Sober Isn't The Finish Line - Peaceful Is

 Congratulations — you stopped using. Now what? Turns out sobriety is just the opening act, and Doc Jacques has some news about the rest of the show. The good news: peace is real and you can get there. The bad news: you actually have to do the work. No shortcuts. He checked. Twice. 

Transcript

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I want to ask you something, and I want you to think about it before you answer. What are you chasing? If you're working on recovery right now, or you're watching somebody you love work on it, what does that finish line look like in your head? Because I'll tell you what most people say when I ask them that. They say sober, or they say clean. They say just getting off the stuff I'm using. And I understand that. But I'm here to tell you that sober isn't the destination. That's the starting line. And if you don't know that going in, you're going to get there and you're gonna feel completely lost. So let's talk about that today on the Doc Shock, your Addiction Lifeguard podcast. This is Doc Shock, your Addiction Life Guard. And if you're here, you already know that addiction is brutal, recovery is hard, and the road between them is longer than anybody tells you. I'm Dr. Jockey Berther, the licensed professional counselor and addiction specialist. This podcast exists for one reason: to walk that road with no sugar coating, no magic pills, just the truth about what recovery really looks like. Quick note, this show is for information and entertainment only, not professional treatment. A real human being is. Now let's get to it. Peaceful is who you become. And the two are completely different journeys. There is the myth of the finish line. You know, most people in recovery, and I'm gonna say probably most families that have loved ones that are addicts, they have the wrong picture of what success looks like. They're aiming at the wrong target. When someone gets out of rehab, everybody's celebrating. The family starts to breathe easier, the spouse cries, there's a chip, there's a hug, and that and that's real, that's earned. But here's the problem, everybody acts like it's over, and it's not over. In many ways, the hardest part is just beginning. Because now you have to live without the thing you used to cope with everything, and nobody told you how to do that as you're working on recovery, or at least most times. I see it pretty consistently. Client gets to six months or a year, and they're miserable. Technically they're sober, yeah, genuinely miserable, irritable, empty, restless. That's usually what I see, and they don't understand why. And they did the thing, so why don't they feel better? Doesn't make any sense to them. Because everybody's sobriety is different. Sobriety removes the chemical, it doesn't remove the reason you needed the chemical in the first place. That's the problem. So getting sober is like taking off the cast of a broken arm. The cast is coming off because it's necessary, but the bone is still in that fragile state. If you don't take care of it the right way and you don't ease it back into usage and go to rehab and start working on the muscles around it and st and strengthening that bone, you're just gonna re break it. And that's what happens in recovery. If you just rip the cast off and you start swinging it around, you're gonna re break it for sure. Sobriety removes the cast in a similar way. But peace is the healing portion. I've had clients come in to my office, they're five years sober, seven, sometimes longer. And what they've been doing basically is just kind of white knuckling it, not ex as extreme as when you're first trying to get into recovery, but they definitely get there, and they're just kind of miserable, they're fundamentally miserable. And they look at me and they say, Well, I did everything right, so why do I still feel like this? And I'll tell them, because you stopped using, but you haven't started healing. Those two things are very different, and it's time to start the second one. So what's what's actually missing in this process? Sobriety addresses the behavior, it addresses the thoughts. The peace addresses the root cause, and you cannot get peace without going through that trauma, that trauma cause. And most people just try to skip over that part because it's pretty hard and it's painful and it takes a long time. When people go into rehab, they're not working on the root cause. They're trying to work on the idea that there is a root cause, and they're also learning about what the behaviors do. So being around people who are not sober or clean is not a good idea. Being in this place or that place, the reminders, maybe sometimes it's about working through the idea of a relationship that you might have to let go or you might have to modify. That's what rehab is. But when you get out of rehab out in the world where the professionals are, like professional addicts, that's when you have to start practicing. So in my practice, a hundred percent of the people who come in with addiction have trauma. That's what I've experienced. I've said it over and over and over again. Every single one of them. Sometimes it's the big T trauma, combat, abuse, assault, something serious. Sometimes it's the smallest T trauma, the chronic shame, emotional neglect, a parent who was checked out or unpredictable, but it's always there. The traumas are always there. The drug at that point wasn't the problem. The drug was the solution. It was the coping mechanism. A terrible, destructive coping mechanism, but it is a solution to an underlying pain that had no other outlet. You just had no other way to deal with it. When you remove the drug and you don't address the pain, the pain doesn't disappear, it just gets masked. It has nowhere to go. And it comes out sort of sideways as anger or depression, anxiety. But you're white knuckling it through the day, waiting for the other shoe to drop. That's the feeling you have. Now, men, women, many times will