If you want to know what the key is to living sober I can tell you that it is not simply to quit drinking. If it were that easy then alcoholics would not struggle for years and years to find a way to get sober, only to continuously relapse over and over again.
There are a few secrets to achieving long term sobriety. The first of which is that you have to make it through early recovery. Seems obvious but this is in fact where most people get tripped up so we have to take a minute and examine what happens with this.
Early recovery is overwhelming and difficult. The odds are stacked against you. Most do not make it past 30 days sober. How can the alcoholic overcome such daunting odds?
A few suggestions for conquering early recovery:
1) Use overwhelming force - if you want to succeed in early recovery then you need to bring a giant gun to a knife fight. That means finding a structured environment for a lot of people or possibly hitting a ton of 12 step meetings each and every day for a long time. I for one moved into a long term treatment center and stayed there for almost 2 years. This is overwhelming force. If you are a serious alcoholic or drug addict and you try to go to outpatient once a week for 2 hours on Wednesday afternoons then guess what: you are not gonna make it. It takes a tremendous effort to make it through early recovery.
2) Go to treatment - rehab is not cheap by any means and the cost is probably rising over time, but treatment remains a solid option for those who are looking to jump start their sobriety. The secrets to living sober can be learned in rehab, but they must be practiced out in the real world. But for the most part, all of the knowledge is there for the taking and pretty much any treatment facility will guide you in the right direction. The specific program you work is unimportant; what matters is action, commitment, and follow through.
3) Transition to holistic growth - now after you make it through early recovery you have to start pushing yourself to grow in a holistic manner. Most people do not understand this or see a need for it and those are the people who end up relapsing in the long run. After you make it through early recovery, the threat of relapse becomes less imminent but twice as subtle, and just as deadly. In other words, it is no longer a struggle to stay sober each day, but this very fact can allow relapse to creep back up on us if we are not careful. So how can we prevent this from happening?
Very simple: we have to keep growing. This is the whole secret to living sober. We have to keep pushing ourselves to grow in our recovery or we will stagnate and relapse. Complacency is our only enemy in long term recovery. To beat it we must keep taking action. This is the path to long term sobriety.
