TIVI

Collection: Healing

Est. Read Time: 11 Minutes

Alcohol was the best thing that ever happened to me.

The second I found it, I knew I had found a friend for life. During the twenty-five years I spent drinking, alcohol never judged me. It never asked difficult questions. It never asked me to face my past. It never required honesty.

It simply made everything quieter.

For the first time in years, I could fall asleep. The relentless voices in my head faded into the background. The shame became manageable. I fit in. My friends at the end of the bar always welcomed me.

Alcohol became the medicine I had been looking for my entire life.

And it worked.

Until it didn’t.

The destruction was obvious. Broken relationships. Lost opportunities. Financial wreckage. Career setbacks. Educational failures. Emotional collapse. The inability to manage even ordinary responsibilities. A twenty-five-year hangover. Almost losing my family.

Truthfully…I would have deserved it.

But the greatest loss wasn’t any of those things. It was myself.

I don’t remember exactly when I stopped recognizing the person looking back at me. It wasn’t one terrible night. It was thousands of ordinary ones. Somewhere along the way…I disappeared.

One of the things childhood sexual abuse took from me was the opportunity to become the person I naturally would have become. Abuse interrupted that process. Shame stepped in where confidence should have been. Fear stepped in where trust should have been. Survival stepped in where freedom should have been.

Somewhere during those years, I lost the person I might have become. Then alcohol did something even more tragic.

If it was abuse that stole my childhood…it was alcohol that stole my adulthood.

Alcohol never healed my shame. It simply postponed having to face it.

People sometimes ask why someone doesn’t just stop drinking. I used to ask myself the same question. For most of my drinking career, I honestly believed I could quit whenever I wanted.

The strange thing about addiction is that from the outside it often looks like a series of bad choices. From the inside, it feels like you’ve lost the ability to choose.

I made the decision to fight alcohol nearly ten years before I ever spent a single day sober. Every morning I swore it off. Every afternoon I found myself thinking about the next drink. Every evening I made the same promise.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll quit. Tomorrow I’ll be different.

Tomorrow never came.

Shame stacked on shame. Day after day. Year after year. Eventually there was nowhere left to look. No one left to blame.

The only person left standing was me.

I wasn’t simply someone who drank too much. I believed I was ugly. I believed I was disgusting. I believed I was shameful. I believed I was beyond redemption.

Looking back now, I don’t think alcohol created those beliefs. I think it simply gave them a place to live.

Perhaps the hardest part wasn’t imagining life without alcohol. It was imagining life without the person alcohol had allowed me to become.

As strange as that sounds, I had become very good at drinking. I honestly wondered whether I would ever be good at anything else. I had also convinced myself that I had ruined the life God originally intended for me. Whatever came after sobriety would simply be a consolation prize.

So why would I ever let go of the one thing that never abandoned me? Why would I walk away from the one friend that had faithfully silenced the voices for twenty-five years?

Everything changed on October 18, 2020.

That evening I walked into a small church in Florida and sat around a folding table with five other alcoholics. Until that night, I had never met people willing to be that honest.

No masks. No pretending. No polished answers. No one trying to impress anyone else.

Just deeply flawed people telling the truth about themselves.

I had never experienced anything like it. For the first time in more than thirty years…I didn’t feel ashamed. For the first time in a very long time…I didn’t feel alone.

Somewhere along the way I realized alcohol had never been my biggest problem. The drink was simply the way I tried to survive everything I couldn’t bear to face.

AA didn’t just teach me how to live without alcohol. It taught me how to live with myself.

It changed everything.

It gave me a community. It gave me people who understood me before they ever tried to help me. It gave me people who loved me before I believed I was worth loving.

In AA, I learned to let other people love me until I could begin loving myself.

But something else happened that I never expected. I slowly began discovering there was actually a self worth loving. And I stayed sober long enough to get to know him.

It turns out…I might actually like him.

For so many years I had defined myself by what happened to me. Then I defined myself by what I became because of it.

Survivor. Alcoholic. Angry. Ashamed. Hopeless. Broken.

Those weren’t simply descriptions anymore. They had become my identity.

Over nearly five years, I worked through the Twelve Steps. They asked me to do things I never imagined I could do: tell the truth, admit my wrongs, make amends, trust God, help someone else.

None of it was easy. All of it changed me.

Somewhere along the journey, God began peeling those labels away. Not all at once. Slowly. Through honest conversations. Through prayer. Through the Twelve Steps. Through people who loved me enough to tell me the truth.

I didn’t just learn to love myself. I met the person God had been trying to introduce me to all along.

One of the greatest lessons I learned in Alcoholics Anonymous had nothing to do with alcohol. It had to do with resentment.

I discovered that resentment—regardless of how justified it might be—was poison to me.

Being sexually abused changed the course of my life. Being abandoned by institutions that should have protected me made that wound even deeper.

My anger wasn’t imaginary. It wasn’t irrational. It wasn’t exaggerated. It was justified. In many ways…it was righteous.

And I was right.

But I slowly came to understand something that was incredibly difficult to accept.

I could be completely right…and still be dying.

That may be one of the hardest truths I’ve ever had to accept.

AA never asked me to pretend the abuse didn’t happen. No one asked me to excuse it. No one asked me to stop pursuing justice. Instead, they helped me understand that pursuing accountability and carrying resentment aren’t the same thing.

One seeks truth. The other was slowly destroying me.

As the Big Book says, “Resentment is the number one offender.”

For me, that became true.

The Twelve Steps took me nearly five years to complete. Today I still attend two…sometimes three…sometimes four meetings every week.

Not because I always need a meeting. But because the new guy walking through those doors needs one. And someone there to tell him he isn’t alone.

Someone did that for me. Now I get to do it for someone else.

Today I believe something I never imagined I would say.

I’m grateful I discovered I was an alcoholic.

Not because addiction is a gift. It isn’t. But because recovery introduced me to a life I didn’t know was possible. It introduced me to a God who never stopped pursuing me. To a community that refused to let me disappear. And to a version of myself I never imagined I could become.

Today I’m still recovering. Not only from alcohol. From shame. From fear. From resentment. From believing my story had already been written.

Recovery, I’ve discovered, isn’t about becoming someone else. It’s about becoming the person God created me to be.

I just needed to learn to trust him more than I trusted myself.

I’m still early in my sobriety as far as years go. But years don’t matter to me the way they used to.

All I have is today.

I can always drink tomorrow.

Reflection: Recovery isn’t becoming someone new. It’s slowly meeting the person shame convinced you it was impossible for you to become.

Continue the Journey:

Previous: 005. Solitude: How the outdoors became the place I found myself again.

Next: 008. A Friend That Almost Killed Me. The addiction that worked… Until it didn’t.

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Why This Library Exists

TIVI exists because no one should have to walk the road toward healing, accountability, and restoration alone.

Every story in this library was written to offer one or more of three things:

• Experience – So you know someone else has been there.
• Strength – So you can borrow courage when yours is running low.
• Hope – So you can believe healing and accountability are still possible.

If even one story helps you take the next right step, then it was worth writing.

Please feel free to reach out to us if we can help. We’re here.