Sober & Queer: Practical Advice for Finding Community Without Alcohol

Alcohol addiction can negatively affect a person’s physical, mental, and emotional health. These effects can be long-reaching and can have serious and sometimes fatal consequences. You can learn more about the dangers of alcoholism in this resource from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Avoiding temptations might sound simple enough in theory, but it can be difficult to eliminate everything that drives you to drink. This is another reason why professional treatment is so helpful. In these programs, you’ll learn ways to navigate the real world without isolating yourself, seeking healthy relationships that build you up and won’t undermine your progress.

How to Achieve Sobriety Without AA: 8 Powerful Strategies

The structure is also rigid, with steps generally done in a specific order. For one, if you’re undergoing medication-assisted treatment for opioid use disorder, NA may not be the best option. But that doesn’t mean it’s always going to work, or that other options aren’t viable. But a 2020 review of research on recovery options sheds some light on AA’s effectiveness.

• Many people who have AUD don’t want to abstain from drinking entirely and instead seek treatments that reduce drinking.
• While you don’t have to plan every single minute of your life, it does help to create a routine that’s productive and enjoyable.
• Personal growth and goal setting provide structure and purpose to your recovery journey.
• Long considered a key component of recovery, 12-step programs are as popular as ever.

Are Your Parents to Blame for Your Addiction?

As you seek recovery, it’s important to understand why you’re taking these steps to avoid alcohol. For many, learning about the dangers of alcohol addiction can be a powerful motivator to keep going. While its effectiveness and success is well documented, it is also clear that it does not work for everyone. A 2002 study with 279 people compared AA or similar 12-step programs with other forms of psychosocial treatment.

Repair stage

Because support is a necessity during recovery, finding a support group where you feel welcome and encouraged is vital. When choosing between support groups, it is important that whichever you pick follows the key pillars of addiction treatment. Those with tips to stay sober AUD suffer from the inability to stop or control alcohol use despite adverse social, occupational, or health consequences. Therefore, once an individual is diagnosed, it is crucial to manage this disease for the remainder of their life.

Sobriety in AA: Since getting sober, I have hope

• Each person is encouraged to find their own method of encouraging their sober self within a LifeRing program.
• They’ll listen without judgment, seeking to understand the factors that lead you to drink.
• Today, we’re sharing 10 tips to help you break free of this condition and reclaim the life you deserve.
• Recovery from alcohol addiction generally follows the stages of abstinence, withdrawal, repair, and growth.
• If you’re a Workit Health member, you can self-enroll in groups through the Community tab in our app.
• We offer many different treatment and therapy plans designed to help individuals overcome addiction.

More and more, however, my friends will tell me in confidence what a relief it is not to party like we used to. By quitting first, it was as though I set the stage for people in my life to also reflect on their relationship with alcohol. Many find their mental health affected the most due to alcohol. The term “hangxiety,” the feeling of extreme anxiety due to a night of over-drinking, has even risen in popularity as more people begin to connect their rise in anxious feelings to alcohol.

• By showing that there really might be other effective options out there, the research provides hope that there may be a better — or at least more complete — solution out there for alcohol addiction.
• If so, that would let some people go to AA meetings if they prefer the 12 steps, while others could find SMART, LifeRing, Women for Sobriety, or something else that works for them.
• Secular Organizations for Sobriety is not one specific program but rather a collection of programs that are autonomous from each other.
• This also gives you the motivation to avoid triggers and temptations and stay the course when recovery gets challenging.
• I often write about stigma, harm reduction, recovery, health & personal growth.

The stages of alcohol recovery

One of the tenets of recovery is finding activities you can engage in that don’t involve drinking. When your mind and body are engaged in these projects, staying away from alcohol becomes easier to do. However, the idea behind the Addicted-Self Model is that alcoholism, like many other diseases, is a physical ailment—one that there is no cure for, only treatments that can help alleviate the symptoms.