4 Years Sober: Why Did This Happen to Me?
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11/9/23
I’m celebrating 4 years of sobriety, and one of the main questions that inspired me to do all this research on addiction was why me? I wanted to understand why this happened to me and not other people.
Why can’t I control how much I drink?
I see addiction as a collection of risk and resilience factors. The more risk factors you have, the more likely you will struggle with addiction. Resilience factors can protect someone from developing an addiction, even if their lifestyle or life experiences make them vulnerable.
I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing my drinking so here are 3 risk factors (I cover 4 more in this episode) that aligned in my life that made it very easy for me to develop a problem.
One. I had no coping skills and I have intense emotions
We don’t all feel emotions the same way. Some people have more intense emotions than others. I have very intense emotions too, and research has found that the intensity of the emotion determines how we will deal with it. If the emotion is very intense, people generally go for negative coping skills to make it go away. If you feel intense emotions more often, then you can see how the cycle goes.
If you don’t know how to deal with anything yourself, then you start searching for external things to solve your problems like the approval of others, achievement, alcohol, food, restricting food, self-harm, drugs, impulse buying, sex, and more. I started trying to use external things to cope when I was 13.
Two. Alcohol felt really good for me
This was one of the first things I got excited about when I started researching addiction. Alcohol doesn’t feel the same for everyone. You know how some people leave half a drink behind? That’s not because they’re stronger than you, it’s because alcohol is meh for them. We can’t understand them because alcohol is very rewarding for us. When we drink, it releases endorphins which feel good. These endorphins then trigger the release of dopamine. Not everyone releases the same amount of endorphins. If alcohol feels more pleasurable for you, then you’re more likely to drink it.
Three. I drank to cope with stress
One of the main reasons I drank was to deal with stress. I had a high stress life because of the jobs I had, but also because of how I thought about my jobs. The way we think about our life is a main part of the problem. I would get heated about things easily and think that everyone was out to get me. I couldn’t brush anything off so I created a lot of unnecessary stress for myself. I had no boundaries so I tolerated anything but inside it made me resentful and angry.
I was very vulnerable to what other people did, and what they did was always about how they didn’t like me or wanted to hurt me in some way. This made me drink at people all the time.
I describe 4 more reasons I believe I developed a problem in episode 177:
Cite this article:
Tietz, G. 4 Years Sober: Why Did This Happen to Me? Sober Powered. 2023
