Long-term sobriety requires it. Many try to eliminate the critical voice. Realistically, at best we learn to manage the voice and not dispose of it. To do so we have to come to terms with its voice and give it direction so that it does not dominate our behaviors. 

Your critical voice is always delivered with the toxicity of shame. You did or said it wrong. You are never enough. Others do it right but you don’t. You just blew up proving that you will never get it right! When will you ever get it, stupid? These and an endless collection of other judgments and criticisms can be levied at you in rapid machine gun fire within your mind. Often this can occur without anyone saying anything to you. Most people have certain life experiences of failure that make them vulnerable to experiencing the wrath of their own shameful critical voice. For me, it’s when I commit to doing something like meeting for coffee someplace with a friend or colleague and I totally space it out, not just being a few minutes late but as in I don’t think of it until the next day. My mind can go nuts inside. My critical voice has been known to scream and yell at me until it becomes hoarse! It is all motivated by shame. Most people have these failures in life that trigger terrific lectures from your critical voice. How do you address your critical voice when it goes on a nonstop rant?

Here are some suggestions for thought.

1. In the midst of a critical voice rant, take attention away from the thought. You can do this by directing your thoughts toward your body and focusing your attention on feeling the energy in your hands. You can take a walk and concentrate for a few minutes on the conversation of birds chirping and singing in the trees. There are a number of possibilities for distraction. When you take a deep breath, your critical voice will slow down when it no longer has your entire attention. For this to occur you will need to concentrate on establishing an anchor for being present that you return to when the negative rumination runs rampant in your head. 

2. Identify that there is negative self-talk going on in your head—that it is not who you are: There may be experiences of negative onslaught that barrage your thoughts and drag you along whereby you conclude that you are your thoughts. It is necessary to distinguish that you are not your thoughts. You must be able to separate and observe that you have negative thoughts that come crashing in so that you don’t conclude that the negative criticism is who you are. Some people fuse their negative narrative with their identity. They conclude that their addiction is who they are and therefore they must act out. They create a storyline of victimization that underscores victimhood as an identity and defend their right to be a victim. If challenged about their negative narrative they will utilize their anger with “How dare you question my identity with all that has happened to me”. Sometimes when people complain enough they get the attention they never got when they remained quiet. So they discover that their negative narrative has a payoff that is worthwhile. Negative attention is better than no attention at all. So they continue to act out with addiction to support their negative belief that will provide the attention that had previously been missing. Being an identified patient is better than being invisible. However, you never learn to give up the storyline of negative self-talk as long as you see the negative narrative as who you are. 

3. Understand the source of where the negative self-talk comes from: Once you identify the negative message it is important to recognize the voice of negativity. Usually, that voice comes from your family of origin or significant caretaker. It could come from another significant mentor. It is important to then give back the message and its power over you and take back your own self-empowerment. You may simply declare that they are not welcome to the conversation and that you will ignore the negative message.

4. Practice being present in the moment of discomfort: Being present in the moment is difficult when everything feels shitty. Yet it is important to bring yourself to inner alignment with the present moment you experience. It is about accepting where you are right now, not forever. It is important to learn to lean into the present moment. Everything can be going wrong. You might be sore with remorse, financial reversal, extreme loneliness, or other intense emotional or physical pain. As hard as it seems you must come to terms with the immediate moment you are in. It’s not going to change instantly. However, you can change gradually. You must learn to practice total acceptance about where you are and what you are facing. You do this by practicing thanksgiving. In the midst of painful experience, you learn to challenge and change your negative narrative by leaning into what is and making something meaningful rather than waiting for the next big break in life. 

5. Rely upon your affirmations: The secret power of affirmative thought can never be overemphasized. Addicts with long-term sobriety and transformation have long since learned the value of practicing the power of affirmation. There is no lobotomy that works. There is no substitute. Regularly bathing yourself with an affirmative belief that you have hammered into your awareness requires ongoing conditioning and training. It becomes a galvanized shield against the criticism of others and tempers your own self-judgment. It is what I have found to be the secret to taming your critical voice.

Surrender’s Sweet Spot: Knowing When to Quit “Rehab is for Quitters”

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Recovery is such a paradox—to be in control means to let go; to win you must know how/what to lose; to know God is to humbly embrace what you don’t know; to go deep in wisdom you must dare to embrace the commonplace average. 

