How do I navigate old routines that always involved drinking?
Early recovery is about changing your perspective and the things you do. The most profound effective medicine for any addict or alcoholic is the other alcoholics and addicts. Find them, talk to them, ask them for help, engage with them.
Out in the same places, don't see the same people, obviously, you're not going to hang out with your dealer, or you're not going to. The bigger, more real perspective is why? Why should I? Of being. Not being allowed to be part of that? How can I replace that with something that's fulfilling? If you went to. If you were brand new in recovery and you went to five AA meetings, my friends are going to happy hour from work, what am I supposed to do? And I want to be really prescriptive here. The message is you need different routines, you need different, you need different income and different stuff that's coming into your life.
You need to change your world enough to where your perspective will change. So in early recovery, it really serves you better to use your feet than to use your head. In other words, where can I put myself that is going to help my perspective change? As opposed to, how can I think myself out of this? Because I bet most of you, at least largely with alcohol, people tend to stay home, stay isolated, drink. You can drink in certain places where it's not shunned. You know, you're not necessarily shooting heroin at the family picnic or at the work, work office event.
And this isolated life creates something in your head where you start to have conversations with the world from one perspective inside your head. And there's this whole committee of people in there telling you things that you should think or she thinks you should do, and it's really just you. So the opposite of that is you get out into the recovery community, you surround yourself with people who also want to change their life or have changed their lives. And you. I was just at a meeting an hour ago in St.
Paul, Minnesota, called problems and solutions. And you can raise your hand at this AA meeting and say anything you want. You can say whatever you're struggling with, or, you know, I hate my sponsor, my parents are p****** me off, my wife is all over me. I hate my job, or I love my job, or I love my life. You can say whatever you want and then people will respond with, here's what I did when that happened to me, or so this exchange of perspective isn't going to happen at happy hour. Let's just face it.
What happens at happy hour? People are getting drunk. Nobody be making, telling stories about what they're gonna do. Here's the difference, man. You go between happy hour and aa or the sober community. You go into the and engage with people in the sober community, and they're talking about what they actually did to change their lives. And what they actually want to do. And it's true, right? I bet you half the stories at happy hour are bullshit. So what? One of the most powerful things about recovery is you live in what's true, what you do, what you say, what largely true in the using world, what you do, what you say, where you go, what you are willing to talk about with people.
The stories you tell is almost stuff like fourth a real thing. But at some point we want you to change the perspective so that you don't have to stop doing so much stuff. It's not about what you can't do, it's about what you can do. And I always say this, I think, I mean, the most profound effective medicine for any addict or alcoholic is the other alcoholics and addicts. It's the other people. So find them, talk to them, ask them for help, engage with them. I mean, if you find a group of people, women, men, whoever it is, whatever, who you ever want to sound surround yourself with in a recovery community, you are going to find that that is incredibly more substantive experience with people than happy hour.
I get it. Happy hour kind of is this work release thing, which, you know, I never really participated in that. I mean, if I went to happy hour, I was probably shooting up in the bathroom anyway because I didn't think alcohol was all that. So we're not going to get, we're not going to get into that story. I want to leave you with this message. This is about changing your perspective and the things that you do. Early recovery is about changing your perspective and the things you do. The places you go physically are going to influence that.
Your head isn't going to lead you there. Your feet will lead you there. Your head will catch up later, and it will, it will catch up probably somewhere around the one and a half to two year mark. You're going to be like, oh, you're gonna have a lot of those moments where you're like, wow, this perspective thing goes like, this gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And you have a lot of these moments like, oh, that's why he kept saying that. That's why my sponsor said that. That's what that guy was talking about at that meeting.
That's what my counselor was talking about. Why the h*** didn't I do this five years ago? Right? How many alcoholics do you ever think said to themselves, why the h*** didn't I do this five years ago? Anyway, everybody take care. Sign up. Sign in to Cadre. There's some amazing people there. Take care.
