Surrendering Control

A Turning Point.

I’ve spent all my life with an insecure attachment.

Having two amazing parents with an unrivalled work ethic, hellbent on providing us with more than what they had as kids, combined with undiagnosed ADHD, among other things, meant I didn’t get the extra emotional support that not even I understood I needed.

It wasn’t until recently that I started to grasp how this impacted me as an adult.

The Sobering Thoughts Community Support Group is only in its infancy, but it’s already impacted my life profoundly. It’s helped me reimmerse myself in sobriety, and it was the kick in the arse I needed to get myself into an AA meeting finally. Something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time but constantly found a way to talk myself out of it. This is something I’ll talk about in future posts.

Through regular interaction with this group of amazing people, regular AA meetings, and monthly appointments with my psych, I feel more immersed in my sobriety than ever, which is the complete turnaround I needed given it was only a couple of months ago I started to realise I had become complacent in terms of practising my sobriety.

A guy from my local meeting said to me just the other day that when you immerse yourself in sobriety, things… fall into place. And you know what? He’s fuckin’ spot on. Even though I’m having some internal grapples around belief systems/structures, I’m navigating my through what certain things mean to me and my own interpretations of certain pieces of literature to help me make sense of it all.

I’ve learned how that insecure attachment I developed as a child manifests in my adult life.

Control…

I don’t feel secure unless I’m in control. When I’m not in control, I am terrified.

There are far too many uncontrollable things in the world with the potential to directly or indirectly impact my life. There are some things you can prepare for, like setting money aside for regular utility bills. Some things you can’t prepare for, like raging bushfires.

It’s not all bad, though. Being a control freak has helped me professionally. I often get commended on my attention to detail and how thoroughly I plan my work. If only they knew that it has nothing to do with my desire to maximise company profit and everything to do with preventing future stress and anxiety, but hey, whatever works.

But I struggle to turn that control on and off. As much as I would like to, I can’t seem to be that meticulous, organised person at work and then drive ten minutes home, surrender control on the way and arrive home in a present state of mind.

I think this is why I always feel the need to be doing something. I always thought it was about avoiding specific thoughts and feelings, but maybe that’s not it. Perhaps it’s just the uncertainty that comes with not having something to do. I do not control what’s happening when I have nothing to do.

I think this is why, in the past, for the most part, I was able to drink less on weeknights and save the drug use for weekends, although toward the end there, those lines (no pun intended) started to blur. As much as I didn’t love work then, I knew what tomorrow had in store for me, and that familiarity and structure brought me comfort.

I think this is why, when it came to the weekends and, more recently, Thursday nights and Sundays, my substance use got out of hand. Initially, I would drink a little throughout the week, but always plenty on weekends. I didn’t realise it at the time. No one ever does, but I was incrementally becoming more and more reliant on drugs and alcohol substances to calm the anxieties that uncertainty provided. Using a depressant and a stimulant to cure my anxieties… clever.

On reflection, it’s no surprise that the closer I came to hitting rock bottom, the more uncertainties there were in my life. I had a pregnant partner. We were packing our house, trying to rent it out, moving from a city to a small town two hours away, where I’d be starting a new role at work. We were trying to find a new house to buy, secure finances for said house, and then move house before I had to start my new role. We would become parents for the first time four weeks after my start date, coinciding with my partner taking a financial hit as she started 12 months of maternity leave.

Things were pretty fuckin’ uncertain.

I realise now that I was using drugs and alcohol to permit myself to surrender control, albeit momentarily. I still remember the feeling I would get deep inside the bottom of my gut as the first line of cocaine would run down my throat—a taste I loved and hated at the same time. I’d quickly chase it down with a mouthful of beer that I could barely feel as my throat was numbing.

It felt like an electronic turbine starting up. It was like with every lap of the coil, the electric charge would double in speed. I fucking loved it and wanted as much of it as I could get. The desire for that feeling is directly relative to the amount of uncertainty ahead of me. I think that’s why I would drink for so long because I had permitted myself to forget about all the things I was trying to control, and I felt free. I wanted to hold onto that feeling for as long as I could. I had no worries in the world while I was drunk and high, and I loved it, but I would also fight my hardest to stay there in that feeling.

Sadly, that kind of behaviour is probably the least productive thing you can do at a time when you need to be sorting your shit to secure your family’s future, but I couldn’t stop. I knew what I was doing wasn’t sustainable, and I knew I wanted to stop. I knew if I didn’t stop, we would either end up with two mortgages and no one renting the first house, or we’d be in the new town with nowhere for me and my heavily pregnant partner to live, but even then, I just couldn’t fucking stop.

And it was all because of this insatiable desire to control everything at a time when I needed to do the opposite.

Today, I have been sober for 658 days. I’ve been working my arse off to better myself for most of this time. Everything I have discussed with my psych has logically made a lot of sense. The same goes for things I’ve learned on my own and through conversations with others doing similar things.

However, I have always struggled with applying what I have learned. In the past, I have talked a lot about trusting the process, particularly around things like running, fitness and weight loss, but these are all things that give us objective metrics and fancy trend lines so we can see our progress and give ourselves a pat on the back.

