First Steps to Sobriety?

To answer this question, we need to define what we want to be sober from. What is the thing that you want to refrain from, your "acting out”, the behaviors that you have identified as problematic or harmful? This involves abstaining from certain sexual activities or behaviors, such as pornography use, masturbation, buying sex, sexting, hook-ups, as well as avoiding situations or triggers that can lead you back into these unwanted behaviors.

When you are in a pattern of acting out, you develop a “fog”, that prevents you from seeing and feeling life in an authentic way. One of the most beneficial things I did early on in my path of recovery was a 3-month time of abstinence. My therapist helped me develop and facilitate a plan with the following diagram.

I put all my behaviors that I was going to abstain from in the center circle. These were the things that I currently recognized as off-limit problematic things I was using to cope. For me those things included pornography, masturbation, bikini coffee stands, massage parlors, and even sex with my wife (more on this in a later blog) I put these in the center circle of abstinence that I was going to refrain from for 3 months.

The next ring out from the center were activities I was going to continue partaking in but analyze if they were “issues” for me. Some of these activities included drinking, smoking, Facebook, Instagram, movies/TV, certain friends I hung out with, and places I would go. As the 3 months progressed, I found that I needed to move of few of these to the center ring. They proved to be things that led in a direction back towards my behaviors I was abstaining from.

The outside ring was where I put “New” healthy activities that I wanted to do instead of acting out. One of the chemicals in our brain that is released during acting out is dopamine. Dopamine is released when we experience pleasurable stimuli, such as eating food, engaging in social interaction, or achieving a goal, and when we act out. The purpose of these new activities is to discover a different pathway in our brain to reinforce feelings of pleasure in healthy activities for our bodies, and let the old pathways get “overgrown with weeds”. A great resource that explains remapping these pathways in our brain is a YouTube video by Paula Hall – “Road to Brighton”. The activities I put in this outside ring were things like a new hobby I could explore, make a new food I have never had, read books, learn a new musical instrument, exercise more and get healthy. Be creative here, look for things that you’ve always wanted to try, but never had the time to pursue.

As I pushed forward in this time of abstinence, I experienced a lifting of that fog, and I began to feel life more fully. I’ve learned that when we numb ourselves by acting out behaviors, we are not only numbing the bad things that we don’t want to feel, but we also end up numbing the good as well.