demonstrate that differently. Men tend to go through anger or depression. Women go through anxiety and depression. Women feel, men do. That's kind of how I look at it. And so doing is anger. But that's that white knuckling it is that waiting for the other shoe to drop. That's why the dry drunk exists. And you know who the dry drunk is. You've seen him in the rooms. Person who's technically not drinking, but they're still acting like an active addict. Miserable, controlling. They're full of rage, impossible to be around. They're just miserable people to be around. That's that's what the dry drunk looks like, or the dry dry addict. And they stopped the substance, but they didn't touch the wound. And those are the ones that will come into my office, and again, they're like years into recovery, and they're still miserable, and they have these relationship issues and all kinds of things going on, and they don't understand why. And then when I tell them, hey, there's a perspective here that you don't really haven't really taken on, and that's you you've never really dealt with the issues, they're many times they're shocked. But to get to the point of peace, it requires going into that wounded area. And that is the part that most people will do almost anything to avoid. And they they do that in my office, they avoid it. The drug was never the problem, even though it became a problem of itself. It was the it was the loudest symptom of the real problem. It's the thing that is most noticeable. You can be you can be silent in that symptom, but until you treat the disease underneath it, you're never going to be at rest. Here's how I explain it to my clients. Imagine if you got a nail in your shoe, and every time you take a step, it it hurts. So you start limping to take the weight off the foot. The limp is the addiction. It's the adaptation to the problem, the thing that you're doing to manage the pain. Now I come along and I fix the limp. Okay, great. Now you're walking normally. But the nail is still in your shoe, and every step still hurts. You just you just stop showing it. That's sobriety without healing. We've got to get that nail out, the source of the pain. What what does peaceful actually look like if we're aiming for peace? Well, you have to define that destination so you know what you're working towards. Peace is not happiness, it's not the absence of problems. It's something quieter and much more durable than that. Peace is not a feeling you stumble into. It takes a lot of work. It's a state that you build, you you slowly, deliberately through the work of recovery. And by work, I mean actual work. So what does that look like in my office? Well, when I'm sitting across from somebody who has genuinely gotten there, there are things that I can see. Their posture is different. They they their look, their gaze, when they're looking at me and they're talking, they're more engaging. The defensiveness is gone. I don't hear defensive language, I don't hear a lot of explaining or dodging the truth or making stuff up. They can talk about the worst things they've done without destroying them in the telling. They have opinions. They make plans, they present the conversation instead of managing it. They don't manage how they're describing things. Peaceful doesn't mean life stops being hard. It means hard things stop being emergencies. There's always this sense of urgency around people who are not fully into that peace portion of the recovery process. It means that you have to have the internal tools to sit with discomfort without having to obliterate it. The stories become much more natural in their telling. If they're telling me their narrative, their life story, they do it in a more natural way. And they don't they don't leave things out because they're painful. They will tell me the things, but they're also not bragging about them to turn them into these uh these war stories, because that's a protective mechanism. So peaceful is when you can say, I know who I am, I know what I've done, I've made amends that I can make, and I'm not running away from any of it anymore. That's what I see. You know, clinically we talk about recovery and we consider long-term recovery five years. I call recovery peaceful. And you know it when you see it. Peace is the opposite of addiction, not sobriety. That's my belief. Addiction is chaos, urgency, hiding, running, dodging, acting squirrely, being unreliable. Peace is the opposite of all that. That's the real finish line. And that's why it's worth fighting for. I had a client years into recovery who came in one day and she was just different. It was kind of strange. I couldn't put my finger on it immediately, but I could sense that there was something very different. It's the same person, the same life they'd led, the same problems that they'd had. But something had shifted in her. And I asked her what was going on, and she said, I just stopped bracing. So I I went ahead with that and I hung on to it, but I asked her if she could tell me what she meant by that. Tell me more about that. And she said, you know, for years I've been waiting for everything to kind of fall apart again. And this week I just stopped waiting. That was it. That's what I'm talking about. That's it. That's the peaceful. And it and it hit her suddenly. It wasn't just something that crept up on her. But I don't want to be misleading about one point that there actually is a gap between sober and peaceful. And I'm gonna be honest with you, some people they never get to peaceful, and that's okay. They're still sober. But they there is a there is a place between them, there's a gap. And that territory between sober and peace is an actual thing. I wish I could tell you how long that is. I wish I could tell you what that actually meant in long-term recovery, because but I I don't. And so but I just want you to know that it's there. It is a real thing. You can be years into sobriety and still be standing in that gap. That's not failure, that's just an incomplete