Finding Happiness Beyond Addiction
Is up to you
Everyone’s recovery from dependency on alcohol is different and reflects the unique personal struggles that led the individual down the path of alcoholism to begin with. Something either got in the way of their happiness, leading them to search for it through different means, or, transversely, the rush of dopamine that brings counterfeit feelings of pleasure when alcohol enters the reward pathways becomes a neverending quest. When one reaches the point where happiness cannot be found without alcohol, addiction is likely hiding in the shadows.
My husband and I have been sober for 4–½ years.
We were both drinkers to numb the despair of life’s circumstances and underlying neurodivergence. We had each reached the point of dependency before entering an intimate relationship as two alcoholics who desperately longed for love and acceptance.
Not long after committing our devotion to each other with a true love we mutually felt and would not disown, we had to acknowledge that we could not continue to grow as a couple while trapped in our heads and at the bottom of our bottles. So, we quit.
I make that sound easy, don’t I? We quit. Just like that.
There is no easy in the fight against addiction,
but only addicts will truly comprehend what I mean by that. The pursuit of happiness is a treacherous one when you step off the path of dependency and into the ring of sobriety to contend with the demons that led you there. We didn’t just quit with the snap of a finger. We made many attempts at cutting back, lessening our intake, and deceitfully guarding each other against our poisons, but our demons were stronger than we were then and always prevailed.
They hid in the drawn line on my vodka bottle so I couldn’t lie about how much I drank and camouflaged themselves in every hidden can of beer he had. We couldn’t disguise those demons, suppress them, or confront them unless we took them head-on without our liquid courage, so we suited up for the inner battle of our lives and armed ourselves with defense mechanisms.
My sister-in-law is now walking this same path behind us, joining the fight and competing in the ring for a sobriety title. Like us, she’s been KO’d a couple of times but keeps fighting. While on the phone with my husband a couple of weeks ago, she asked him point blank, “How do you be happy without alcohol?”
Great question, isn’t it?
A few days before this phone call, we had been discussing this very thing because our 4–½ year-long recovery had taken starkly incomparable directions. When we made the initial decision to quit together, his dependence had a much stronger grip on him than mine did and he’s lucky he survived his detox. It was four days of hallucinating with no sleep and multiple trips to our local crisis center and the hospital where he was finally given an anti-psychotic medication and slept for two days straight, waking up completely sober for the first time in years. Upon discharge, he had a treatment plan in place including various medications and required psychiatry appointments.
Through that time, I was busy chasing ambulances,
probing for resolve, and pretending to be people I wasn’t in an attempt to hasten his hallucinations and the aggravation that arose from his misconstrued reality. Despite the security officer who stood outside his ER room, I protected him from outbursts toward others and halted his attempts to flee from his horror. I had promised him and his parents that I would see him through all of it and I was not breaking that promise.
I loved this man and would withstand whatever I had to keep him alive and sober while also trying to keep myself sober. I slighted my own addiction and recovery because it was more important to me to fight alongside him and I never second-guessed my commitment in doing so.
Throughout our initial sobriety, we recovered portions of alcohol-free happiness through keeping ourselves busy with things we enjoyed from being creative to kayaking and golfing, an essential aspect of staying sober for anyone. He attended his weekly appointments with his AODA and psychiatrist and we never picked up a drink again. Life was moving forward on a healthy and abstinent road.
Or so I thought.
I was so proud of him for carrying through with getting sober and I was proud of myself too.
I had never even considered disowning my vodka. I didn’t want to nor care to. I was functioning and my growing intake was inconsequential to me, so dumping out my brand-new bottle into the driveway and watching my liquid happiness stream into the gutters was penetrating. I did it for him regardless of if I needed to do it for myself. That was my thought.
I did not detox like he did. I was not as dependent as him and I did not become as easily infuriated by insignificant situations while trying to stay sober as he did, but I did become distressed by his on a damaging level. I felt the adverse effects deeply but didn’t explore the mental healing that I needed. This was about him, not me. I was fine.
