"Sobriety is the most fundamental level of honesty for a recovering addict. Call it self-honesty, if you will. That’s because sobriety means existing with your unaltered truth, without your drug to hide you from yourself. Sobriety is about being yourself, in the most literal sense of the term.

At least initially, though, sobriety also means tolerating the noisy presence of Your Addict. Determined not to go down without a fight, it will rebel furiously against this honesty by trying to get you to go back to your drug. Even as Your Addict slings a barrage of intolerable feelings at you, along with a thousand and one tantalizing thoughts about using your drug, you must not revert to covering up those thoughts and feelings by actually using your drug.

I will warn you that in your first days, weeks, and months of sobriety, those thoughts and feelings might seem unbearable. They might make you feel like you want to crawl out of your own skin. This is not your cue to repress those feelings by running back to your drug, however. Doing so would cause Your Addict to rub its claws together in delight, salivating over how well its excrement-slinging campaign worked to feed its greedy appetite.

'Welcome back to the darkness!' Your Addict would crow. 'Now let’s eat! Shall I seat you right down this dark little alley, at your usual shit-smeared table for one?'

No, those unbearable feelings are your cue to release those unbearable feelings by being honest about them. Rather than running for dark cover, you must turn those feelings over to the light by connecting to the people who will give you a boost of powerful Unconditional Love in return — instead of using your drug, which comes laced with crippling shame and a bottomless need for more.

The people you most need to be honest with about those feelings are the strangers I talked about earlier: your fellow recovering addicts. Otherwise known as the people uniquely capable of giving you the Unconditional Love you need right now to stay sober and learn to love Your True Self. Your fellow recovering addicts will be accepting of what you reveal when you shine the light of honesty on all your ugly, unbearable thoughts and feelings. After all, they’ve experienced those themselves. They will also express hope for Your True Self in a way that no non-recovering, non-addict could.

I have a feeling you may already know where to find these recovering addicts, but in case you don’t, I’ll clue you in.

I’ll start with the free, community-based Twelve Step fellowships that meet every day, both in person and online, every hour, and in every time zone, all over the world. The granddaddy of those is Alcoholics Anonymous, which was founded back in the 1930s by a couple of recovering alcoholics who found they could successfully stay sober by providing support to each other. They recognized that this mutual support was a power greater than their own individual resources of willpower, which had always proved inadequate when it came to sobriety."

Excerpt From The Addict’s Guide to Recovery by Emily Sussman, LCSW

❤️

Copyright 2025 Freedom Recovery Press

For MUCH more, visit theaddictsguidetotheuniverse.com

Sent with True Love from the Universe ❤️💫