“Did she just say that she was three years sober?” I wasn’t sure I heard her correctly as I was making a mental note that she was a cat person from Northern California with three boys. There was something about the comment that intrigued me. I scribbled down the sobriety thing next to her name in my notebook, “Jaime Green….3 years sober.” I hoped she would circle back to that at some point in our Spiritual Direction cohort.
The group of us meet via Zoom once a week and explore the world of Christ-centered spirituality in a style rooted in what the program calls theological hospitality. We are seekers from all over the country, from all different backgrounds, hoping to use our spiritual gifting to help other seekers navigate their own spiritual journeys. It is a warm and welcoming group.
Sometime in January, I heard Jaime refer to her recovery once again. I immediately reached out to her via email telling her about my devotional every Dry January and asking if she would be willing to share more about her journey. She responded with enthusiasm and openness which put me at ease because I didn’t want to offend her in any way, you never quite know with cat people. Ha! Or maybe her serious disposition in class made me feel like she wouldn’t be open to the idea but there had to be a reason she mentioned it. Turns out, Jaime has been writing about her road to sobriety for a while.
Her response:
Hi Natul. I'm so glad you reached out. I wouldn't be where I am now without hearing others' stories prior to my decision, so within my capacity I make it a goal to say "yes" to invitations like these. I'd love to have a conversation and share my experience. (I love that you mentioned Gray Area Drinking, too. That term/concept itself was what led me to openness even considering quitting. I was caught for years in the "am I or am I not" binary before I let myself get curious, so the on-ramp to that journey is exciting for me to talk about!)
Whew. I was grateful for her enthusiastic receptivity and had a feeling that I was about to get clarity on some of my own inner battles and nagging questions.
After asking her a few introductory questions, she shared a strong statement about how the alcohol community does a lot of gate-keeping.
If you do this, then you’re an alcoholic.
If you struggle with this, then you have an addiction.
If you have to do this, then you have a drinking problem.
Those black and white statements keep a lot of sober-curious people walking the line of “Am I or Am I not?”. At first they may breathe a prayer of gratitude that they haven’t been arrested for a DUI or blacked out or lost family and friends due to their drinking. Still the nagging thoughts continue, the constant math game of counting drinks persists, the idea that there might be some kind of problem casts a shadow over them whether they are drinking or not.
The thing is, those “if, then” conditional statements may not be true of someone who is a gray-area drinker. This is the muddled area of drinking where a person does more than drink socially but isn’t physically addicted. It may not be a part of their daily routine but the behavior is no longer moderate and self-control suffers. The grey-area is the fulcrum between sobriety and alcohol addiction. For people that teeter-totter between the two, it is the lack of extreme consequences that keep them stuck in the back and forth game of “Am I or not?”
The people around them don’t think they have a problem, their jobs aren’t suffering, their family is okay so it’s hard to pin-point where exactly the problem lies. For these types of drinkers, there is a real fear of being pegged down as having a drinking problem so, ironically, they keep doing what they are doing.
That is why collective alcohol-fasts like Dry January or Sober October provide an obligation-free opportunity to explore sobriety without having to “commit” for life and without having other people worry that you have some type of disorder.
Jaime was caught in this same confusion for years before she decided to reframe her story. Instead of going back and forth from “Am I?” to “Am I not?” She viewed the opportunity to abstain as a gift.
She asked, “Am I willing to sit in this invitation and walk in this freedom to abstain from alcohol?”
This approach mitigated the severity of having to abstain from alcohol with a more life-giving statement: “I get to abstain from alcohol.”
With a family history of alcohol abuse, she had hoped to reset the narrative for her children by showing a more controlled way to consume alcohol. Although she wasn't what people call a "raging alcoholic," she knew she had gone way past moderation and the pain of not changing started to outweigh the pain of seeking change. For her, resetting the narrative would mean quitting for good.
It took a long time before she considered even using the word “sober” for the long-haul. Her “on ramp to recovery” started in 2016 and involved a series of stops and restarts before she would take her last sip.