But I wasn’t fine. I was miserable. While he was taking steps to fight his demons and allow organic joy to come back to him, I was withering away in sorrow while trauma from my past misconstrued my reality and ability to cope. I wasn’t hallucinating as he had, but my perception of reality was skewed just the same. Resentment grew in me with animosity towards the good that was happening around me. I could not discern the origin or target of my emotions and I felt them explosively, now more potent than the vodka I had once used to make them disappear.
I had to finally admit that I was not okay and I had to admit it again and again and again. I simply could not feel the way I did anymore. I wanted to remember how to be happy.
Within the conversation on that day before his phone call with his sister, I had been making my best attempt to explain how I had lost the ability to see the beauty in the world and how it was a critical determinant in realizing my propensity to simply be happy had diminished.
The sunsets that once reminded me how even a bad day can end beautifully no longer assured me. The sounds and commotion of the living world around me that had once created a buzz of enthusiasm and gratitude for being a part of its existence no longer hummed in me. The breeze of a warm summer night that once invigorated me to draw breath and enjoy the serenity of subconscious delight went unnoticed.
I expressed how clarity to perceive the resplendance of the world through my senses would come to me in waves and how I did everything in my power to hold onto those feelings, but that they would dissipate and be forgotten. I think what I was fundamentally trying to illustrate was that my ability to be mindful and present had been displaced and I desperately needed it back to allow happiness to flow through me once again.
While later interpreting the conversation he had with his sister to his mom, he stated how she had asked this ever-important question of finding happiness without alcohol and he responded that she would not find it by just looking around for beauty in the world. I was hurt deeply by how he could take my revealed dissection of happiness and systematically bury it in the dirt where so much lost beauty grows.
Achingly offended, feeling as though he had transfigured my sentiments into something not worthwhile, we had one of our clearheaded, unsedated, vexing conversations. Again, only those in recovery will likely understand what I mean by that. Those are the conversations fueled by emotion when you’re not even sure what you are feeling or thinking because you forgot how to think and feel, but you have to explain yourself anyway, and beyond the apprehension, they somehow always end in resolve.
In his defense, he stated how he knew his sister very well and that she was going to have to dig deep to find her happiness beyond the bottle. His statement modestly meant to contrast the breadth of her situation. Observing beauty in the world was not something that would help her, just as it was not important to his recovery. He had not meant to dismiss what I had explained. We have invariably and effectively understood that we have a profound paradox in our way of thinking and this was an example of that mental diversity. The search for happiness is not the same for anyone and he needed to help his sister in the way he felt was most beneficial for her while respecting the similarities between them as siblings.
I didn’t fully understand what he understood, that the search for happiness after addiction was not a quest that looked the same for everyone. I knew it as a fact, it is an intellectual sensibility, but I didn’t fully understand until I became offended by his misinterpretation of my approach leaving me feeling unvalued which was also, as many situations bring, was combined with a trauma response.
It was then that I began acquiring the humbling notion that apart from having healing to do, I would be achieving happiness on my own. I would be accompanied by comforting support from others, but independently from their comprehension of my journey, just as I will never fully be aware of his or anyone else's. This is the difference in recovery from one addict to the next.
The search for happiness after addiction is yours and only yours.
And it’s mine.
At the heels of this profound misinterpretation and the subsequent discussion was a mutual appreciation for each other’s individual recovery and reciprocal understanding that it was now my turn to search and find happiness in my way, with the stability of support and love that I had once given him.
The way I see it, the beauty in nature and the living world is brilliantly distinguished by being authentically unique in all aspects of existence. No sunset will ever be identical to the one at dusk prior, no tree branch grows exactly the same. Our days here sharing in it all will never be the same either, varying whimsically every day. Every moment we experience will never be duplicated nor can we as human beings. Much like the multifarious types of plants all grow in the direction that best suits their survival from the conditions it seeded in, we too, strive for perseverance in the best way we know how.
If I can find beauty in the exceptional uniqueness of the living world around me, then I can find beauty in the exceptionality of myself. And when that inner beauty matches the beauty of the world, I will have found the structure of happiness to be built on.
