How To Stop Drinking Without Going to 12-Step Meetings

Necessary, yes. You can get recovery, get sober, yeah, like real recovery, without going to any meetings, any group therapies at all. And despite what other people say, it doesn't mean that you're dry drunk or, you know, you're sober, but you're, you know, not working on yourself and all that other kind. You're not in recovery. Sometimes people will tell you things like that, but I'm here to tell you it's not true. You can absolutely get all the promises of recovery. You can get sober for real without having to talk about your business in front of large groups of people. And in this video, I'm going to tell you like five super realistic ways to get the job done. Now, I don't have anything against the meetings. I like the meetings. I've been a lot of meetings myself. But maybe it's just not for you. So let's dissect the situation and figure out what it is about meetings that does work for people. And let's figure out other ways of getting the job done. Because as long as you got the right ingredients, it doesn't really matter too much where you get the ingredients. As long as we got it all in place, we're gonna be okay. So when I think about what happens in meetings, there are, there, you know, there's few things in there that are important to recovery. And so I've got them narrowed down, try to narrow them down, like to the top five things that you would get out of going to meetings that are helpful and figure out alternatives to those. So one thing that going to regular meetings does for you is it keeps recovery, what I call front of mind, where it's your focus. You don't sort of take your eye off the prize, especially in the beginning. I think that's very important. So I think if you are new in the sober process, then you do need to keep it focused front and foremost in your thinking. In fact, everything else that you're doing in your life, I want you to put it all in the crock pot. I understand there's things you got to go to work, you gotta do with your family, you gotta take the dog out, you know, all that stuff. You can still do all that, but I want you to give it, you know, like at least amount of energy as you can. Don't start new projects that are really hard or that require a ton of willpower, anything like that. Put everything else in life kind of like keep doing it, but sort of on summer, you know how when you say I could do that with my eyes Closed. Do it with your eyes closed and put your energy and your focus on making these changes that we're about to talk about. Now, one way that you can keep things front of mind is to download a bunch of recovery podcasts on your phone and listen to them, put some recovery apps on your phone and listen in or participate in the journal activities. There's all kind of recovery apps you can put on your phone to keep it front of mind. You can get access to like my free 30 day jumpstart series where you'll get a message that gets sent to your phone with like a short three or four minute video every single day. To keep it front of mine every single day. I put that link for you in the description and a whole bunch more. But there are many ways to keep running. Get some books, put those books on audible, listen to them in your car. You can make this happen conveniently. And these are small, easy things that anyone can do. Now, I will say this. If you do want to sort of get sober on your own, which is sort of what we're talking about here, basically, you're going to have to put the framework in place for yourself. Yeah, you can go to a program and they have the framework built for you and you show up and they sort of put you through the assembly line. And I'm not opposed to that. But if you are opposed to that, then you are going to have to build the assembly line. So you're going to have to be willing to open your podcast app up and download you some podcast and mark some episodes to listen to, get a book, watch a YouTube video. Any of those things are just as helpful for keeping your recovery front of mind as anything else. So get on it. The next thing that you get out of recovery meetings is you get fellowship. In fact, I think in the beginning, when you very first start like going to meetings and stuff, fellowships, probably the important thing that you get more than like the actual program or rules or steps that they want you to take and all that kind of stuff. So the fellowship piece, you've got to think of some ways to get the fellowship. And why is that important? I think it's important for several reasons. One is just listening to how other people have got sober. Learning from other people's mistakes is all super duper helpful, but you can do that without having to go to meetings. Like, you could just go on Reddit and join some Reddit recovery groups. There are so many Reddit recovery groups that are very, very active. In fact, I had a client not too long ago who hated the idea of going to any kind of meetings. And he was pretty introverted, so I knew, I didn't, didn't even try to get him to talk about it. But he, before he even started talking to me, he was already in all these Reddit groups and he participated and he would tell me about things he read in the Reddit recovery group and advice he gave. I mean, it was just as active of a part of his recovery as anybody else's meetings or groups that they go to. So you can do that in Facebook groups, Reddit groups, you can find community without having to do group therapy. If you've got other ways to find community or, you know, good communities to join that aren't that, you don't have to go to group therapy, you don't have to share if you don't want to share and all that kind of stuff. I would love it if you would share that in the chat or in the comments so that other people can know about the resources that you know about. In fact, any of the things I talk about, if you know good resources, this is the place to put them. Because that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to get people access to the information that they need to get sober, whether or not they want to go to treatment, whether or not they