Last week at our support group we discussed traveling alone as an opportunity for the addicted voice to speak up yet again.
First, I would like to take a moment to apologize! The past two weeks we have had a change in our meeting schedule and location. I realize this can be disruptive for people who benefit from the support group. I was on the road traveling to a friend’s wedding and also missed posting here on Substack. I value consistency and aim to always provide reliable services to those seeking help with their addictions, and I feel terrible about the lapse. My apologies!
Speaking of my trip: I had a funny thing happen. The beer at the gas station was talking to me!
Let’s rewind it back many years to when my addiction was out of control. I did a lot of traveling while doing migrant farm work, often in my beat up ’99 Honda Civic, and almost always hung over. I related driving across the country with feeling like shit, doing hangover math, and wallowing in crippling anxiety. How soon can I pull over and get a beer? How many beers can I drink to fall asleep in the back seat of my car and not wake up feeling too too shitty tomorrow? Am I safe in this parking lot, or will a cop knock on my window at any moment?
I was stuck and life revolved around negotiating drinking enough to not feel like hell, while being at constant risk for being carted off to jail.
Since getting sober, I have made this tidy little life for myself at home, and I am content to no longer travel at all. It took having two really special friends get married in Utah for me to be pushed out onto the road again for the first time in sobriety. Before leaving, I hadn’t even given it a thought. Beer? At the gas station? I walk past it now and couldn’t care less. But: beer at the gas station while I’m driving across the country alone? Apparently this is different! I looked at the beer cooler in my drive-bot stupor, and the beer said, “You could drink me in the back of your car before you sleep at night and no one would know.”
The addicted voice loves a captive audience in a novel situation.
You’re right, it wasn’t the beer talking. It was my internal addicted voice. These days, it is very quiet and generally well behaved, so I was surprised to see it speaking up so confidently! It thought, perhaps, that I was in a special and vulnerable place… and it thought it might be worth a shot to really give a strong message.
I am so grateful to have the skill of being able to speak to these thoughts now, which are in opposition to my intuition and my core self. In the past, before I understood myself well, I might have an internal conflict between these opposing thoughts: a phenomenon known as cognitive dissonance.
What did I do? I said, “Hello addicted voice. Welcome to my house. I understand why you are here, but I know that I do not want to drink. If I drink in the back of my car, I will feel crippling anxiety and shame tomorrow. I would rather wake up feeling rested and ready to chug along with this drive.”
If we greet the addicted voice and face it instead of ignoring it, we disrupt the feedback loop of addiction in our brain. This is the work. Each time you exercise this thought, you become stronger, until one day the addicted voice more or less retreats and gives up. You can do this!
May you be happy and free, dear reader.
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