I can remember always trying too hard when I was a kid. Shamed by my athletic performance very young, I never thought I could measure up, so I would try harder than everyone else or so I thought. I remember when I was about 14, I worked for one of my older brothers who managed a Shell Oil gas station. He had given me an assignment to create a window display with all the oil cans that were for sale. Then, it was popular to create a kind of pyramid display. Some gas stations made it an artistic arrangement that expanded the entire picture window with a design that went all the way to the ceiling. I was determined that was what I was going to create. I thought about a design that made sense in my head and went to work. I would construct my pyramid almost to the top of the ceiling and then it would collapse—not a row or two but the entire pyramid which frustrated and embarrassed me. That morning I tried seven times—each attempt met with failure. My brother would stick his head in the room to see how I was doing at the most inconspicuous time—when the cans were spread out all over the floor. He kept asking “You ‘bout done ?” Each time he’d ask I’d get pissed and with determination. I’d try it again and then again. Finally, on the seventh failure, I cussed and began to cry. Fearful that I would be seen crying by my brother and called a “big baby” I went to the bathroom to hide. I got myself together went back to the display room picked all the oil cans and put them back in the boxes and quit! Then and a couple of other times prior to getting into recovery were the only times I recall ever quitting in my life. I was surrounded in a culture that taught me well that—whatever you do, don’t quit. The mantra “winners don’t quit” was ear wormed in my conscience and drove me at times into the ground.

The truth is that a champion’s testimony is about knowing when to quit and what to quit. Trying too hard always freezes capabilities and pushes away opportunities to achieve and move forward. The only way to recognize trying too hard is to try too hard and experience its disappointment and failure. Michael Jordan talked about letting go of trying too hard of doing everything for his team and allowing the game to come to him. He emphasized that it was this understanding of his profession that helped him to flourish in becoming the great basketball player he was destined to be. Many of us can relate to some degree about allowing our abilities and talents to develop and flourish professionally by letting go and allowing the work to come to us. So, professionally we soon learn that it is important to know what to quit as well as when to soldier on.

The challenge comes when life asks that we transfer this skill set of knowledge and wisdom into our personal relationships and recovery lives. Doing more and harder what doesn’t work needs to be stopped. Yet, many of us hold on with a death grip trying to control what we cannot control in our relationship lives. You can’t make your partner sober. You can’t make him/her stop ragging and nagging about how you lied, cheated, and broke their heart. You can’t make your son or daughter stop using or be successful. There’s absolutely nothing you can do to control anything or anyone but yourself. All attempts with temporary success are only an illusion that keeps you drunk with efforts to control. Only when you realize and surrender will you quit. That’s why we say “Rehab is for quitters”. 

However, quitting often means to start. It means getting back into your own lane and recognizing your limitations. Surely, it means going deep within your own lane of understanding and mining the depths of family of origin hurt and dysfunction that fuels this compulsive need to control what you cannot. To quit means to embrace the personal fear and face what that might mean drawing upon the strength of a Higher Power and others who have been there. So quitting often means to start as well. 

In recovery, sometimes we think we have to do so much to get it right so that we can escape the throes of addictive acting out. Yet, the truth is that some of you feel this way and you have not acted out—you are living profoundly different than you were when you were active in your addiction. Still, you feel the pressure that you have to do more to keep from being less. This is a sign that you are trying to control what you cannot. So you have to let go of making your partner’s smile of approval your everything and sole marker as to whether you are OK or not. Until you do you will not know the sweet spot of surrender that propels long-term sobriety. Letting go does not mean you are insensitive or boorish toward others, particularly your partner whose heart you have broken with your addictive acting out. It means a clear surrender and recognition that though you have broken trust. You cannot heal the broken heart of your partner and must retreat to gentle validation with healthy boundaries lest you take the bait of trying to control what you cannot. This can become a painful behavioral vortex that leads to overwhelm and relapse. 

Trying to force things to happen is controlling. When you have done your part and then step out of your lane and get into controlling, caretaking, and coercing you have lost your way. Trying to make something happen is a good way to create a block that prevents what you hope from becoming a reality. It’s time to practice quitting again.

Melody Beattie, the author of Codependent No More, says “Do your part in relaxed, peaceful harmony. Then let it go. Just let it go. Force yourself to let it go. If necessary, “Act as if.” Put as much energy into letting go as you have into trying to control. You’ll get much better results. (Language of Letting Go, July 22). Most of us who get stuck in fear and try to cling to control must do deeper work at the point of a family of origin. 

