Two Years Sober: The Real Transformation Begins. What Is It Like Now At Two Years Sober?

If you're new to sobriety and curious about life a few years down the road, this video will tell you in your alcohol addiction recovery what you will feel like at the two year sober mark. And why you won't feel this way in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous.
BOOKS FOR RECOVERY AND REINVENTION

THE SMALL BOOK: HOW I BEAT ALCOHOLISM AND WHY ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS DOESN'T WORK.

THE SHEPHERD AND THE RUNNINGWOLF: A PATH TO FORGIVENESS ON THE PACIFIC CREST TRAIL

REINVENTION OF SELF: HOW TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE AND BEING FOREVER

Transcript

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If you're new to sobriety and you're wondering what it's gonna be like a few years down the road, I'm gonna tell you what it was like for me at the two-year mark, where unlike Alcoholics Anonymous, I proclaimed cure. You will be able to claim cure at two years. And what your life's gonna resemble, it's all good. I have stated that one who suffered from alcoholism can reach the point of cure. I proclaim it's at the two-year mark. I pick two years because that's when protracted withdrawal syndrome ends, at the most. A lot of people reach that terminal at one year, but one to two years is when the neurochemistry has rebalanced your being to adapt to a life which is now alcohol free. Why does it take this long, one or two years? Because alcoholism isn't something that you just go through for a few months. It is years and for some decades. I usually didn't drink during the work week during my early stages, but at 27 on a spring break, visiting an old military friend, I stepped over the line. I drank every night, thinking I would return to somewhat normality once the break was over, but this time I didn't. John Barleycorn had taken me. My alcoholic years lasted for a total of 13. I finally quitted at 40. I've had prior articles on the phases of recovery. The detox phase, which is nothing short but a five-day walk through the inferno. Remembrance of that experience alone is enough to never want to call my old buddy Johnny ever again. Then there's phase two that lasts from 30 to 45 days. The emotional roller coaster and severe cravings that are practically continuous. Then to the six-month mark, where the cravings are abating and the emotional upheaval is starting to balance. For the next year and a half, I would still have episodic bouts of anxiety and depression, and the periodic wanting to pick up that phone and call good old JB. All this decreased as time went on, and at the end of year two, it was largely gone. I state in my book on the matter that this is where I claim cure. It has been now close to two decades clean without the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, which I not only find not helpful, but completely destructive. I think their massive failure rate proves that point for me, regardless of their reasons why. I have given comparison in another article how I felt at three months, compared to what I saw in the rooms with members who had just made their 90 days and 90 meetings pledge. I was already much better off than they. But I remember the day I made two years as well. I was not only cured, but looked in the mirror and saw an entirely different person. That's the big significance of the two-year mark. I have stated and still do that the way to recover from alcoholic addiction is to completely reinvent yourself on all your planes, the physical, emotional, and career sphere, in which your spiritual plane will fall into place, and you have to solve why you drank to begin with, and that usually comes from dealing with past abuse, whether at home or outside of it. You have a rotted foundation of being an alcoholic with this past trauma, therefore you must fix it. If you fix your past or at least come to terms with it and reinvent your being, you will cure alcoholism. Willpower past the six-month mark does not cure you from the effects of your prior addiction. Recreating your existence as a non-alcoholic does. If you advance your planes, you will rarely think about alcohol at all past the two-year mark, because you will envision the person who once was and realize he is long dead. But when I do go back and read my journal of my recovery, many entries that make up these works today, I am reading a different biography altogether at the two-year mark versus the one who was still best chums with John Barleycorn. First, you cannot comprehend that you were once that person so deep in JB's bottle. I can't comprehend how I worked as a medical provider. Sick every morning, reeling with vertigo, matched by light nausea, the fatigue that settled in the afternoon. I was good at my job as a PT through mainly force of will, but I wonder how much better I could have been if I was clean. How different my being is today when I periodically contract, just getting up with only a little sleepiness that wears off in a half hour like a normal person. The thought that I operated every day with physiological sickness is astounding to me. Who was that person? Then the return to fitness. I started that at day 45 sober, the first day I felt good. I had been a longtime Thai kickboxer who fought in school events regularly. If I had a week in those last five years of my alcoholism when I trained twice, that would be a good week. When I returned from the dead, I started with just a few rounds on the bag and a few sets of lifting weights. Within months I had advanced greatly. At two years I was doing 15 to 20 rounds on the bag and lifting weights for 40 minutes afterward, two out of every three days. My new high was the endorphin rush from vigorous exercise. Fitness alone led me to a new sense of well-being. It's the foundation for reinvention of self. Instead of being sick in the morning, I always felt rested because I didn't have nearly the insomnia I did in the Book of John. And I was