process. So when they come to see me, especially if they've been many years into sobriety, and I have people that have come in for as long as 20 years or more, and they're still kind of in that gap. And they've just kind of been there. So it's just they're not in that complete process. Maybe they weren't ready to tackle the hard stuff and really touch that deep wound. Maybe they weren't ready to let go of that identity that they'd built around the usage they were afraid, but whatever it is, it's there. But I guess a bigger question is like what keeps you in that gap? To me, that as a clinician, I see that as unresolved trauma that was never addressed. It's unprocessed grief, resentments that you're carrying because it feels more powerful than letting them go. The relationships they never repaired because they couldn't, they just couldn't face that person. Making amends was difficult, maybe. And that gap has a specific feeling. And it's kind of strange because it's not the crazy that you felt when you were an addict, and it's not the unrest that you felt when you first started getting into recovery, but it is kind of restless. It's a little discontent, feels a little irritable, like something is perpetually unfinished, but you can't quite put your finger on it. It's like you're waiting for the real life to start. And and that's kind of what I see. There's a hesitation about decisions or making tough choices. So I guess, you know, does that sound familiar to you? Those are AA words. They put them right in the literature because they knew exactly what this felt like. That gap. You cross the gap through the work, and that's the the brilliance and the genius of the 12 steps, is you work through that stuff. It also is the work you do in therapy with someone who understands trauma. That's really the most important piece of this is working with somebody who understands trauma and understands where to go with it. Step work that you actually do honestly. Step four is a tough step to take, the fearless searching moral inventory. And that's the one, honestly, where most people who are working on recovery, they step out of recovery because they don't want to face that. That's how hard it is. And I'm not I'm not making light of that, and I'm not making a joke about it, but that is the truth. That is where most people, I find, will step out of working uh the steps on the 12-step process. Forgiveness of others and of yourself is something that also is very tough. Facing the people that you've done things to and that have feelings about that, and and then you being able to face that person making you feel something about yourself, right? And that's what step nine is about. You pick out those people in step eight, but you can't leave anybody off that list. And I want to make sure I'm clear about this. Step nine says that you will make amends whenever possible, except when to do so would cause harm to others. And I consider doing harm to others to include doing harm to yourself. Because if it's painful for you to go through the process uh so much so that it would cause harmful reaction in you to face somebody, to ask them for forgiveness, so to speak, then don't you don't there's nothing that says you have to do it with them. You can do it for them, and you don't have to be in their presence. But the biggest part of that, again, is you being able to forgive yourself for doing those things, because that's actually actually what you're doing in step nine, is you're you're asking to receive and take back the anger, the resentment, or whatever it is that you bestowed upon somebody else. You gave it to them, and you're asking them to give it back, but then at that point you're also there to give yourself your own forgiveness. So the gap is not permanent that you feel between sober and peace. But you can't shortcut across it. You have to walk through it, you have to actually do it. The restlessness, the irritability, the discontent, that's not who you are. That's the gap you're talking about. Those are the feelings that you have, and the gap has an exit. But the exit is through the work, and it's hard work, not going around it. So if you're sitting in that gap right now, sober, doing the right thing, still feeling something is fundamentally wrong, I want you to hear this. You are not broken, you are not failing, you are not done yet. That's all. And not done yet is not the same as never done. It means the next part of the work is in front of you. You just have to go do it. How do you close that gap? There are concrete steps. They're just they're not abstract, they're concrete. You have to know exactly what doing the work means in order to be able to do that. And so closing the gap looks like this in practice. One, you have to get a trauma-trained therapist, not someone who hears your history and moves on, someone who sits in it with you, someone who you can tell the difference between you processing and you performing. What I see in my practice, when somebody comes in, they start telling me their story, they will tell me things and I will let them go for a while. But sometimes I'll stop them in the story and I'll ask them, whoa, whoa, hang on a second. Did you just say that your mom um passed away? What but what age were you? Like they don't even say what age they were sometimes. So just say I was a kid. Or maybe it's uh an example of dad and mom got divorced, and they they don't tell me the first time, and I remember that, and they tell me something about their story, then they mention later on about mom and dad getting divorced. And I said, Well, wait a second, you told me the first time you told me that story, you didn't tell me that part. Oh, I didn't? And uh like, no, you didn't. Why didn't you tell me that? Like, I'm not I'm not concerned about the fact that they had, you know, the the story that changed, but I'm just curious as to what they were doing, and I know what they're doing, they're adapting around it because it's painful, they don't want to talk about