When I was a young boy movies with a Western theme dominated the television screen. I have this image of a stagecoach with a team of horses running out of control across the prairie. There is the stagecoach driver or the “Whip” and then there is this young boy sitting next to him hanging onto the side rail with all his might. At some point, the “whip” hands the reins for the horses to the young boy and says “Kid you’re on your own”. The prairie funnels into a narrow passageway with a 100’ drop-off. We all know that as long as the kid has the reigns that the coach and every animal attached is going to wind up at the bottom of that drop-off. However, the driver, the veteran “whip” firmly takes the reins from the boy and rather than chastise or berate the boy, he draws the boy close to his side as he takes charge. He whispers into the boy’s ear “I’ve been here many times before and I know how to get this team of horses to slow—even to a complete stop—and we will navigate this narrow passageway and all will be fine” and that is exactly what occurs. 

You are the “whip” the stagecoach driver of your life. The only time you get into trouble is when you give the reins to the small child and expect him/her to navigate what only the experienced adult can manage. Truth is, we often hand the reins to the small child within. Yet, when we recognize and take back the reins from the child within, we successfully navigate, knowing when to let go of control, when to quit, and when to steady the course and persevere. Surrendering what you cannot control will require the powerful adult within you to take the reins from the fearful child within.

Meet the Sober-Grammers!

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In the early years of Instagram, members were posting a steady stream of nature, food and travel photos. As the social media platform grew, it became known for carefully curated lifestyle accounts, duckface selfies and fitspo (or fitness inspiration).

Now with one billion accounts worldwide, Instagram has transcended its origins as a gallery of pretty pictures to emerge as an effective tool for networking, education and support.

Two years ago, I was looking for motivation to quit drinking and was surprised to discover a vibrant sober community on Instagram. Since then, accounts centered around recovery have multiplied dramatically.

The four Instagrammers below are known for sharing their own stories and extending a welcoming hand to those who are sober-curious, newly sober or looking to strengthen their ongoing recovery efforts.

Alison Evans (@TeetotallyFit)

When Alison Evans, who recently celebrated two years of sobriety, started using Instagram soon after the birth of her first child, her content initially focused on family and fitness. During her first period of sobriety, however, she began shifting her focus as she felt increasingly comfortable sharing her experiences.

“To me, Instagram serves as an open diary,” she says. “By sharing sober content, I feel like I’ve been able to hold myself more accountable, and I’m not hiding a dirty little secret. I’ve also been able to impact and inspire others, which in turn keeps me going.”

When she relapsed after eight months, however, she deleted much of what she’d shared about sobriety. As she explains, “I felt ashamed, plus I thought I was going to be a ‘normal drinker,’ so why keep the sober stuff on my feed?”

After a “final wake-up call” in January of 2017, Evans jumped back into both sobriety and posting about it because “I knew I’d be greeted with virtually-opened arms.”

“I don’t have the luxury of attending regular recovery meetings or meetups,” says Evans, who’s a military wife and the mother of three young children. “Instagram has served as a safe space to connect with like-minded, sober individuals from the comfort of anywhere.”

“Knowing that there is most likely another mother just like myself across the country, or even the world, cushions the idea that we are not alone in this walk,” she adds. “We may at times feel isolated, but then you just open up Instagram and quickly see that we are far from being ‘the only one.'”

Jocellyn Harvey (@SeltzerSobriety)

Three years sober this month and not quite 28 years old, Jocellyn Harvey has been on Instagram since she was 21. “My first account was all about things I bought, places I ate at, and how much I drank,” she says. “About six months after I got sober, I made that account private and stopped posting, though I did start talking about my sobriety within the first month.”

After almost a year away from Instagram, she started her @SeltzerSobriety account and has been writing about recovery and mental health ever since.

Harvey chose Instagram as her primary platform because of its simplicity and the ability to easily connect with people around the globe. “Instagram is a place where you can really create this life that isn’t you,” she says. “I think we’ve all done it. But now people are ready to be more ‘real’ on Instagram, and for some that means getting real about their drinking.”

Instagram hasn’t just offered Harvey a way to share her journey with the world but also introduced her to different recovery modalities. “If I wasn’t online, I’d really only know about recovery from my own program, and I think recovery needs to be well-rounded,” she explains.

While Harvey thinks “being open about your recovery is one of the best things you can do,” she also understands that shouting about recovery from the rooftops isn’t for everyone.

“If you’re more private, you can keep your account locked and follow along on other people’s journeys,” she notes.

