The difference between sobriety and recovery

I went on a cruise two weeks ago. While I was in the Honduras I went parasailing, and there were two women that went with me that reminded me of how different sobriety and recovery are. The two friends were talking about parasailing, and one of them said that she was scared to death. When asked why she was scared by the guy driving the boat, she told him that she could not swim. "Thats okay," he said, "you will be 800 feet in the air. You have to be in the water to drown." This did not reassure her at all. 


Her friend was the first one to go, and she went screaming and came back laughing. She started off scared, but in the end loved it. She told us how much she had enjoyed the ride, how peaceful it was and that the view was breathtakingly beautiful. Then her friend went. As she was whisked off the back of the boat, she was screaming bloody murder, "I changed my mind!" When she came back, she was in tears and angrily talked about how horrible it was and that she hated it. When asked how she liked the view, she admitted that she did not even open her eyes. 

This was the exact same experience through the lens of two different people, who felt differently about what they did. It is a lot like working through addiction and being either in the sobriety phase or the recovery stage. It is the same experience through two different lenses. Not to say that sobriety is not necessary for recovery to occur, but you have only touched the tip of the iceberg when you are sober. Read on, and we will get into that more as you go.

At one point I had been sober for several years, but I never stepped into recovery. Like the example above, sobriety is not easy. It is generally the hardest thing to do. Sobriety is the work, recovery is the enjoyment. You can have sobriety without recovery, but you cannot have recovery without sobriety. It is vital to have sobriety in order to move onto recovery. But like the first chapter of a great book, without the other chapters the first one is incomplete and disappointing.

Recovery is crucial if you want to stay sober for the rest of your life. Sobriety is not all that it is cracked up to be. I know that we feel that it should be enjoyable, but not drinking (or drugging or overeating or sleeping around or giving into rage or fixing everybody but yourself) is really just the beginning. It is a step in the right direction, but just that. A step! There is no magic that occurs, in my humblest of opinions. It does not guarantee a happy life to you. In fact, it can be just the opposite.

What we think should be the apex of our life can actually be the nadir. I thought that things would be all better after I got clean. I found it was really the reverse. Before when I felt low self-esteem, depression, anger, hurt or self-loathing, I could use and would feel all better. It would assuage my pain. Without the drugs, I now had to feel the pain with no buffer. There was no escape. What could I do?

I could have done a lot of things, but this is what I did. I began to revel in my character defects. I began smoking more cigarettes, having more sex, getting into more verbal and physical fights.  I began to find ways to look down on others. If they were not working their program “my way” I would belittle them at meetings. And thanks to principles before personalities that worked out well. So did my “13^th step” that I so often employed. I was now using others instead of my drug to make me feel better.

I did my 90 in 90 (more like 150 in 90) and I thought that I was doing good. If only attending meant better. You got to do more than show up. Like the pastor says, "Sitting in church no more makes you a Christian than my standing in my garage makes me a car." The same is true about meetings, just being there and not working what you learn outside of the meetings is worthless. But that was not me! I even worked the steps with a sponsor and told him what I knew he wanted to hear. I thought that I was in control as I counted the years. I eventually began drinking, but I could excuse that because it was not a drug. I was great at lying to myself and those around me. I portrayed happy and content, confident and strong. It was all a lie.

I could never find true happiness. I was miserable! I saw myself as an addict and a convict every time that I looked into the mirror. When I became an alcoholic, it should not have been a surprise to me. I tried to, as the Bible put it in Matthew 9, put new wine in an old wine skin. I tried to put on a new mind set but kept the old behaviors. That is a recipe for disaster. The new mind set was completely wasted as it spilled out onto the ground.

Eventually I reached the realization that I was back where I had started. I had taken a new route with a different vehicle, and I had arrived at the same destination as before. The worst part was that this time I could find nothing to blame it on. I had money, people I considered friends, a career I liked not a job I hated, a beautiful son, coworkers who cared, a boss that let me know I was appreciated, even the respect of people who never would have talked to me when I was an addict. All of that was simply not enough. I was still miserable. I began to realize that the fault was all mine. That was the beginning of my reaching the lowest point of my life. Then the jump to recovery happened, and I became happy almost overnight.

Recovery came to me for several reasons, but the most important reason is this. When I was an Agnostic and I woke up in the morning, I knew that this was AS GOOD AS IT GETS. I had nothing to look forward to. My life still consisted of terribly disappointing days followed by drunken nights. If I did not drink, I would get into my depression and isolate and feel miserable. If I did drink, I would get out of my depression while being around people and not feel miserable until the next morning. BUT…….I was always miserable in the end.

After I got saved, my entire outlook changed. I finally realized that I was forgiven. I could never forgive me before because I felt unforgivable. That is the smallest part of it though. The biggest thing for me follows. I did not believe in life after death. I believed that we returned to dust, and that would be the end. I would one day die, and this sinful, hateful world would be all that I would know. When I got saved I realized that even if this life where to be completely miserable for the next 30 years, after I died if I kept my faith and walked the narrow path that I would live an eternity in bliss. That was overwhelming, and it was enough to cheer me up........finally, I could smile and it was not fake!

This is when I finally realized what recovery is. Sobriety was simply me not drinking or drugging. I could still suck at every other aspect of life, still revel in all of my character defects, still be my own worst enemy and judge and hate myself, still make one wrong choice after another while justifying them and still care about me and only me juxtaposed with thinking only about others happiness and not my own. That is what I could do sober.

Recovery on the other hand was me changing everything about myself. I mean the floor to the ceiling, the windows to the walls. I began to make changes in recovery that I never would have made in sobriety. I began treating others with respect even if I felt they did not deserve it. I vowed to never have premarital sex again. I quit smoking, as it was just another addiction that was bad for me. I stopped fighting and started being genuinely nice, even when I would have normally resorted to angry methods of coping. I even quit cussing, as it was not really a nice way to conduct myself. These changes actually made me happy. I began to walk around positive, which made me positive. I acted positive, so I felt positive. I became an optimist instead of a pessimist.

I made these changes not to impress anyone, but because they were the right thing to do. That is what recovery is, not just doing the next right thing but insuring that I do not do the wrong thing. I act the same way behind closed doors as I do when I am in front of people, the same way to my wife I do to my pastor. I do not simply treat people as I want to be treated, but better than I want to be treated. In recovery we should treat people the way that we would want them to treat our sons and daughters. We should not engage in behaviors that we would not want our sons and daughters to behave in. That is recovery, total change of our lives.

The sad thing is that as I look around the rooms, I see a lot of people that are sober but very few that are in recovery. I feel that way when I look around churches, too. I will get into this in my next blog, because getting baptised is a lot like getting sober. It is simply the first step in the right direction. There is a long way to go, still. It is simply not enough. I see many who look down on addicts and alcoholics in recovery that could learn a lot from them. Recovery is something that we should all want, as we are all recovering from something. I’m not judging, I’m just telling the truth.

Whether you are in addiction or recovery, a Christian or an athiest, I want to leave you with one thing. Even if you do not believe the Bible is true, there is still good stuff in there that everyone could learn from. Here is one of those good passages. In Matthew 7 of the Big Book I live my life by, it says that they will know you by the fruit you produce. So, what does the fruit you produce say about you? Think about the two women parasailing. You can either open your eyes and enjoy the ride of sobriety, or you can wish that you were anywhere but sober and do it because you have to. One way will keep you sober  and make you happy. The other way will only lead eventually to failure. The choice is yours!