Emotional and psychological growth is much harder to measure. It can only be done through active reflection and self-assessment, which requires us to tackle our unconscious biases, which isn’t easy, especially for someone susceptible to low self-esteem.

While the above is true, I know I have made significantly more emotional and psychological progress over the last couple of months than I did in probably the six months before that. I can confidently pinpoint a few fundamental changes that have helped to accelerate my sobriety and improve my mental health.

The first one is the Sobering Thoughts Community Support Group. I’ve spoken more than enough about this group lately, so I’ll keep it brief. The ability to take a group of like-minded mates in my pocket everywhere I go and knowing that at any time I can jump into a safe space, free of ridicule and judgement, to seek advice has been amazing, and the quality of the dialogue in that chat continues to blow me away. Most of the people there I’ve never met in person, yet they’ve profoundly influenced my life over the last two months. You’re a bunch of legends, and I’m so grateful for each of you.

Secondly, I finally mustered up the stones to head along to my first AA meeting. I understand some people might see AA as a bit cult-like or no different to going to church. It was those exact fears that kept me from going for 21 months. This has not been my experience. My experience has also been nothing like the movies.

We do sit in a circle, and sometimes people do cry, but it’s not in some dingy abandoned fucking warehouse or dimly lit community hall with flickering lights where everyone is moping around with the shakes. There’s also no dick swinging. It’s just not tolerated, and because of that, no one is bothered. Ego is left at the door. It doesn’t matter if you have 50 years of sobriety or 50 seconds. Everyone is welcome, equal and as important as anyone else, and that’s truly been my experience.

Lastly, I found a daily online AA meeting to sit in on. I jump on every morning, and it helps me start my day with sobriety in mind front of my mind. While they lack the personal touch of a face-to-face meeting, they have their upsides too.

You can jump on anytime, anywhere. You can do so anonymously. You don’t have to turn your camera on, and you don’t have to share. I think this is great for anyone considering a program like AA but has some reservations. It’s a great stepping stone into AA or even a great way to dip your toes into the water and establish if it’s something you’d like to do or not. You never know until you try and lose nothing from listening to just one meeting. It might be your first and last ever meeting, and it might change the trajectory of your whole life, but you won’t know until you try!

I’ve realised there is no silver bullet to apply the practical knowledge I’ve been picking up over the last 21 months. As my friend from my meeting said, you have to show up with an open mind and allow things to fall into place.

I always associated surrender with weakness, as though it meant giving up. But for someone so conditioned to want to control everything, and the idea of not controlling things terrifies them to their core, surrendering is one of the bravest things you can do.

I know that for some, this might all sound a bit woo-woo, and to be honest, I’m still grappling with a lot of it. The thing is, though, this is your sobriety and your experience of it. You can interpret the literature in whatever way works for you. Like any self-help book, taking one or two helpful things from it is worthwhile.

All I know is that since I have been spending more time interacting with other sober people and being a little more open-minded about things, I have found more peace in my chaotic mind. I’ve realised that it’s not up to me to apply the practical knowledge that I am learning, but it is up to me to allow it to apply itself, and it’s all just from spending more time interacting with a community of like-minded people.

My mind feels slower, and for the first time in my life, I can stop and ask myself, “Do I need to worry about this?" or “Is this my problem?”. More often than not, the answer is no, and I can forget about it.

If the answer is yes, the next question I ask myself is, “Do I need to worry about this right now?” again, more often than not, the answer is no and just like that, I forget about it. If the answer is yes, then we deal with it.

It’s wild because I’ve even written in the past about how 85% of the things we worry about never happen. I know this stuff, but it’s taken until now, until I did these other things, for the message to land for me.

It’s helped me be less cynical, judgemental and critical of others. When we think that way about others, we’re actually seeing traits in others that we don’t like about ourselves. So, by reminding myself that I don’t need to concern myself with others and what they’re doing, I’m actually being kinder to, and more accepting of myself.

It’s hard for me to accept that something so simple can profoundly impact my day-to-day life, but isn’t that always the case?

I feel so much better in almost all aspects of my life. That subtle but constant hum of anxiety that has been following me around all my life is slowly dissipating. I’m worrying less and less about things I can’t control. That feeling of surrender I once got from that first line of cocaine I’m now finding within myself. If only I had known, I could do it on my own all along without all the adverse side effects.

It’s reaffirmed my belief that we just have to do the right thing for the sake of doing it. Not for any result or with the idea of getting something in return. It’s strengthened my trust in the universe, or spaghetti monster, or whatever, that you’ll get back what you put in. It is not our business when it will happen or in what form. We’ll only get the reward when we’re ready to receive it.

I think the most accurate reflection of this kind of growth is when other people can see it.

When my partner mentioned to me just the other day that she’s noticed a fundamental change in me, the last 21 months’ worth of work felt all worthwhile.

Cheers Wankers.

X.

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Make sure you check out my Writing 4 Resilience friends. They’re all legends.

Running for Resilience Ben Alexander Brent Ford Running Rare The Milkbar Reflections of a Clare Bear

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