want to go to meetings or not. You can do this. All right. The third thing, that pretty essential component to get sober, not just get sober, but actually like feel better, enjoy yourself, like, like your life better. That's what's essential about it. You could, you could like stop drinking or using or doing whatever you're doing and not do these things. That's possible. But you probably don't feel that much better. And if you're going to do it, you might as well feel better. So let's do it this way. The third thing that you get from going to meetings is accountability. And I do think this is particularly important. I kind of a lot of videos talking about why accountability is important. First I want to tell you why it's important, and then I want to tell you some ways of creating that for yourself. I think it's important because there are going to be days when you're committed and you're in the zone and you mean it. And they're going to be days when you're not committed and you're not in the zone and you don't want to, and your willpower is weak and you're frustrated and you're hungry, angry, lonely, tired. All those things. And so you need to put some things in place that make it very difficult to slide back into your old behavior and think of accountability. Just like putting roadblocks between you and the behaviors that you don't want to do anymore. One good way of creating accountability, fastest, easiest way, is to tell the people in your life what your plan is. Now, I know a lot of you, you're like, well, that's my business, and I don't want to talk about it. But I do kind of have this thought that you can't really recover in secrecy because most time when you don't want to tell nobody, the real truth of it is. I know what you're gonna say. It's the stigma. I'm not saying it's not that at all. But let's be real. The real truth of it is, is you want to tell people that you're not doing it anymore because you might change your mind. And so when you're not telling people, you're like, literally keeping this little safety net in place for yourself just in case this whole be a sober thing doesn't work out. Telling other people is like burning the bridges to the old behavior. Sure, you could keep doing it, but it's kind of awkward. Like, if you told one person that you work with that you are, you know, not drinking anymore, for example, and then it's like this work event that you got to be at, you are much less likely to drink at that event because you know that one person knows. It's not like they have to do anything or say anything. Just the fact that you know that they know that you said that does the trick. It's amazing. Something we use in our office for accountability that works beautifully for alcohol is we use something called a sober link. And I've got videos on that if you want to know what that is. But it's like an alcohol monitoring device. It's really cool. I'll put the link to it in the description. There are more videos. You can take a look at that. If alcohol is your issue. But there are other ones other than sober link, you don't have to use that. There are other ones, but create some accountability, whatever way that you can do it. Set up drug screening for yourself. Ask your family member to drug screen you if that's what you need. Some people I've seen, they tell their work that they have a problem and that they're working a program like their work, like their HR work. Not like a person at work, but like, they tell their, like, business, their work. Thing, do what you have to do to make it really hard to go back to it. I know you're resistant to doing this because you're like, well, I don't want to let people down. And I get that. And you might. And if you do, you're just gonna have to say, he know I let you down, but I'm still trying, so I'm not giving up. And burn those bridges back to the old behavior. We don't need them anymore. The next thing that I think is super important, that you get from most 12 step kind of programs and other kind of like community support groups and that kind of thing is being involved in the process of doing that. There's something that happens that I'm just going to call shame rejection, shame reduction. And that happens for a few reasons. What happens is, is when you hear other people talking about how they felt, the things they did, then you feel less horrible as an individual person because you're like, wow, I'm not the only one who's done that kind of thing. And if, if, if you were in a 12 step program, not only does it help you just to hear people talk about like in the meetings, but they have steps for that. They have you write down the horrible things they have. You admit it to someone else. And the reason why that is important is because saying out loud these, these horrible, shameful secrets that you're carrying around inside, it's like getting an infected splinter out of you. It allows you to start to heal from all of that stuff. And secrets keep you sick. You want to rid yourself of those secrets. So if you're not going to go to some kind of community support group for that, just because you don't like talking from groups and this and that, then you get yourself a recovery coach. You could get yourself a counselor. You know, you could find one friend that you trust. They don't even have to be in recovery if you don't want, but find somebody you can talk to about these kinds of things so you can rid yourself of the shame. And you also get a little bit of that shame reduction from doing the fellowship things, from just listening to other people talk because you're like, okay, I'm not the only one. And that by itself makes you feel a little bit better. Number five, practical, realistic step is self improvement. You do need to find some way to work on yourself as a person. And the reason that is is because you in recovery, the goal is to become a person that you are proud of and that you like. So one part of that is getting rid of the shame, getting rid of the secret so they're not haunting you anymore. And a second part of that is growing as an individual person and being proud of yourself. And I'm not just saying