it. But I asked them why. And so you I I have to bring that out. And as a trauma therapist, I'm listening in intensely listening to their story because I need to get all of it, not just part of it. And so the distinction between how you're telling the story, like you're telling war stories, or you're telling somebody else's story, and you're telling your own story. It feels different when you do it. And if you've ever been with a therapist who was trauma trained, you understand because they'll bring that stuff out. I'm not saying it's easy or not painful, of course it is. But the other part of this is you don't stop doing the steps, you have to work them honestly. Step four is a gut check. Fearless moral inventory, not the version that you'd show someone at church, you know, the real one. The the one that you show somebody at church is the thing that takes out all the bad stuff. You just say, Well, you know, I had a rough childhood. Yeah, no, you went to you you ended up in a juvenile juvenile detention hall, and it was because you tried to stab somebody. You know, are you gonna tell that to somebody in church? No, but you do have to do that in in the step four process. The version that includes things that you've never said out loud, that's where that nail in your shoe is. Um avoiding amends. Um, those of you who have made amends when you needed to, um, and when it was important, understand what I'm talking about. I mean, I certainly have done mine, and they're hard. It's very difficult, but the the one thing that you You have to get from it is you have to be confronting the reason that you're not doing it, the reason that you're deferring it, that the piece that you want is sitting on the other end of the side of that conversation, and you should have that one with your therapist. You have to learn to sit with discomfort. It's it's a skill, it's not a character trait. You build that one. If you're an addict, you spent all your time with these character flaws that you know you were avoiding all kinds of stuff, and that's what you do when you're an addict. You just go through what you feel without immediately doing something about it. And that's that's what it's like when you're when you're processing your feelings. You just let the feelings sit there. Could be five minutes, could be two minutes, maybe ten minutes, and then you move on to twelve minutes. And you're doing this in small amounts, like every day or every other day. Spend time devoted to actually feeling the feelings that you're feeling. That's a that's a whole big process. You practice it in the meeting when you share something hard and you just let it land there. And that's why we don't have crosstalk and meetings. But you've got to find your community to do that in. So this is why it's important to get into the rooms, into the AA and NA rooms or any other A type of room. It's not just when you're struggling, but it's always, because the people in those rooms are your mirrors. But those mirrors, those are mirrors that also have experience. But they'll show you where you still are and where you're going. Those mirrors will. And you'll do the same for them. So that's why you get the nodding of the heads in the rooms instead of the words. But the difference between someone who gets sober and someone who gets peaceful is almost always just one thing. The second person did the work that they were most afraid to do. That's the person who gets the peaceful. You didn't get into the to this situation overnight, and you're not going to get out of it overnight. It's actually okay that it takes a long time because every honest conversation, every meeting you show up to, every session where you say the real thing instead of the safe thing, I'm using my ear quotes, all of it is you moving somewhere. It's moving you forward to peace. I and I've seen it enough times to know you can get there. You just have to be willing to go through that part that's uncomfortable. And that is difficult. You know, uh a lifeguard doesn't just pull somebody out of the water and drop them on the beach and say, it's all done. The job is to get them to breathe again, to get them to be stable, to get them to get back to the living. That's what I'm trying to do here. Get you out of the water, that's sobriety. Get you to breathe, that's the early work. Get you living, that's peace. The beach is not the finish line. Living is the finish line. You can enjoy the water, but hey, you gotta do something to make something happen to live. I've watched people come into my office completely destroyed. And I mean genuinely destroyed. The tornado has blown through and there's nothing left. They are just a shell. And I've watched those same people years later be at peace. It's not not perfect, not without problems, but they're at rest. They're not bracing, they're not running away, they're just living. That transformation is real, and it's available to you because you have to want more than sobriety. You have to want to be peaceful. So go get that help, go to rehab, walk into a meeting, find a therapist that actually knows what they're doing, do the work you've been putting off, that painful work, because it's not worth not doing it and just destroying your life. It's just not worth it. So go out there and do that for yourself. Well, I hope you enjoyed this episode of DocJack Your Addiction Life Guard. I am Dr. Jack Burkert, the Addiction Lifeguard. If you like this episode and you want to share it, please do that. Subscribe, like, recommend, do whatever you can to help me promote this. And if you have questions for fun, you can reach out to me through my website, DocDoc.com. It's listed in the description. And if you like this episode, I really do appreciate you giving me the review if you can do so on any of the five. Listen, go out and get into some form of help. Totally have to mean something. Don't save your addiction by ending your life. That's crazy. So until I see you next time, this is Doc Jacques, the Addiction Life Guard.