Common Fears During Recovery & How to Conquer Them

If people press that response, I’ll either stare at them and hold an uncomfortable silence (this is enjoyable at some point), or just change the subject. There are exceptions to this, like if someone alludes to their own struggle with alcohol, and then I might offer up a bit more of my personal experience. You are a mirror now, a fear of being sober flashlight of sobriety in a society that is laced with the judgment that it’s abnormal to abstain from alcohol. People will assume you drink and will be very curious about why you don’t have a drink in your hand when they do. Before I quit drinking, I never really used to care about dividing the bill down the middle with a group.

Mental Health Treatment Programs

It will hurt (pretty bad at first), but in time you will come to see it as the gift it is—and you won’t waste time getting to know the wrong person. Ask any sober person whether they want to go to a cocktail party or stay in with a pack of La Croix, The Crown, and a bathrobe. I’d bet nine out of 10 of us won’t even answer, and we’ll just laugh because it’s such a ridiculous question. Sobriety doesn’t necessarily turn you into Liz Lemon, but it can give you the clarity to understand that you’ve been Liz Lemon your whole life. This is an opportunity to assert for your needs, and therefore assert your worth. So if all of your friends drink alongside you, then there’s no issue, right?

“I Will Lose My Friends”

If your friends don’t want to hang out with you unless you’re drinking, then you know where you stand with each other. If all of your friends abuse alcohol and/or your spouse abuses alcohol, it makes a lot of sense to fear what will happen next. The fear of getting sober is more common than we may think.

Common Fears During Recovery & How to Conquer Them

For example, severe alcohol withdrawal can be deadly without medical treatment. But even if it’s not medically necessary, it can make a difference on getting you through the detox successfully. In a medical detox, a specialized drug team will be with you all of the way. They will provide you with round-the-clock care and supervision, ensuring that your physical and mental health is in good shape.

They may seek treatment solely to appease partners, take medications irregularly, and drop therapy after a session or two. This is often to the detriment of their children. While https://ecosoberhouse.com/ Vasavi doesn’t blame her mother, a cardiologist, who she recognized had her own mental health challenges, she admits that her mother’s issues impacted her mental health.

Pay attention to your mindset

Jyoti shares that while working on her sobriety, she read a lot of literature, but noted that “it didn’t represent me, my upbringing, my community, or my story. Hol was the main character in my life for a very long time. He was invited to everything I did and without him, it just wasn’t fun.

• However, if you don’t learn to manage those fears and put them into perspective, they will drive you right back to the bottle.
• The flipside of the fear of failure is the fear of success.
• So if you’ve hidden your addiction well up until now, that’s not going to last.
• If you fear that you will not be able to talk to people when you are sober, remember the consequences of drinking too much.
• Your treatment center will address your ability to sleep through the night along with your other fears, cravings, and physical or psychological symptoms.

Coping mechanisms are tough—they work temporarily, and allow us to avoid and put things aside for the time being. We use alcohol to cover up our pain and our problems. We use drugs to numb ourselves and our emotions and to push off thinking for another day. But when we no longer have those devices at our disposal, we’re left with only our minds, our willpower and our inner strength to carry us through the hard times. We’re forced to think and analyze our problems, to come up with solutions, and in doing so we may fail or make mistakes. But that’s how we grow and learn, and how we learn to cope better when the next challenge presents itself.

Any big life change naturally brings a sense of fear or unease. Disclosing issues even to close friends can be daunting, due to an underlying and often valid concern of how one will be viewed. Religious and cultural systems play a huge supporting role in collectivist cultures. However, they are not always well-equipped to handle mental health issues, let alone substance use challenges. Unfortunately, mental health issues in immigrant parents are often inconsistently monitored, and help is often deferred until circumstances are dire.