Tracy Murphy (@MurphTheJerk)

Tracy Murphy, who’s three years sober and has been sharing about it on Instagram almost the entire time, had a very specific reason for wanting to be out and proud on IG. “It was important to me because, as a queer person, I wasn’t seeing many (or any) other queer people being visible about their sobriety in the recovery communities I was part of,” Murphy says. “It’s easier for people to do things if they see other people who are like them doing it too.”

“Being queer and sober means we’re a subculture within a subculture, so finding other folks with experiences that are similar to yours can prove challenging” Murphy notes. Murphy’s best recommendations?  Use hashtags to find other like-minded folks. (Popular sober queer hashtags, according to Murphy, are #soberqueer, #sobergay and #soberlesbian.)

While Murphy thrives off of being open on Instagram, they also know that “people need to assess to make sure it’s safe for them to do so. Some careers or family situations can become vulnerable or unsafe when folks are open about substance abuse, especially early in the recovery process.”

Still, Murphy knows the benefits of being open first-hand. “If it is safe for you to share your sobriety on Instagram, do it!” Murphy says. “The more people there are talking about it, the more people can see that sobriety comes in all different shapes and sizes and genders and sexualities and races.”

Alyson Premo (@Alys_WickedSober)

When soccer mom Alyson Premo quit drinking in November 2016, she immediately switched her Instagram handle to a recovery based one and started posting about sobriety. “I wanted to give hope to others who couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel—to show them that if I could do it, so could they,” she says.

Premo passes along motivation and hard truths, including the fact that addiction doesn’t discriminate. “I graduated from college, had a successful job and lived in middle-class suburbia, and here I was struggling with alcoholism,” she explains.

As her handle suggests, Premo’s posts show her sense of humor, and she wants people to know that “once you get sober it’s not all rainbows and unicorns. There are some hard days and emotions that we have to work through, but the blessings outweigh your hardest day.”

Now a recovery coach, Premo is a champion of the power of Instagram: “We’re all rooting for each other,” she says. “When someone has a bad day, we’re there to provide encouraging words and ways to get through the rough patch. Someone is guaranteed to get inspiration and hope from what is posted, and that’s what is needed in this world, considering the epidemic that we are currently witnessing.”

While Premo admits that while sometimes sober-grammers do get negative feedback, “being brave and owning our story is one of the greatest things we will ever do in our life.”

It’s no wonder Premo feels so strongly. While many rail against the negative impact social media has on our society, Premo notes, “From my struggle with alcoholism I finally found my purpose in life. Something that was lacking for a really long time. Without Instagram all of this wouldn’t have been made possible.”

The Sober Stand-Up Special You Have to See

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The best comics make it look easy, but a successful career in stand-up comedy is much harder than it may seem. Take it from Matt Gallagher. To hear him tell it, stand-up is a circuitous journey that begins with open mics, writing material, making a set, taking it to live audiences, being a barker, getting paid, securing closing spots in shows, going on the road and finally headlining. But what allowed him to take the journey actually involved taking something away. “It only came about because I got sober,” he says. “When I say I did stand-up before, anybody from the outside would say, ‘This guy is not doing comedy.’ The old version was like watching a car accident.”

All told, Gallagher has been seriously doing comedy for about 18 years, since 2001 when he went through rehab. He cut his teeth while living in New York and facing all the terrifying possibilities that new sobriety brings. “I was either at a meeting or I was at a comedy club,” he says of the early days. “I lived in Hell’s Kitchen and meetings and the club were three blocks apart. I was doing three meetings a day and three shows a night, so it was a great way to stay sober.”

It was also a great way for Gallagher to hone his craft, as his new special A Stumble in the Woods, available on Amazon Prime, shows perfectly. Any serious comedy fans out there will notice that Gallagher’s special is unique, even amidst a recently flooded comedy market. As it turns out, his approach was different. “I didn’t work on this special or take it on the road and workshop it,” he says. “I had done it one time for a group of 15 people in a really small space.” That rawness yields a show that is equal parts storytelling and comedy, sometimes keeping the audience guessing as to what Gallagher will reveal and what he’ll withhold. “I didn’t have a concrete plan when I started talking,” he says. “When you put yourself on the spot, the stuff that pops up is really the truest stuff.”

