The Definition of Sobriety
Nov 07, 2024
Recently I had the privilege of talking with Todd Sylvester on his podcast, “Beliefcast”. After struggling with a drug addiction for 10 years, Todd found his way out and has now been clean for 34 years. He now helps others on their path to recovery by sharing what he’s learned along his own journey.
What intrigued me the most about our conversation was Todd’s definition of “sobriety.” He defines sobriety as “the time between relapses.” Sobriety is however long you manage to hold the demons back before they break out again.
It’s a vital part of healing from an addiction, but getting sober is only the first step to healing; it is not the destination. When in the sobriety stage, you are only a few steps away from a relapse. It doesn’t matter if you have been sober for 5 days or 5 years, you are still only a few steps away.
There is a very common belief I hear from people who have gotten sober from an addiction. When they give up their addiction, it’s really tough. Which is normal, but they assume it will be like that for the rest of their life. Because they had fallen into an addiction, they would now forever be running from it. It doesn’t have to be that way because there is healing beyond sobriety!
What Recovery Looks Like
Imagine you are driving a car. The sobriety stage of battling an addiction is like driving a car on a mountain road. There is a fence and plenty of yellow signs pointing you in the right direction, but with a slight turn of the steering wheel, you could careen off the cliff edge. Again, it doesn’t matter if you’ve been driving that road for 5 days or 5 years, the cliff edge is still just a small turn away.
Complete recovery is like driving down the mountain to the middle of an Oklahoma road that is flat, open, and has no cliff edges. When you recover from an addiction, the dependency completely disappears.
How to Step Beyond Sobriety
Sobriety is all about limits and filters that make it harder for someone to fall back into their addictive habits. It focuses on the addiction and uses the addictive behaviors to measure the success of the struggling person. The person’s entire healing hinges upon how long they can stop themselves from doing the addictive behavior. The problem is that before a person has fully recovered from an addiction, relapses are inevitable.
When you define your healing by how long you have been sober, a relapse is devastating. And instead of a relapse encouraging you to try harder, it destroys your confidence and you spiral all the way back to where you started.
Sobriety is important, but the faster we can shift our focus from the addiction to the person, the better. What I mean by that is, stop trying to fix the behaviors of addiction and start exploring the beliefs that drive the need for the behaviors.
Addiction is a symptom of a bigger, more pervasive problem: shame.
“Shame loses power when it is spoken.” - Brené Brown
Recovery is the process of healing the shame that drives addiction. Addictions fill up the holes in our worth with pleasure, numbness, and comfort to relieve us of our shame for small moments of time. That is why people fall into addictions. Because there are holes in their worth that they are trying to escape.
To fully recover from an addiction, we must confront those holes (that shame). We have to look our shameful demons in the eyes and deconstruct their lies to uncover the truth.
The truth is, there are no holes in your worth. Your faulty beliefs make you feel that way, but you’ll come to see that your worth cannot be bent, destroyed, or even altered at all. You are and will always be invaluable. Your worth is beyond comprehension.
To reach recovery, face your shame, and tell it the truth: “I am more than you say I am.”
Reframing your perspective to see your true worth is what brings you away from the cliff edge, down the mountain, to the middle of Oklahoma where there is no edge to fall off of.
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