HOW TO DEAL WITH ALCOHOL WITHDRAWAL. TO THE SIX MONTH PHASE. AND WHY AA HURTS SOBRIETY.
- chphurst
- Sep 20
- 10 min read
If you have been clean and sober for approximately thirty to forty-five days, you have made it through the first two phases of recovery from alcoholism. The initial blast of the first five days of acute withdrawal was nothing short of Hell. The post-acute road to thirty to forty-five days is where you will live a little down the street from Hell but still feel its intense heat as the emotional upheaval and continuous cravings for the former offending substance attempt to pull you back into the fire. The AA meeting will give you another chip at day thirty. For me, the first day I could say I actually felt good was day forty-five.
Most literature will say that it will take one to two years for your neurochemistry to completely rebalance once you end your friendship with John Barleycorn. Commonly noted as the protracted withdrawal phase. This is why, in my own book, I state the two year mark is the day you can claim cure from your former addiction of alcoholism. And you will stay cured as long as you never touch it again.
That statement is, of course, heresy to “the rooms” in Alcoholics Anonymous. Their belief is you are forever diseased. Alcoholism is not a disease. It is an addiction. You may have predispositions toward this addiction but you did not have cancer. The person with cancer had no choice. The alcoholic did. Your body and mental health are indeed sick while you are an addict—because of alcohol. When you cease this activity of drinking and enough time passes, the body then heals itself. As long as you don’t reach for that bottle again, you are cured from it and ready to progress your life forward in lieu of living in an AA meeting for the rest of it.
The next big landmark toward that date of cure is six months. Many will claim that if you make six months, you have a good chance to make sobriety permanent in your life. I say it shouldn’t ever be a question in your mind that you will make sobriety for life, even if you can’t picture it at the moment. You made the contract day one and you are going to keep it for life. The phases are just the formalities of how you will feel while you honor this contract. That is the attitude you take. For staying sober is largely your mind’s resolution to do so. A sponsor, meetings and mantras will not keep you sober. Only you can.
The good news is this phase isn’t nearly as terrible as the first two. It isn’t great, but this is where you begin to rebuild your life, physically, emotionally and spiritually. You are past the roller coaster torment of the first thirty to forty-five days. Physical symptoms will still be there, but you’ll be living on the surface in the fresh air with the depths of the inferno left below.
Your mind will experience an up and down of emotions. One day you will feel euphoric and the next severely depressed, even suicidal. Agitation will be very common. Things that shouldn’t irritate you will irritate you greatly. You will have anxiety. But the difference with all of these emotional symptoms is they are now episodic instead of continuous. And that is something most don’t consider in their path of recovery. These symptoms are no longer continuous in this phase. The episodes of these negative emotions are only going to decrease with time. That is the concept that you hang on to. You are getting better.
The cravings will operate in the same manner. Do you remember, just a brief time ago, when the cravings were intense and continuous? Almost every minute of the day you thought about nothing but alcohol? That will begin to pass in this phase. You will still have cravings, probably daily. But not continuously. The intensity of the cravings will also vary now. You won’t always feel like you have to handcuff yourself to the wall to keep from running to the liquor store. Some cravings will be just like second phase but some will be moderate and a few will be mild. And you’re going to have a few hours here and there with no cravings. By now you have ignored so many intense symptoms of those mouth-watering cravings that you know you can defeat them. And as you continue to put days behind you from that last drop to the six month mark, these cravings will lessen with time as well. They lessen with frequency, intensity and duration. One day it will be a rarity to have one and when you do, it will be much milder and won’t last long.
The way I viewed these cravings at this phase was like a surfboard on the ocean. The wave approaches as I lie flat and let the board go up and over it until it passes. You beat cravings yesterday so you can today. Even in third phase, John Barleycorn was attempting to resurrect himself. But he was growing weaker. Just a little, each day. And he would be even weaker tomorrow. You’re not just winning the battle but starting to turn the tide of the war in phase three.
This is the point in recovery where I could see having a support group in which to go. And as I said in previous articles, it may not be a terrible idea to sit yourself down in an AA meeting at times in those early months of recovery, especially when the cravings are the most frequent, when you are surrounded by triggers of alcohol. If you must do that, do it without adopting their philosophy. You can tell your story here. After all, you are new to sobriety and may need to hear yourself say it. Geez, Louise, I really was an alcoholic. But hanging out there every night for the rest of your sober life? I have a much better protocol.
As said previously in this article, this is the phase where you begin to reconstruct the planes of your existence. Engaging in this reconstruction process will also keep you busy and your mind off that ringing phone from John Barleycorn. You look at the spheres of your being, also noted in my other book for people who need to reinvent their lives. The physical plane. The emotional sphere. The career and the spiritual realm. The career advancement is something you think about later on, as at this point, it is the physical and emotional planes that are needed the most of that labor crew to begin to lay the foundation of your new life.
First, there is the physical realm. This is a pretty nuts and bolts approach. It consists of exercise and clean diet. The exercise program doesn’t have to be a three hour a day plan. You start slow with this. You will have to because you won’t have a lot of energy initially. Because you will have a great deal of insomnia during this phase. Then you’ll have periods of hypersomnia with strange dreams, usually consisting of the past. Because the past is probably where the alcohol abuse originated. There will be periodic night terrors but these will decrease as the emotional symptoms and cravings do with continued time away from that last drop. Your energy for exercise will increase as all of these symptoms lessen.