now living healthy, not in physical and mental illness, which is what alcoholism is. I was also engaged in meditative activities, which only worked in perfect conjunction with the physical ones. If you were to run a film at the clinics and hospitals of my personality during the alcoholic days, you would see an entirely different one. Now understand the world of healthcare is rough and mean. Many times you have to be a non-negotiable SOB to administer ethical care when the higher-ups try to interfere for profit margin. But being in a mild rage all the time at big or little issues is not the way to live. During those drinking days, especially the last five years, if I was only a little edgy throughout the day, then that was a good day. I was never that way with patients, at least I can attest to that, but everyone else, if interviewed about my disposition, would paint a recollection of a largely hostile individual. Of course you're hostile and on your best day edgy as an alcoholic. You're going through daily withdrawal from the night before. It isn't the detox withdrawal because the body will hold that as long as you make your checkpoint time at the liquor store or bar on the way home. Anyone who has gone to work with the flu won't remember being in an ideal frame of mind. The alcoholic is going to work with sickness every day of the week. You aren't going to be congenial when you're coming out of your skin until you get the antidote. The work hours are just an inconvenience until you can get your hands around that bottle again. When you look back at your life two years ago, you'll see that it was a cycle of daily sickness. Fatigue in the afternoons, the return to emotional normality somewhere in the third or fourth drink, then to heavy intoxication once again. The weekends were even worse. You have no inconvenient work hours, so the drinking is continuous, as I have never known an alcoholic who didn't start his binge until Saturday evening. And what is incredulous when you're looking back once you've passed that two-year mark is the tranquility now. Going to work every day, not being pissed off at the world and coming out of your skin. Being able to handle work conflicts with more stoicism. Oh, healthcare is still rough and mean, but I've adopted the attitude with contracts, which I still periodically take today, that it is unemotionally my way or the highway. If I do get lured into a clinic and find out I got snowed and that they're completely corrupt, I don't even get angry anymore. I simply state that I'll be done my way, or I know the direction to the ferry or the airport from Alaska. No hard feelings. Versus the Mr. Hyde that would practically threaten the director with physical harm and be in a rage about the matter for months after the contract ended before its term. Because now you're in normal thinking, not alcoholic thinking. I thought about that long past cycle when I hit two years clean. Drink, wake up, be sick, get through the workday and drink again. Now it's wake up, do a smoothie, have a decent breakfast, and go to work in a state of calm and enthusiasm to help the patient, come home, go to the gym, and meditate before sleep, which will be deep. The weekends aren't non-stop with the bottle to my lips. They are exercise and hiking or fishing or walking along the Alaskan Gulf. Living instead of being in that altered state where Johnny Barleycorn resides. How I lived in that black hole of the universe, existing in a drug-induced state more than I wasn't. That person was erased two years later. The new incarnation was one who had activities throughout the week and weekend. Someone who was in a state of continual refinement of the physical and the emotional. A person who was continuously advancing himself. Your spiritual plane is destroyed while you're an alcoholic. You don't see yourself as a functional, integral part of the universe. You're just going from one drunk to the next. The last day of my alcoholism, I was a drunk who happened to practice physical therapy. Two years later, I was a physical therapist who was constantly honing his craft. Someone who was gaining good reputation in the small remote towns of Alaska. Staff members actually wanted to be around me versus the toxic person who existed among them two years prior. I had developed other statuses as well, besides in the clinic. I was an author of several books. I was now a proficient stock trader as well. None of this could have evolved while in the bottle. The first day of detox, I was none of these. By the two-year mark of cure, I had completely accomplished what I wrote about a few years later in my work, Reinvention of Self, How to Change Your Life and Being Forever. This is what you set to accomplish after you were past day 30 to 45. You don't need to touch alcohol again. You proved you can abstain, you just did it for a month or month and a half. Now you have to bury that old person. This is why AA fails so many. They want to keep that disease person, that addict, that alcoholic. They don't advocate that staying sober isn't just using willpower not to pick up the bottle after the first few months. They don't get that the key to being alcohol-free for life isn't living in that mentally alcoholic state in the circles. You have to exit that life forever. You create a new being, a physically and mentally strong being. A being who advances his career or side projects always and evermore moving forward. Two years of this reinvention, and you won't be remotely the same person who walked with Johnny. If you do this and rectify your past, that person won't feel the need to drink ever again. Because contrary to AA, that is a new being who isn't an alcoholic. Now for my condensed version and guidebook on how I defeated alcoholism, check out the small book, How I Beat Alcoholism and Why Alcoholics Anonymous Doesn't Work. Links are in the description, usually free on KDP. And remember, keep your contract. Be sober at sundown, and I will see you at the next sunrise.