FreeOwl

I think I can relate.... the GETTING sober part comes with a lot of challenges, a lot of needing to get really honest, a lot of needing to look at our own lives in ways that can be really uncomfortable. It comes with loss, as well. Though a lot of focus in recovery is on embracing the new and the possible and the growth and the presence of life - too often we forget to just acknowledge that there is also LOSS, and loss comes with grief.

• We lose connections - often longtime friends and peers will drift away or we will have to let them go
• We lose traditions and rituals - regardless what the real impact on our lives was, when we stop going to bars, stop attending rager parties, let go of habits that influenced our addiction, those are also things we've come to find a part of who we 'are'.... so it's ok and healthy to acknowledge those losses and even grieve for them.
• We lose familiarity - our addictions and our habits "feel" familiar and humans, human brains, are comforted by the familiar
• We lose sleep!!! Boy, did I lose a lot of sleep in my early days of sobriety
• We lose an image of ourselves - though we know it's an image we no longer want..... still, letting go the image of our drinking selves means we become a little un-tethered and 'who we are' now needs to be re-defined. That can be a confusing and scary part of recovery at first.

All in all, these losses - when we look at them in later sobriety - aren't such great losses after all. And many of them - when sobriety's focus arrives - are actually not losses at all. But, along the way - all of them can feel kinda like 'recovery sucks'.

It helped me to look at those losses, honor them as such, journal about them, write them on paper and burn the paper ceremonially, work with my therapist about them, and generally give myself space to acknowledge that there IS plenty of "this SUCKS" in the process of recovery....... but it is ALL worth it.