The exercise should be largely cardio in nature. I’ve been a gym rat and kickboxer most of my life so my cardio program is intact. And I also lift weights for forty minutes so between that and my bag work, it takes an hour and a half or slightly more. But you don’t have to lift weights like I do. Your exercise cardio program should be forty-five minutes to an hour. It can be elliptical, bike riding, speed walking or whatever program suits you. And you start slow. You may find you can only do ten minutes of cardio before you feel like you’re going to collapse. So that’s where you start. You can look up on the internet how to calculate a target heart rate for your age. That’s what you train at. You’re not supposed to feel like you’re going to collapse. And once you have a baseline, you build it up to that time above. I train two days on and one off. This keeps me mentally in the game as I’m always close to a rest day and avoid burnout at my age.
The close cousin to the exercise program is the diet. This is where you break hard from the AA habits of smoking, guzzling coffee and sugar at every meeting. If you had to smoke to get through the initial tidal wave of early withdrawal, then so be it. Now is when you quit it. You can still have a dessert every night and a few cups of coffee through the day. But smoking needs to be gone. Have you ever seen the AA’rs, ten years sober, still smoking and sucking coffee like they are in the third week of withdrawal? If the ones running this program had a brain in their heads, they would have opened a medical book and known that these habits actually induce cravings. They should have been encouraging clean lifestyle after day thirty.
Sure, you can go to McDonald’s occasionally. But for the most part, your diet should consist of solid proteins and whole grains with lots of vegetables and fruits. I bought a NutriBullet so I could make a gigantic vegetable and fruit smoothie and drink it all day long. Diet alone and the elimination of toxins like nicotine, excessive sugar and caffeine will reduce the symptoms during the protracted withdrawal phase and gives to good holistic health, even if you weren’t an alcoholic. The physical program given is the same one I give patients who are suffering from anxiety and depression.
Next is the emotional plane. On top of the physical program, you must develop a meditative routine. This can be yoga, Tai Chi, or any other type of meditative program. You engage in this for fifteen to twenty minutes a day on top of the physical regiment. If you feel a panic attack approaching, you now have a tool to combat it as well. I still have long anger issues that try to surface at times. Ten minutes of Zen meditation stops that demon in its tracks. And if it tries to reach the surface, four hours later, then I do another ten minutes.
But my, you will say, where do I have time to do all this? Please, you used to drink hours every night. An hour and a half a day for the physical and mental program, two days out of every three is doable. Most people spend more time on social media than that every night. You build slowly, as said. And you will find that after exercise, you will have hours of no cravings during this phase. Endorphins dropping from vigorous activity counter these protracted withdrawal effects. If everyone in this country followed the above program, we wouldn’t have a nation that feels it needs anti-depressants to get through this normal thing called life.
One of the largest complaints you will hear from the newly sober is they suddenly have all this idle time. So they hang out in “the rooms” and consume substances that induce cravings in an environment of complete negativity. So I advise to spend that time on physical and emotional enhancing activities that reduce the cravings of the very substance that got them in trouble. Why AA thinks this is heresy is beyond me. The only answer that comes to mind is because they are a cult that believes if you stray an inch outside of their mantras, then you are that heretic.
The weekends are still difficult during this phase of recovery toward cure. Because even with the physical and mental program, there are still all those idle hours. So I have something to incorporate as well to fill those hours so you aren’t thinking about going back to the bar. It’s pretty common sense. You create activities to fill your time.
The outdoors is a wonderful holistic recovery tool that costs next to nothing. Take day hikes. I have lived in Alaska and near the Sierra Nevadas, so the mountains are always a part of my home. But not everyone lives in places like these. So drive a few hours. If you are in the flat farmlands of Ohio, the Red River Gorge is a few hours south in Kentucky and a few hours north is Michigan. Spend your weekends doing that. Or take up fishing. Or hunting. Find a course on wilderness survival. The outdoors naturally drop those endorphins as well.
If you aren’t into the outdoors, there are other activities. There are museums to see. Book clubs to join. Maybe you learn how to wood work. Maybe it becomes your next occupation. But when you have idle hours that are inducing the symptoms of protracted withdrawal from alcohol, then you fill these hours with something else to think about. Something that is healthy and possibly advancing your life.
Or you can go to a meeting and regurgitate every night how terrible your life was in your addicted state. Which avenue sounds holistically better?
By now you have had over a month sober. Which means you are able to now comprehend an entire life in this sobriety. You are now incredulous how different if feels to wake up in the morning without a hangover and are starting to wonder how you did wake up with one every morning for so long? The symptoms of withdrawal are still there, but the worst of the typhoon is over. And you see calm waters in the distant horizon.
If you continue this path of recovery stated above, the turmoil of the protracted withdrawal will be far less. For on a daily basis you are proving to yourself that you no longer need the friendship of John Barleycorn. Because he was never a friend to begin with.
I didn’t spend the day of my six month anniversary of sobriety sitting in meeting. I was standing on top of Mount Whitney at fourteen thousand feet after a two hundred and twenty mile trek. I hadn’t claimed cure but was advancing toward it. And there was no doubt in my mind of two things. One, I was going to be free from alcohol forever. And two, Alcoholics Anonymous wasn’t the tool to cut the chain to release me from the addiction.
For a tale of reinvention of Self across a 2,600 mile trek check out
John Barleycorn: taken from Jack London's memoir of his alcoholism. John Barleycorn: First published, 1913
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