In her March 24, 2023 entry she wrote these words:
"On December 31st, 2021, I swallowed the last sip of my glass of bourbon around a bonfire with my husband and our friends. This right here was the kind of drinking I wished I could compartmentalize and keep, because drinking with friends was never the problem. I usually drank alone or I doubled others’ drinking pace—unknown to them. I was two different people, and it was time to tend to the one who was hiding away."
I asked Jaime a question that I think frightens those of us who have wondered if we might be drinking too much. We don’t want to go beyond the parameters of acceptable drinking. We want to enjoy it as the gift it is so we keep trying, hoping that next time we will be more prudent, wise, judicious and sometimes we are and sometimes, not so much.
Holding my breath I asked, “Do you believe that moderation is a possibility for someone who might be a gray-area drinker?”
Her answer landed somewhere between “yes” and “no” as she shared some of her concerns about people who practice what she calls, “faux moderation”, where in public they enjoy one or two drinks but in reality, they may slam drinks before and after a gathering. The brain is very good at covering up our addictions.
Or perhaps a person thinks she is drinking moderately but her brain is churning with what Jaime calls “the math game” of counting drinks, counting money, counting how many days of drinking in a given period of time. In her effort to control how much and how many, she becomes a slave to The Great Obsession rather than obtaining the freedom that only abstinence can offer.
I appreciated her saying that it is important to honor everyone’s individual journey. We can’t “gate-keep” with bold statements like “If you do Dry January, then it's a dead giveaway that you need to commit to life-long sobriety.”
Promoting the sober lifestyle to people who struggle with alcohol is a sticky thing. You can’t lie and say it is all roses and sunshine, what Jaime calls the glowing pink cloud of early sober-living. You have to find a way to say,
“Hey, this is me and this is my life now, and it is freaking hard but it SO WORTH IT. I have come to the end of myself, emptied myself and through the suffering, awake every morning a free person.
After talking with Jaime and taking a few days to reflect as I come into a new month, full of possibilities, I find myself wondering what freedom looks like for me. I may not fall into the category of gray-area drinking, but I have fallen prey to the Great Obsession with questions like, "Has wine become too important to me?" "Have I developed an unhealthy attachment to it?" The answer to these questions is enough for me to continue leaning into the sober-curious journey, knowing it will look very different for me than it may have for Jaime and that's okay.
There may be one simple question you can ask to see if you would benefit from exploring abstinence:
“Can I live without this?”
If you can, then do it. Try to live without it for a time. If it is hard, if you find yourself slipping or convincing yourself that it was a silly thing to ask in the first place, then you might just have an addiction.
Don’t try to compare yourself to others. Don’t try to convince yourself by listing out all the bad things you don’t do. Just acknowledge that there might be a problem. This suspicion is enough to warrant some time and reflection. Honor yourself and your dignity. Perhaps start with the same question Jaime asked herself three years ago,
“Am I willing to sit in this invitation and walk in this freedom to abstain from alcohol?”
I read some time ago that shamans and healers are deeply wounded people who had to learn to heal themselves. It is the gift of deep pain and victory that gives them the wisdom to heal others. In many ways, that is who we strive to become; wounded healers walking alongside others who may not know that they, too, have the power to heal.
The paradox is that we must start with the admission that we have no power at all. That we need help from above to cast light on the next step.
And the one after that…and so on and so one.
In Jaime’s recent publication in Plough Magazine, she shares the time she came to the end of herself:
“With no more ideas or plans, I prayed the few words I had left: “I want to be free. If it’s going to work this time, it has to feel like freedom. It has to feel like letting go.” I had unknowingly spoken the first three steps of A.A., famously known as: “I can’t. God can. I think I’ll let him.”’
Modern healers may not look like the images we see in movies and epic stories, they mostly look like people like Jaime and others who are living as authentically as they can in hopes that others will be encouraged by their struggles and victories. It looks like good moms with kids who have walked away from something that enslaved them no matter how much they wanted to believe the opposite.
It is their honest wrestling that leads me to believe I, too, can attain freedom from all my unhealthy attachments. That my road is not too long nor my hole too deep. That there is a great cloud of witnesses applauding my own groping for freedom and every good thing it entails.
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