Six years without alcohol

The lessons, they keep coming.

Good morning, everyone. Starting out with a testimonial from one of my Integral coaching clients:

Working with Dani was truly a gift on my healing and recovery journey. Before starting 1:1 coaching, while I was solid in my sobriety, I had become a bit isolated and sometimes lonely, and knew (or hoped) that there was much more joy and connection for me out there in the world. 

My challenge was to learn how to tap into that connection, opening myself up to new experiences, friendships and community, while developing a greater sense of ease on the path of life. No easy feat, and Dani was able to help me tremendously in a relatively short period of time, in a different way than what I accomplish with my therapist. 

There were so many things I loved about working with Dani, including her incredibly soothing voice and demeanor, which immediately made me feel safe, cared for and relaxed. She taught me to reframe critical internal thoughts and develop a kinder inner voice, and helped me see how far I’ve actually come, which in turn made me more curious about what’s still out there. I loved that Dani gave me specific, interesting and creative exercises that helped me on the path to my goals. The work we did together made me more patient with myself, and more confident. Most importantly, with Dani’s help I developed a more finely tuned inner compass, and am gradually creating that deeper sense of connection to others and the world that I so crave. 

Thank you, Dani, for your wisdom, guidance and nurturing care - you have taught me more than you’ll ever know and I am forever appreciative and grateful!

R.W., Integral Coaching client <3

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"She who wants to have right without wrong,
Order without disorder,
Does not understand the principles
Of heaven and earth.
She does not know how
Things hang together."

Chuang Tzu, 4th century B.C.

🌀

This past Sunday, September 17th, I celebrated six years free from alcohol.

🥳

Last year—five—felt like a big deal. Statistics¹ show that once a person hits five years of abstinence, the chances of them returning to substance abuse fall as low as for someone who never had an issue to begin with. Since I quit, I never worried that I’d start back up again—because the life improvements were so immediate—but that stat stood out to me because it reflected my belief that we can heal, a concept that very much goes against the refrain of “once an addict, always an addict” I see bandied about in most recovery traditions (and that ruffles my feathers so much). In addition, there was something exciting about my recovery being half a decade old. Five felt strong, stable, and I felt a renewed excitement for all that the next five years, and beyond, had in store.

I know any of these types of celebrations are ultimately all arbitrary, but it felt good to celebrate the way I like, which is usually pretty privately with a few of my people who are also nondrinkers and ideally includes something in nature.

Last weekend I got to do both: on Saturday, one of my booze-free besties treated me to a comedy show, and then on Sunday, I spent the whole day hiking in Point Reyes National Seashore, at the Tule Elk Preserve, where I’d never been before and where there was so much wildlife traipsing about I felt like I was on safari. We rounded out the day with oysters and burgers for dinner, buffalo milk ice cream for dessert, and an episode of The Bear on Hulu (luckily it wasn’t that episode, which was phenomenal but which I needed about 75 straight minutes of dumb puppy videos to recover from after).

I feel extraordinarily blessed by the fact that when I finally quit drinking, I was so deeply exhausted by myself, by the Groundhog Day nature of my existence, that I was truly done. Since then, I’ve never considered picking up ever again. Sure, there were moments when it crossed my mind. Of course there were. The difference was that the second the thought of drinking popped into my head, it was immediately followed by a play-by-play montage of so. much. bad. behavior that the desire to drink evaporated immediately.

Sometimes when I recount this I feel nervous, because I worry that you who want to quit will attach to my experience as something you can expect, which you can’t, because in reality it’s different for everyone (and if there’s one thing you should never compare it’s your recovery to someone else’s)—not to mention the fact that if I only talked about the drinker-to-nondrinker switch flipping overnight, it sounds like a nice little tied-up-in-a-bow story that ignores the more important truth, which is that it took me about ten years of not only knowing that something was fucked up with my drinking, but continuing to struggle because I didn’t think quitting was possible. So when the flip did finally switch, it looked clean and tidy—easy, even—when the reality is that I had to struggle for my entire adult life (since I was fifteen, really), watching everyone around me get better while I only ever seemed to hover in place, in order to finally be done.

It is an experience I don’t wish upon anybody.

It’s not like everything was always bad, but it certainly always felt so hard. And even though I know life is hard and adulting is totally overrated based on how I thought it would be as a kid, my god, feeling stuck, that type of hard, wears a person down. I’ll speak for myself: by the time I quit drinking I felt so worn down, I was ready to try literally anything to feel even slightly better. Including the thing that up to then had seemed just as impossible as getting literally anything passed in congress.

I have spent the past six years creating new habits, new routines, new friend circles, new careers, and new relationships. I have developed self-compassion which helped me forgive both myself and others. I have created a community of peers—some of whom have become my dearest friends—who I get to spend time with every single week. I am deeply proud of the work I have done, and the woman I am. After many years feeling at the mercy of life, I have more agency than ever before, and more confidence in myself to pursue what’s most important to me than ever before. Those pursuits will most definitely take far longer to accomplish than I would hope or expect, but I believe in my ability and capacity to take on increasingly more meaningful projects and to devote myself to the people and causes that move me most.

It’s also true that this was the hardest year of recovery yet. Harder than that first year, moving through the world as a recently hatched chick, figuring out how to do everything and nothing without my tried-and-true go-to release valve. Harder than the second year, breaking up with my long-term partner, and moving back in with roommates. Harder, even, than years 1-3 of a global pandemic. I have never, not once, considered drinking to cope—thank fucking god—but this year, the squirrels in my brain were more abundant and more chaotic than ever.

