I sat in my therapist’s office (this was before Covid, when we still went to offices), telling her all about my traumatic childbirth, the 40 days I spent in the NICU with the twins and the subsequent 7 days I spent in the NICU with Cade (who was conceived when I had an IUD), our dissolved business and the long and drawn out failure of our house sale in Spokane (it did eventually sell), and all the other things my husband was doing that were pissing me off.
This particular shrink I had sought out for the panic attacks I was having when I would go into the doctor’s office with my sons, and also for my floundering marriage.
“So when do you drink?” she wanted to know.
I looked at her. “Oh, yeah, the thing is, that’s not my problem,” I said.
“I mean, what is your trigger?” she continued. “When you’re angry?”
I nodded.
“Sad?”
“Yeah, also sad.”
“When you’re bored?”
I nodded again. “Mad, sad, bored, or if it’s been a really busy day,” I paused. “When I’m tired, for some energy — alternately, also if I’m keyed up, to calm down a bit. If I’m celebrating something good.” I squinted and looked out the window. “But, also if something bad happens. If the kids are good and I want to relax while we watch a movie…and also if the kids are bad to take the edge off.”
She leaned back in her chair and looked at her notebook, fiddled with her pen.
‘It sounds like your trigger is 4 PM,” she said. “And 4 PM comes every day.”
In the early days, when I was still “sober curious,” or even perhaps under the delusion that I would one day be able to moderate, I had a pattern. I could get through “Day 1” (because usually Day 1 followed a real bender, feeling physically like shit and also being mortified by something I did like looking at my phone to see that I had a three-hour long conversation with a boy I really liked, or that I left the oven on and was about to make a pizza right before I passed out, or just that I was so sick of my own shit I could hardly look at myself in the mirror - especially my face felt so puffy that I could see my cheeks in my peripheral vision). I could get past Day 2, because like, it was just Day 2, I couldn’t give up on Day 2. And then I would get to Day 3, and well, it seemed like I had earned a reward, and I didn’t know any reward aside from a drink, so — I’d have a drink. And then, like 15 more.
And so began another cycle.
One thing that scared me when I got past a week or two was watching my face get less puffy. I had never thought alcohol could possibly have been affecting me as it was. But my eyes started to sparkle. When I passed the mirror, I hardly recognized myself. I looked alive. It devastated me to think if this was what my face looked like on the outside, what could possibly be happening inside my body, and perhaps that was why I felt like dog shit all the time.
December 2021 and September 2023
As my shrink had so painstakingly pointed out, my actual trigger was afternoon time on a day that ends in Y. Because, once again, as a highly functional alcoholic, I could continue in my drinking so long it was in the afternoon. If I started drinking in the morning, that would have indicated a real problem.
I mean, yes, every now and again I had a bottle of champagne with a splash of orange juice in the morning, but only on the weekends (except an occasional weekday but that opportunity rarely presented itself). And, for the most part, I nursed a hangover through the morning, slammed coffee, fed the kids breakfast, tried not to throw up into their scrambled eggs, took them to a park (where I tried not to throw up at the swing set), fed them lunch, chugged Powerade Zero, started watching the clock and soon enough it was the exact right and totally appropriate daily time for a very-not-alcoholic-totally-normal-Mommy-Juice-drinker to start drinking again.
When I started making it past Day 3 regularly, it was because I had started trying a lot of things. In short, I was throwing everything against the wall and seeing what stuck.
Here is a non-comprehensive list of the things I tried to get sober:
Shamanic medicine wheel
Energy healing (I have become a practitioner, myself)
Reiki/Archangelic light
Astrology and birth chart readings
Tarot cards (which I read now)
Intuitive readings
Annie Grace’s The 30 Day Alcohol Experiment (I will say this was probably the most influential app I had — Annie Grace examines the neuroscience behind addiction, social constructs surrounding alcohol, reasons why we drink, among other things)
Attending We are the Luckiest meetings (I haven’t attended in some years, can’t speak to what the community is now)
Building a community (many, many, many group chats with people who kept falling back to “Day 1”)
And still, when it really, truly, finally stuck: I found myself in AA. Fucking AA, I thought. There had literally been entire years of my life where I said to myself, god dammit Kristen, you better get it together, or you’ll be one of those people crying in a church basement.
When I first got to AA (where I had stumbled in many times over the years), I heard a lot of people say they were grateful recovering alcoholics.
Grateful? I thought. What do you have to be grateful for? You can’t even drink champagne at your wedding. How depressing.
But, as they say, they’re not a glum lot.
And I did find true healing in the rooms. I would argue not only in the rooms — I needed all the other recovery tools that I had gathered in my toolbox — and I intend to share how AA is a component of my recovery among all the rest, but I think it is fair to say the group of women I came to know in AA is and was what has kept me sober.
But, before all that good shit could happen, I had to get past 4pm.