Gallagher performed his special at the historic El Cid theater in Silver Lake, Los Angeles. “I wanted it to have that jazz, underground, beatnik-y feel to it,” he says. “It was all the stories I’m either uncomfortable with or I [felt] like people [needed] to know.” If you know nothing about Matt Gallagher, the special is also a great primer: He was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey to a widowed dad. He was raised with six sisters, two of them much older than he was. Perhaps most notably, both sides of his family had Irish Catholic bar owners.

The special begins as a relatively light retelling of a laissez-faire childhood before moving into darker territory. In one moment, Gallagher tells a wide-eyed story about how he thought priests were magical because bells would chime every time they broke the eucharist in church. In another, he regales his teacher with all the biodiversity that must’ve been on Noah’s arc (facts remembered from reading Ranger Rick magazines). Some of those early experiences with the magical thinking of religion turned Gallagher away from it in the future. “When I did this show, I just kind of embraced that I’m an atheist,” he says.

Still, Gallagher credits the 12 steps with helping him get and stay sober—and he still harbors a curiosity about the natural world that borders on spiritual. “My fascination is with the vastness of the universe,” he says with a laugh. “That to me is more powerful and interesting than any of the Abrahamic religions.” For anyone who missed it, the title of his special is a nod to A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson, the naturalist non-fiction writer who chronicled his adventures on the Appalachian trail. “The title resonated most with me,” Gallagher says. “Some people didn’t get it.”

Although Gallagher portrays himself at moments in the special as the red-nosed, drunk uncle at the end of the bar (inspired in some ways by his Uncle John, described throughout), Gallagher and his stories often strike a literary vein. Throughout our conversation, Gallagher quotes James Joyce and George Bernard Shaw and also references Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung. Though he explored the latter two while he was still drinking (“I was always searching for something—I kind of became a religious assassin in a way”), the ideas about mythic structure seem to have stuck. “[This special] was my little Hero’s Journey,” Gallagher says with a laugh. “I went through the underworld and I came out with the magic power of self-discovery.”

For a special that is digressive and relatively unstructured, viewers might be surprised at how neatly everything comes full circle. Beyond the allusion to Bryson, an anecdote at the end of the show gives the title new and deeper meaning. Still, I won’t spoil it here. For Gallagher, the next step in his work is to make meaning of his new life and his place in the world—a scary prospect for someone who has slain all the obvious dragons. “I’ve started working again,” he says. “I’ve been happily married for 11 years, I have two happy and healthy children. When I stop and take a breath, I see I have everything I want.”

But I Thought the Rules Didn’t Apply to Me?

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I can’t believe this is happening but it is.

Yep, it’s true. I’m growing older.

Look, I get it—most of us are appalled by aging. But I feel like it’s different for me. Every day that it happens, which is to say every day, I feel more and more like one of those people you hear interviewed on NPR after they’ve survived a disaster—the ones who say, “I’d always heard about this happening to other people. I just never thought it would happen to me.”

In other words, I’m flummoxed, stymied and every other SAT word we had to memorize over the fact that time is passing and with it, I am aging. Because I truly never, ever, ever thought it would happen to me.

I’m biologically programmed to be shocked by this turn of events. Both my grandmothers were obsessed with defying their age and had face lifts long before this practice was more common. My mom, at nearly 80, looks no older than 60. And my brother, after helping to invent a product that prevents people from looking older, is now quite literally working on the cure for aging.

(None of this is BS hyperbole. Google “Nathaniel David.” Yep, one of the world’s leading experts on anti-aging.)

I don’t think it’s an accident that my family is obsessed with not aging. We are a family, you see, that lives by another credo: the rules don’t apply to us.

No one ever said this to me. They didn’t need to because I absorbed it.

And what rule is more unfair and yet more unavoidable than aging?

My point is this: I always understood that aging would happen to you. I just thought I would stay eternally, say, 38 while you guys would get grey hair and clogged arteries and other, far worse things. Whenever I’ve spied a grey hair, I’ve felt inarguably, stupefyingly betrayed by my body. As I tweeze it and then pretend the whole thing never happened, I all but scream at the sky, “How could you do this to me?!”

And that brings me to my years of sobriety. While it’s lovely in many ways to be sober for 18 years, that also means not being able to avoid one completely horrific fact: unless you got sober as a prepubescent, you simply can’t be 18 years sober and not kinda, well, old.

But aging isn’t the only horror I’d assumed I’d be able to avoid throughout my sobriety. I’d also had this idea that I’d be able to duck some of the other issues I’d heard other people discuss—namely, depression.

