After you have been through treatment and are in recovery, you may realize that they were not really your friends anyway. True friends do not enable each other to poison their existence in an endless cycle of drinking and drugs. You will be making new friends in treatment and recovery, as well as through your support group meetings and new activities you will now start to enjoy. Fear in recovery isn’t something you can avoid, but it is something you can overcome and work through every day in your journey towards recovery. Over the next few weeks, we’ll touch on some of the most profound causes of fear in people facing addiction. We’ll also provide specific steps to take when your heart starts racing and your mind starts wandering.
“I Am Afraid I will Actually Feel Something”
During your individual counseling and group sessions, your emotions may feel overwhelming. That is because you may need to cleanse and purge yourself of years of piled-up Sober House negative emotions, memories, and past bad behavior. This emotional cleansing is a necessary part of healing, just as detox is a physical elimination of toxic substances.
Broken and Bleeding: Emotional Trauma and Substance Use Disorder
There are many ways to create new friendships without drugs and alcohol. This can include meeting people in support groups, adopting new hobbies, going to classes that interest you and pursuing a new career path. Alternatively, you may think following a healthy lifestyle will be too challenging. The prospect of changing your habits completely can, indeed, seem quite daunting. However, addiction treatment involves support in this respect.
Sobriety Fear #1: Never Drinking Again.
- Our brains are hard-wired to become uncomfortable in the face of the unknown.
- Once I did get sober (and once I stayed sober for several years) I realized that I was truly becoming the best version of myself.
- However, this is only possible if you genuinely want to be clean and sober and commit to the process.
- Fear is always about loss; it is present only when there is desire.
- If you fear that you will not be able to talk to people when you are sober, remember the consequences of drinking too much.
- When you’re addicted to drugs or alcohol, the notion of getting clean and then staying sober over the long haul can be frightening.
Sexiness really has nothing to do with drinking or doing drugs. You only fear that you will lose your sex appeal because you think that you will become inhibited and closed-off if you do not drink or do drugs. Real sexiness comes from within, from who you are and how you display your real self to others. You should look forward to discovering the real you that you have buried deep inside. The only way to truly do that is by going through treatment and becoming clean and sober.
Digital Health and Wearable Devices
- While you are in treatment, you will learn about accepting responsibility, and you will learn ways to ensure that you follow through on your commitments.
- More than likely, though, this meaningful journey of self-discovery will be a long, ongoing, and wonderful process.
- So understanding and addressing these fears is paramount.
- The best way to overcome fear is to walk through it.
- She started dry-heaving and had to leave the store and sit outside, struggling to catch her breath.
” Lifestyle modifications can be uncomfortable and perhaps even generate anger and resentment. So for some people, sobriety can be a bit scary. Depending how severe it is, overcoming a phobia can require a combination of therapy and medication. Sawhne, for example, recalls treating a woman who had lived with podophobia for years and was struggling to get intimate with a new partner. Many resist taking off their socks and shoes, or clutch their feet with both hands to protect them. They tell her they never wear open-toed shoes, even in the Miami heat, because they can’t stand what they see.
- With the right support and treatment, people in recovery can overcome their fears and build a healthy, sober life.
- Going from abusing drugs to living sober often involves major changes in your lifestyle.
- Most people will need ongoing support groups for some time after detox.
- If people press that response, I’ll either stare at them and hold an uncomfortable silence (this is enjoyable at some point), or just change the subject.
- Many of us drink because we need something to turn down the volume of the toxic shame parade running through our brains.
- You have probably been closed off for so long that you are understandably afraid to do, see, hear, and fail.
Sober Recovery Expert Author
You look at treatment as this big, mysterious black hole that you will fall into and never come out of. By entering addiction treatment, you are liberating yourself from the shackles of alcohol and drugs. However, this is only possible if you genuinely want to be clean and sober and commit to the process.
Your job is to recognize the fears for what they are – little lies we tell ourselves to keep from changing. Sometimes our fears are logical, but mostly they are not. These people know https://businesstribuneonline.com/top-5-advantages-of-staying-in-a-sober-living-house/ that the days are hard right now, but they endure because they also know that, eventually, they will come out on top. They don’t know when or how, but they trust that it will happen.
Fear of Sobriety
That’s why experts say it’s essential to raise awareness and combat the shame that often surrounds rare phobias. There’s no need to keep your phobia a secret and suffer in silence, Sawhne stresses. “People know this is an irrational fear, but they create avoidance behaviors to help manage their day-to-day so they don’t have to deal with it,” she says. “They come into treatment when they realize their fear is getting in the way of something greater,” like a fulfilling relationship or enjoying foot-loose fun all summer long. You may have thoughts about losing all that is good in your life, losing all friends, being boring, and feeling lost without the use of the substance. This fear is common, but by looking at the sober community, you can see that those thoughts are not true.