How I got past 4pm in the early days:
Fake beer/wine — There are mixed feelings in sober communities about fake beer/wine (nonalcoholic drinks) but I love them. When I got home from work in those early days, I just looked around and wondered, what is it I’m supposed to consume right now. Fake beers/wines filled that void for me. Some people warn they will trigger you to “want the real thing,” but for me, it hit the spot. I still enjoy drinking fake wine and beer on occasions when I might have enjoyed a real wine or beer. My favorites:
Athletic Brewing Company is the best beer — their IPA tastes so authentic, I sometimes had to do a double take to be sure it was, in fact, non-alcoholic. What’s wild is I used to have to special order it online, and now even Food Lion carries it. For something sparkly and dry, I love Gruvi’s Dry Secco. Fake Corona with a lime is perfect for summer days — and also bizarrely available at the grocery store as of late. I’ve even tried some fake hard liquor, but I have not yet found one that I really enjoyed (would welcome suggestions).
Eating lots of sugar/whatever I wanted - My only rule was ANYTHING but alcohol. This was a bit different than the other times I had tried to quit drinking in the past. Before, I would try to quit drinking as part of an overall “I need to get healthier” type thing. I had to quit drinking so I could do the keto diet, for instance. But it didn’t take long for me to learn you could still drink hard liquor on that diet, and there was a few weeks in early covid when I would eat lunch meat and bacon all day then guzzle a bottle of vodka and subsequently eat up all the bread in the house. In any event, this go-round, when I really, really was desperate to quit drinking — the rule was, anything but alcohol. Sugar cravings are very real in the early days as a result of your body being deprived of the sugar that you used to consume in alcohol.
Taking it one day, one hour, one minute at a time — I had (still have) the app I Am Sober (more on my favorite apps next time). I wrote my “Why” and I would literally sometimes stare at the sober counter, watching the seconds tick by, the minutes, the hours. The days started to collect, and that felt good. Having to re-start that clock felt so shitty that I would sometimes think, I just can’t re-set this again if I drink. I’m not sure that ever fully kept me from reaching a drink (I had to learn how to keep a drink much further from me than that, something I learned in the rooms, which I’ll get into later) — but this was a good motivator. I set alarms for a “pledge” at 8am and a “review” at 8pm — and it still feels good to answer “No” when the prompt asks, “Have you had any drinks since your last review?”
Smoking cigarettes — I can’t, of course, say in good conscience that I would recommend smoking cigarettes — as it turns out, cigarettes are bad for you. But again, I was willing to temporarily trade the (I have quit smoking cigarettes now, but it is definitely the first thing I want to reach for when I am feeling overwhelmed or stressed).
Letting the kids watch lots of TV - I gave myself permission to do ANYTHING except drink. The kids ate a lot of Happy Meals and we watched a lot of TV. I listened to The Luckiest Club meetings while Mickey Mouse Clubhouse was on and I cried. I fell asleep in my boys’ beds, I was so exhausted. My body had so much healing to do. I was so bone-tired. Anything that drew against my “sober resolve,” I just didn’t engage with. Like if I felt like I was burning myself out with the kids, the long-term effects of having a sober and present mom outweigh the harm of them watching Toy Story 1-4.
My mantra was: the kids will recover from all these Happy Meals. They will recover from stepping over fries and trash on the floor of the car. They will recover from watching Toy Story 1 - 4 in one sitting.
They will never recover if their mom dies of alcoholism.
The days accumulated. Day 1, 2, 3 — falter. Day 5, 6, 7 — falter. I had years of false starts. I remember the first time I made it to two weeks. It blew my mind that I had done it. And yet, I rewarded myself with — you guessed it — a drink.
There were many times when I thought, there is no way I can do this. I am a true hopeless alcoholic. I thought of stories I had heard of my paternal great-grandfather, a “fall down drunk” who couldn’t keep a job, who lost his family’s house, who died young.
But I kept at it. The more 4pms I made it through, the more 4pms I felt confident that I could make it through. The muscle strengthened.
That’s not to say that 4pm sometimes still roll around and I never think to myself, god a drink sounds good. In fact, sometimes when my many children get off the bus and storm into the house and tear open fruit snacks and goldfish and capris suns are scattered everywhere and they are all screaming, I think, god I wish I could just turn the volume down a little bit on this.
But I don’t turn the volume down just a little bit. I turned the volume way the hell up and then off all together when I drank, and when I woke up, my anxiety was a thousand-fold. Annie Grace calls these falters “data points” — and I needed a lot of data points to finally, eventually, painfully wave the white flag and conclude that a drink (as if I ever had “a” drink) never ended well for me.
We have such similar stories, I read Tarot and I tried all of the same sober strategies. I'm recently giving the meetings another shot lol Congrats on your hard earned sobriety and thanks for sharing your story :) I'm brand new to Substack but happy to be here.