Dealing With Negative Feelings & Emotions In Recovery

There is no escaping life with a couple of beers for people in recovery. We get to face all of our emotions, the good and bad.

Photo by Ümit Bulut on Unsplash

Staying sober is more than just not picking up drugs or alcohol. That can be hard enough.

After a while, though, staying away from substances becomes a habit in itself, and there are a lot more days that I don’t think about using than there are days when using crosses my mind.

I don’t miss drugs. That life turned me into a person I hated. The “rehab shuffle” and the never-ending jail stints is a miserable existence. That doesn’t mean there isn’t anything about using I don’t miss, however. I do occasionally miss being able to cover up any negative feeling or emotion with a drink. To escape reality when I am having a rough day.

The thing about being in recovery is we don’t get to do that, though. As painful as life can be - no matter how hard it gets - we have to learn to deal with it and feel every feeling. On good days, which I am happy to say is most days for me now, it is fairly easy. But those bad days - when it feels like the whole world is closing in around you - that is when it is crucial to have an outlet or a support system in place to be able to work through them without relapsing.

“Regular” people can have a drink or smoke and not fall into a pattern of destruction. Think about it: for most people, when they have a long, stressful day at work, they are allowed to come home and have a beer or glass of wine at dinner to relax and calm down. Sober people don’t have that luxury.

When life gets hard and you have a week of hell where absolutely nothing went right, regular people can take a weekend off and forget about their problems with a night out at a bar or party. It can be an escape. Sober people cannot do that unless we are fine with opening the door to a spiraling relapse.

Before I make this sound like a sob story for people in recovery, I want to make it clear that there are also millions of people who don’t have a history of addiction that do not drink or use when life gets hard. Some people don’t ever drink, or maybe they have a glass of wine once a year at a wedding. It’s not like people in recovery are the only ones in the world who don’t choose to drink or use. I am just pointing out that for us, we are so used to covering up negative feelings in our addiction. So when we get sober we have to almost literally re-wire our brains to learn how to find sober coping mechanisms.

I think one big difference between people who use drugs to relax for a night and someone like me who had an actual addiction is that for me, it wasn’t an escape as much as it was trying to be numb from everything. I wasted so many years numbing life, and there are times in my past I don’t even remember. Several years are still a blur to me, and there are memories that creep in that make me think, “did I actually do that? How truly dumb could I have been?”

That is why I cannot have a beer on a Friday night. I know where it leads. I am content with my life today, and though there are struggles, I wouldn’t sacrifice everything for a temporary fix. There is beauty in the struggle, especially when you can look back on it and realize that those tough times made you who you are today.

Part of being in recovery is learning that feeling emotions is vital and also understanding that nothing ever lasts. All feelings are temporary. Trying to make a temporary feeling permanent is useless. Identifying those emotions, allowing yourself to feel them, staying in the moment, and accepting them is a process I try to practice but will never master. Recovery is not easy, but it becomes so much more meaningful when you can get through tough days.

As hard as it can be in the moment, it is helpful to know that without all the negative emotions, we wouldn’t be able to appreciate the good ones. And I promise, the longer you stay sober, there are way more good days than bad ones. So, try to be grateful that we don’t have to escape our feelings today. Instead of looking at it like “we have to deal with bad feelings,” start looking at it like “we get to deal with bad feelings.” We do recover.