Now I understood from the beginning that it’s not like you get sober and then things just get better and better all the time. I got that there were peaks and valleys only followed by more peaks and valleys. Still, at a certain point—SAY, 18 YEARS OF SOBRIETY—you sort of just maybe kind of think all that’s over?

See, I’d heard early on that years seven through 10 of sobriety were not easy but I buckled through. Cool, I seemed to think, survived that, scratch it off the list, move on, share in meetings about the gifts of sobriety, keep meditating and praying and all that and the tides rise and stay there. Right?

Er, not really.

The bumps have continued and I feel as betrayed by them as I did by that grey hair I tweezed this morning. Don’t all the happiness studies claim people get happier as they get older? Isn’t that how I consoled myself over the fact that the aging rules did apply to me? When the fuck, I want to ask that deity that I seem to have a hard time finding when I’m going through the shit, does it just get easy?

Never have I been more gobsmacked by that question than early this summer, when early childhood trauma I’d spent a lifetime trying to avoid came screeching out. This all happened to come along at a time when I had truly established myself “out there” as a person who shared her dark to find her light. My company, Light Hustler, was successfully helping people write and publish and sell books. I had made my life philosophy clear in the world: if you share the things that have brought you the most shame, you will heal and help others to as well.

In a certain way, I was the perfect person to lead this charge. After all, I had been doing that since I published my first book about addiction in 2007.

For years, I’d been receiving accolades for my bravery when it came to sharing about my addiction. I’ve received hundreds of emails and social media messages and in person declarations from people who tell me that my podcast or something I’ve written or said has helped them to come to terms with their own addiction. They often add something like this: “Even though I may lose my family or career by coming clean, your bravery has given me the strength to do so.”

For a long time, I accepted this praise, no questions asked. God damn it, was I a brave person, I would tell myself. And I didn’t even have to try!

But that shield of self-congratulations I’d created to honor my bravery fell apart in the face of my summer breakdown. I am generally not a crier but I became someone who cried so hard, so publicly and so often that it wasn’t even surprising one day when I was walking down the street, sobbing, and a homeless man asked me if I was all right. Humiliated, defensive, I responded, “Yes!” He looked at me, said, “You don’t seem okay” and shuffled off.

It just happened that I had a book coming out at this time—a book I needed to go out there and promote. I dramatically told a friend one day between sob sessions that I couldn’t be publicly together so I was going to cancel everything.

She shook her head. “I don’t get you,” she said. “This is your whole thing. Sharing your dark to find your light. Why wouldn’t you be open about struggling?”

So I had to ask myself the same question. And that’s when I saw that I’d never been ashamed about being an addict but I’d always been deeply, horribly ashamed about suffering from depression.

The truth, I suddenly saw, was that I seem to think sobriety is cool and that you, whoever you are, want to hear about it. I remember going to a restaurant early on in my sobriety, ordering a Diet Coke from a waiter and then adding, “The reason I’m ordering a soda and not a drink is that I’m newly sober after a crippling cocaine addiction and if I have a drink, that will just lead to more and next thing I know I’ll be calling my dealer and then it will be 6 in the morning and I’ll be wired to the gills, hearing the birds chirp and thinking about killing myself.”

And I recall him nodding warily and, while backing away, telling me my soda was on the house.

Even if I haven’t overshared about my addiction with you, I’m just a genre of person whom most people in the world would expect to be an addict. In LA, they say, you throw a rock and you’ll either hit a sober person or someone who needs to get sober. People in recovery are so out and proud here that we don’t even realize there’s any other way to be. And writers? Well, we’re supposed to be drowning out our senses to near incapacitation in order to access our creativity.

Point being: I was never going to not get a job because of having been addicted to drugs; if anything, it would help me get hired.

In other words, I wasn’t nearly as brave as the people coming to me for help sharing their recovery stories.

I was a hypocrite.

Unlike a movie character’s epiphany, however, I didn’t have this realization and then change. This wasn’t Grease and I wasn’t Sandy, ready to have Frenchie convert her from the person she’d been to the person she wanted to be.

In fact, when I signed on, puffy-eyed, to do a video interview the day after my friend confronted me, I told the person interviewing me that I had “just gotten some bad news” and might not be able to do the interview. This was about a month into my crying jag so the “bad news” was a lie.

Ignoring my attempt to duck out of the interview so I could surrender some more salt water from my eyes to the pillow, he said, “Well everyone here loves and supports you” and I realized that I wasn’t just talking to a friend but to the hundreds of people who had signed on early and were already watching online. I felt humiliated.

