A short YouTube talk by Amber Hollingsworth about building a recovery support system during early sobriety. She emphasizes having both accountability and a safe, nonjudgmental person to call when cravings arise, recommends regular check-ins (e.g., with a sponsor or recovery coach), and advises creating a foundation of trust so asking for help becomes easy.
Chapters
Not only is it important to have accountability in your recovery, it's also just as important to have really good support. Now, I know you probably have family and friends who are supportive of you, and they say, we support you and we love you and all that kind of good stuff. But sometimes they don't know exactly how to support you in the right ways. If they're coming to ho for families, hopefully they're learning how to support you. But if they don't, they might have good intentions but totally screw it up and not be very helpful. So a lot of times the family and friends, they really support you by holding you accountable. And that is a form of support. You definitely need that. But you also need that person that you can call up and you can say, oh, my gosh, I wanted to drink so bad day, I can't stand it. Like, I seriously started scheming in my head about how to do it. And the important thing about the person that you call and have that conversation with is that they can hear it without freaking out. In fact, a lot of times when clients tell me that, I get kind of happy, they're telling me that not because I'm happy they had a rough day or that they're craving or anything, but more because I know if they're telling it to me, they're way less likely to go out and do it. If you wanted to go do it, you're not coming to tell Amber about it. I worry a lot more when clients just always tell me everything's fine, I'm not having any cravings. Like, this was way easier than I thought it was going to be. That scares me. It doesn't scare me when someone says, I had a really hard time or that was really rough, or I barely made it through it, or I'm not even sure what's gonna happen. You know, when you're telling it out loud, you're telling on your disease, which, number one, makes the craving go away, number two, creates a little more accountability in your life. And a lot of times when clients talk to me about it depends on my relationship with them, but we'll just laugh about it. I'll be like, oh, man, I bet that was rough. And then we'll talk about it and talk it through, and we'll put it in a better place in their brain, and we might come up with some solutions about maybe triggered the craving and what could help. But the key is being able to say it out loud. And you need a safe place to do that. You know, people always say, like, Call me up if you want to drink, blah, blah, blah, all that kind of stuff. You're definitely not going to do that. If you think they're going to either freak out or get scared or you're going to get in trouble, you've got to have that safe person. Now, the last little tidbit I'll tell you about creating support is this. When you go to 12 step meetings and you're new, they do this thing where they pass around this list and everybody puts their phone number and they'll say, hey, call us if you're having a hard time. Here's what I'm going to tell you. Like, no one hardly ever does that. They don't call when they have a hard time. What you need to do is pick a person maybe on that list, or sponsor recovery coach. And you just need to call them regularly, even every day. Just talk to them about your day, tell them what's up, tell them what's going on. And when you do have that hard day, it's going to be easy to call them up and have the conversation with them. If you haven't talked to this person ever, you don't have a base, a background, you don't have a foundation. You're not going to call up some weird stranger and say, oh my gosh, I want a drink. I mean, I guess that could happen, but not very often. So make sure you're putting the foundation in place. You're building those relationships, you're communicating regularly, and then when the time comes, you will be able to utilize it. You'll feel safe, you'll feel comfortable, and you'll be able to reach out when you need to.
