You’ve stopped drinking, you know it’s the right decision and you’re feeling good about your new alcohol free life. Then a few days or months in a little voice starts saying “what about having a drink, just one for old times sake.”
The voice can be strong, particularly in the early stages, we give in to it and experience a blip. Despite all our good intentions, we find ourselves with a glass in hand doing what we said we wouldn’t.
I remember waking up the next day after a blip feeling like my world had ended. I beat myself up, why couldn’t I get it right, why did I cave in, why wasn’t I strong. All these questions ran through my head as I surfed the hangxiety waves. I reset myself back to day one because I felt I deserved to be punished.
However, punishing ourselves for having a blip isn’t helpful and can even lead us down the slippery slope into drinking again. I want to offer you a way to reframe blips so they can be a point of reassessment rather than a feeling of disappointment.
You have to change the way you view a blip from it being a point of failure to accepting them as part of the cycle of stopping drinking. After all,everything in life is cyclical, nature goes through seasons, the moon has different phases and our moods change throughout the week. The journey to becoming alcohol free is not linear, it is another cyclical part of life.
The cycle of stopping can look like a period of not drinking, and then we drink for whatever reason. The blip ends that cycle but change your perspective to see it as the beginning of a new cycle of not drinking. A blip gives you a chance to step back and reevaluate what’s not working in your alcohol free journey. Take some time to reflect on why the blip happened,
was there a trigger or was it a challenging situation?
With this information you can support yourself to understand what needs to change as you enter this new cycle.
Blips don’t mean you are weak, becoming alcohol free is a completely new way of living, it takes time to get to where you want to be. Think about anytime you’ve tried to learn something new in life, it’s rare you get it right first time and stopping drinking is no different.
I encourage you to befriend your blips, don’t make them something negative. Embrace them as an invitation to spring forward not as an excuse to drag you back into drinking. Remember that in every ending there is always a new beginning.