The truth I had to face is that I only wanted to share dark experiences if they were in the past…that I wanted to look perfect but talk about a broken past so that I could be respected or even feel better than other people. “I struggled once, just like you’re struggling now,” I wanted to communicate. “But look at me now!” I wanted to have the ugliness be a funny or meaningful story from my past.

So I’m here from the front lines to report: I’m not cured. I still fall apart. And I can quote Leonard Cohen all I want and talk about how the crack is where the light comes in but the reality is it fucking sucks when I’m going through it. Even though, of course, just like all those people promised, I always come out on the other side having learned something invaluable. It just can take a long god damn time—unlike aging, which seems to happen in a millisecond.

In other words, it’s taken me this long to truly accept the fact that the rules do apply to me. I even have the grey hairs to prove it.

Crossing Finish Lines: Carrie Steinseifer Bates’s Road to Recovery

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Road to RecoveryWhile alcoholic falls from grace are as common as they are tragic, there isn’t often an Olympic pedestal involved somewhere in the story. Unfortunately for three-time Olympic champion Carrie Steinseifer Bates, her story has one in it. Her decades-long plunge into alcoholism didn’t just devastate her family and destroy relationships—it almost erased her monumental athletic achievements from memory. “When you have somewhat of a public life, your problems aren’t any worse or more dramatic,” she says, “but everyone in my community knew. And let’s face it: when you’re being put in the back of a police car at three in the afternoon when the school bus is dropping off kids, the gig is kind of up.” Bates, who first competed in the 1983 Pan American Games, realized that none of her gold medals mattered much if she couldn’t escape the long shadow that alcoholism cast across her life and remarkable career.

At 15, Bates won gold medals in 4×100-meter freestyle and 4×100-meter relays, which she parlayed into Olympic wins the very next year. Beneath the brightness of her wins, though, something dark was percolating and about to rear its head. “I grew up in an alcoholic home, so swimming was my escape and my safe place—and I just happened to be good at it,” she noted. “That’s where I went to work out my fear and my anger. I took it all out in the pool and nobody can see you cry underwater, right?” Where that fear and anger informed her will, commitment, and singular drive to succeed in her competitive career, it later underscored a just-as-epic drinking career, too. “All the [sayings] that brought me my greatest accomplishments: ‘Don’t ask for help,’ ‘Barrel through it,’ ‘Bulldoze your way there,’ and ‘You’re strong’ became the same things that nearly killed me.”

Bates first tasted alcohol on a 14-hour flight from Tokyo, which sent her off to the races (pun intended): “I was on an airplane and I was one of the youngest traveling with the national team,” she remembers. “Nobody was monitoring what we were doing. Not only did the drinking feel good, but it was more of a feeling like, ‘Oh my God. I finally fit in.’ I’d always had a sense of not being comfortable in my own skin.” (She drank enough wine coolers to vomit on the plane and pass out.) Still, her competitive swimming career continued after her ’84 gold-medal wins and meeting then-President Reagan. She attended the University of Texas, where she was a member of three NCAA national championship relay teams, not to mention representing the US at the 1987 Pan American Games and the 1989 Pan Pacific Swimming Championships. (She won gold medals for the latter two, as well.) And yet, alcoholism doggedly pursued her like a competitor in her own swim lane. “I don’t think I really crossed that proverbial line to alcoholic drinking until my late thirties,” she said. But when Bates finally crossed the line, everything came crashing down.

“You have to remember I lived in a world that was about excess. Everything that we did was entitled and of excess,” Bates observes. “As elite athletes, we have this mentality that we work really fucking hard, but we play really hard, too.” And just as she did in the pool, with alcohol, she pushed the boundaries of what she was capable of. And while she later managed to get through two pregnancies without drinking, she knew that she was an alcoholic. “As I got older and was raising kids, I could definitely start to see that my disease was starting to progress,” Bates says. “I started to hide [my drinking]. I started to drink more than my girlfriends and more often, too. Eventually, it wasn’t just the quantity but the frequency.” It’s a story that sounds familiar to most any alcoholic, but it’s a particularly unsettling one for a champion who’d trained her entire life to be the best, if not quasi-invincible. Alcohol just wasn’t something she’d factored in. “I’d become everything that I hated in life,” she remarks, “and I didn’t even see it coming.”