🌀

Recovery is an inherently chaotic process. In my experience as a person in recovery and a recovery coach, I’ve noticed that the end of one’s drinking is often marked by an uptick in chaotic behavior. This was a persistent enough of a theme that I got curious. What was this unmanageable force that seemed so hell bent on causing trouble? Why were any attempts at control always coupled with strange behavior inevitably coming out sideways, in chaotic, unpredictable ways? Was it possible to redirect all this energy in way that didn’t feel harmful?

Over the past two years, I’ve been learning about chaos theory, which, when interpreted from a more creative and therapeutic standpoint—rather than only a scientific one—is a useful model for change because it provides a frame through which to make sense of how change happens. Taken a step further, viewing life through the lens of chaos theory rather than maintaining a more linear, or Newtonian, view can assist in not only understanding why change happens, but also how to embrace it with grace and openness. Looking at life as a dynamic system that is ever-shifting and adapting, rather than as a mechanistic process that can be predicted and managed, can open up different and new possibilities for action. It can help universalize an experience with struggle, challenge, negative feelings and emotions, because chaos theory is a reminder that these are all different ways that life expresses itself, rather than indications that something is wrong with any experience.

The greatest thing I’ve learned from applying the principles of chaos theory to my life experience is stepping into the belief that life is a good partner. For most of my adulthood, and even prior, I interacted with life as an antagonist: something I had to manage, control, predict, and stay one step ahead of. This was ultimately a futile undertaking, considering none of those things are even possible. As I’ve learned to loosen my grip on life, to relax in its unfolding and to be attentive to what is emergent, and what wants to reveal itself to me, my experience of being alive has profoundly shifted. Though I might not love when a challenge arises, I can be with it in a more present, relaxed way, instead of judging it as something that “shouldn't” be happening. This has allowed me to move through struggle in new and inventive ways that previously would have been unavailable to me.

Approaching life from this standpoint means that I practice a new way of being in the world that is actively deconstructing the conditioning that would have me view life as a machine, rather than a dynamic system that knows how to take care of itself—including adapting and evolving as necessary. When it comes to recovery, I can think of no more helpful model through which to understand and be in relationship with life, which for me is the whole point of this (often thankless) practice.

In theory, this is the best ever.

In practice, I spent this year throwing all this knowledge out the window. Over the past four months in particular, the sense of inner chaos was as whirling and wild as ever.

And in case this is annoyingly vague, here’s what I mean:

🌀My anxiety came roaring back more strongly than I’d experienced since quitting drinking.
🌀My relationship and my business turned one year old within three weeks of each other which sent me into the most confusing, nonsensical, unexplainable cloud of insecurity which made the anxiety even worse.
🌀 All the go-to’s in my toolkit just…stopped working. Everything I knew to do to seek relief fell flat.
🌀 My creative spark vanished. Ideas dried up.
🌀 I discovered that, despite all efforts over the past many years, my nervous system has actually been in a state of activation more often than not. Realizing that I spent the majority of my life, from the time I was nine or ten, struggling far harder than I even realized was tough to learn.

Year six of recovery was a reminder that no matter how many years I rack up as a nondrinker, chaos will always come for me. I am not off the hook (though it took this year for me to see that I was sure acting as-if I had my shit figured out).

Because there’s another helpful aspect of chaos theory I haven’t mentioned yet, which is that order always comes from chaos. Indeed, it is inherent to it. Chaos and order are not opposites, nor are they working in opposition. Chaos and order are in relationship. One cannot exist without the other.

From Leadership and the New Science by Margaret Wheatley:

Chaos has always partnered with order—a concept that contradicts our common definition of chaos—but until we could see it with computers, we saw only turbulence, energy without predictable form. Chaos is the last state before a system plunges into random behavior where no order exists. Not all systems move into chaos, but if a system becomes unstable, it will move first into a period of oscillation, swinging back and forth between two different states. After this oscillating state, the next state is chaos, and it is then the wild gyrations begin. However, in the realm of chaos, where everything should fall apart, the strange attractor emerges, and we observe order, not chaos.

The strange attractor is the order that emerges from a chaotic system. But it takes time for the attractor—the pattern inherent to a chaotic system—to emerge. The learning (or, re-learning) moving forward—especially if I take my longing to become a relaxed woman seriously—is that during periods of chaos, what I must do is stop. Have a cup of tea (who am I kidding—coffee). Take care of myself, and my dog. And most importantly, I have to trust that order will emerge. Meaning is on the way. Next steps are inevitable.

Margaret Wheatly, again (emphasis mine):

It is chaos’ great destructive energy that dissolves the past and gives us the gift of a new future. It releases us from the imprisoning patterns of the past by offering us its wild ride into newness. Only chaos creates the abyss in which we can recreate ourselves.

Most of us have experienced this ride of chaos in our own lives. At the personal level, chaos has gone by many names, including “dark night of the soul” or “depression.” Always, the experience is a profound loss of meaning—nothing makes sense the way it did before; nothing seems to hold the same value it once did. These dark nights have been well-documented in many spiritual traditions and cultures. They are part of the human experience, how we participate in the spiral dance of form, formlessness, and new form. As we reflect on times when we personally have descended into chaos, we can notice that as it ends, we emerge changed, stronger in some ways, news. We have held in us the dance of creation and learned that growth always requires passage through the fearful realms of disintegration.

🌀

Are you living through a season of chaos? Is something in you nudging you toward a different way of relating to uncertainty? Are you ready to expand into a more grounded, engaged way of being in your life? This is deep work and if you’re curious/ready, I’d love to chat.

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🦋 Related reading 🦋

Five years
Four years
Three years
One thousand days

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SELF MADE empowers you to liberate yourself from societal programming and step boldly into a life of your design. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Integral Coach, and recovery guide based in San Francisco, CA. 

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Thank you.

1. Cited in “The Urge: Our History of Addiction” by Dr. Carl Erik Fisher. Hella highly recommend this book even if you don’t personally struggle with substance.