that in like a counselory way. I know I'm a counselor, but I'm trying to say too many counseling things, not saying that in that smushy, gushy way. I'm saying it because when you do things that make you feel proud of yourself, you live in congruence with your values. You get a lot of good serotonin released in your brain, and that serotonin actually helps to protect you against addiction. And it just makes your life better, which makes it a lot easier not to go back to the old stuff, because you're like, I like my new life. In order to do that, I don't want you to be thinking constantly about what will make me happy. I want you to think to yourself, what will make me proud of myself? And whatever that is, I want you to start doing it now. Maybe that's pursuing some kind of career goal that you've been wanting to, but you've been delaying, procrastinating on. Maybe that's getting out in nature and becoming a better fisherman or hunter. Maybe that's getting in the garage and finally building that, restoring that car that you've had sitting out there. Maybe that's helping other people. Find somebody else in your life that needs some help. If you can't think of something to keep yourself busy and help yourself, find somebody else that needs some kind of help and you have the ability to do that, maybe it's just listening. Maybe you have some kind of special skill, you're handy at something. Help someone else, that's going to help you, number one, be a better person, and number two, build all that good serotonin. Self improvement. You can also do this through working on any kind of underlying issue that you have, like depression, anxiety, trauma. That's where I would put this. I would put it under this self improvement category. Like, if you know that there's something else under there that's holding you back and you've been neglecting dealing with it, now would be a good time to do it. So the self improvement involves sort of putting extra things in your life that keep you busy, that make you feel good about yourself. And it also means getting rid of any old ugly stuff that's still in there that's keeping you down. And so a lot of times that means old, bad memories, all that kind of old mental health Stuff. If we need to deal with that, let's deal with it. So as you can see, there are many ways to get real life recovery without going to any minis. Because maybe you don't want to talk about your junk in front of everyone. Maybe there's not any meetings where you live. Maybe you don't agree with the philosophy of the meetings that are around you. Whatever your reasons, that's fine. You don't have to do that. You just have to have a plan. And I just gave you a really easy five step plan. If you can put these five things in place for yourself, you will see movement. Now, in the description of this video, I put some examples of resources in every single one of these five categories for you. But you, you don't have to use those resources. I'm just giving you examples. So feel free to go out there and build a recovery plan that works for you. And up next, I want you to watch this video called the Simple Mindset Shift that will help you conquer any addiction because it goes right along with what we're talking about. It's like what do I need to do as a person to get recovery on my own? And a lot of it is about shifting the way that we think about things. And I'll talk about that in detail in that next video. I do want to say hello to the people who join us live, which is. Hey, Lydia. Lydia says, I love those jump starts. Can't wait for my son to be ready receive them. I've listened to them because it helps me invisibly coach him. Oh, I love it. Emma says, my husband says he's going to stop drinking, but knows he doesn't. But I know he doesn't. Hold on. Sorry, Emma, my brain's not working. Let me put it up here. Bigger on the screen. Maybe I can read it better. My husband says he's going to stop drinking, but I know he doesn't want to. He knows I so clo. I'm so close to leaving. He's making me so ill. What should I do if he says he's gonna stop drinking? Even if he's saying he's gonna do it for you, that's a good reason, you say, I really appreciate that. That is a big sacrifice and I'm. I'm very grateful because I really care about you a lot and I want to make this relationship work. Thank. Don't say, you got to do it for yourself. Don't say, well, you're gonna have to do this and this and this. Say, I appreciate that. And when you say that, it's gonna make him feel more positively towards you and motivate him even more. Now, one big, very important thing I should have said at the beginning to the family members. This is one of the reasons why I made this video. You guys are always asking me if you're watching this as a family member. You're always asking me, can I send this video to my loved one? And I'm always like, probably not. Because most of the time, you guys want to send a video to your loved one where it's like, I'm saying something that you feel like it's going to call them out. Like, why do addicts treat their families bad? Or something like that? I'm like, no, don't send that one. This is the one. This is the video that you can send to your loved one if you've been wanting to send one. If. If your loved one is saying, like Emma's husband is saying, yeah, I'm going to get sober, but I'm going to do it myself, or I don't want to go to meetings, or I don't want to do. I don't want to go to treatment or something. This is the one that you can send them. If you're not going to say, no, I don't have a problem. I probably wouldn't send this one. Go into our invisible intervention and work on getting someone out of denial. And then when they get to that point, then send them this video. So this is the one I made because it's. It's a little easier to digest, it's realistic, and it gives people options that make that sort of. That are flexible and doable for anyone. All right, everybody, thank you so much for joining us. I am putting the link to that next video right here in the chat, and I will also put it right up here in the top corner so you can just click on it. Bye, everyone.