Soon enough, Bates found herself in AA rooms, even though she still struggled with hitting any honest stretches of sobriety. “Talk about driving the shame stake deeper into the ground,” she sighs, recalling the memory. “I was a complete fraud. I’d literally stand up and take coins when I knew I wasn’t sober. My life was so defined by my achievements that I was so afraid that people would find out my truth.” That truth was its own full-time job to conceal. Bates spent as much time drinking as she did maintaining the illusion that she had a perfectly manicured life as a wife, mother, and career woman. “If you could divide me into three [parts], there’s me as a sober, recovering, strong woman. There’s also the diseased alcoholic [who is] really sick and near dying. And then there is me as a successful athlete, great mom, and a good career. For a long time, I felt like they were three very different people and I couldn’t quite connect the dots, but in sobriety, I can.”

Sobriety remained more elusive to Bates than an Olympic gold medal was to an ordinary person, though. “Elite athletes aren’t easy people to get sober,” she admits. “We have pretty big egos, usually.” Still, Bates had hit a bottom where suicidal thoughts, destroyed friendships and divorce waited for her, so she turned to treatment. That trip, though, wasn’t successful. “I wasn’t fully honest in treatment. I told the staff and the counselors what they wanted to hear,” Bates says. “I only told them parts of my stories because if I told my truth, I’d have to stay. I have a life to get back to, don’t you know? But I didn’t see how much that hurt me and my ability to stay sober.” Needless to say, her time in treatment didn’t work. She returned to treatment in 2012 after sitting at a kitchen table with two girlfriends, drinking alcohol out of a coffee cup. It was that moment when she decided to quit cold turkey, arranging for 90 days of out-of-state treatment. “And then went into this really, epic, dangerous withdrawal,” she says with a disturbingly cold, matter-of-factness that belies just how horrifying the experience must have been. “It was full DT’s: voices; hearing TVs that weren’t on; no concept of night or day. I was lucky I didn’t die, but I’m not so sure I didn’t want to die.”

Years following treatment, however, Bates hasn’t just found sobriety—she’s found purpose. “I was sick of getting A’s in Treatment and F’s in Life,” she explains, looking back on decades of drinking with equal parts terror and awe. Now, she’s focused on being the best mother possible to her two daughters and making them “aware of what’s running through their veins.” She’s also taken a very vocal stance against the stigma of addiction, using her achievements as an Olympian for a greater purpose. While Bates respects the anonymity of others in 12-step programs, she’s dedicated to living out loud and helping others. “I talk about recovery openly,” she said. “It’s so much bigger than the medals. It’s about using this platform to help other struggling people who are ashamed to come out of their front door.” When Bates speaks about recovery, you can hear the passion in her voice: the electricity in between each syllable; the way she punctuates her sentences with confident periods. She doesn’t hit one inauthentic note. Bates is resolute when she describes being active with the California treatment center where she finally got sober—a place she visits frequently with her family. “I watch my girls tell other moms that their kids will forgive them, as they did me, if they stay sober. Those are my proudest moments,” she says.

It’s particularly interesting to listen to Bates describe her recovery because she begins to speak with pronouns like “we” and “our,” rather than describing it as some sort of sad solo act. “My daughters aren’t ashamed of me and they’re not ashamed of our journey. We all own our story out loud and my kids have no interest in hiding the truth.” As Bates reflects, it’s clear that she’s come a long way from not only her drinking days, but an early recovery that found her “paralyzed by fear” and afraid to leave her house out of shame. Now remarried, Bates credits her “fabulous” husband for helping her achieve sobriety, saying that “he would walk in front of me until I was brave enough to be seen, in back of me in case I slipped, and next to me with pride when I was strong enough.”

In many ways, Bates is as much a force of nature now as she was as an Olympic champion, if not more so. She recounts signing up for half-marathons, full marathons and Iron man competitions with enthusiasm and grace, not an unbridled ego ready to destroy other people. Bates isn’t broken by her past so much as she’s humbled by it. She’s keenly aware of the gulf between standing on the Olympic pedestal and lying on her kitchen floor. “I have the seen the world from a view that very few people will get to see in their lifetime: as an Olympian, a gold medalist, as someone who traveled the world,” she notes. “I have seen and done things a lot of people will never get to do in their lifetime. But I’ve also absolutely lived in hell on earth.” True champions never let the fire inside them die out, and Bates is no exception. For someone whose career was built on speed and endurance, it’s remarkable to see that Bates continues to outpace her demons, leaving them all far behind.

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