Two Years Sober: The Real Transformation Begins. What Is It Like Now At Two Years Sober?

I have stated that one who suffered from alcoholism can reach the point of cure. I proclaim it is at the two year mark. I pick two years because that is when protracted withdrawal syndrome ends—at most. A lot of people reach that terminal at one year. But one to two years is when the neurochemistry has rebalanced your being to adapt to a life which is now alcohol free.

Why does it take this long, one to two years? Because alcoholism isn’t something that you just go through for a few months. It is years and for some, decades. I had been an on and off binge drinker from eighteen to twenty-seven. I usually didn’t drink during the work week during my early stages. But at twenty-seven on a spring break, visiting an old military friend, I stepped over the line. I drank every night, thinking I would return to somewhat normality once break was over. This time I didn’t. John Barleycorn had taken me. My “alcoholic years” lasted for a total of thirteen. I finally quit it at forty.

I’ve had prior articles on the phases of recovery. The detox phase, which is nothing short of a five-day walk through the inferno. Remembrance of that experience alone is enough to never want to call my old buddy, Johnny, ever again. Then there is phase two that lasts to thirty to forty-five days. The emotional roller coaster and severe cravings that are practically continuous. Then to the six month mark, where the cravings are abating and the emotional upheaval is starting to balance. For the next year and a half I would still have episodic bouts of anxiety and depression and periodic wanting to pick up that phone and call J.B. All of this decreased as time went on and at the end of year two, it was largely gone. I state in my book on the matter that this is where I claimed cure.

THE SMALL BOOK: HOW I BEAT ALCOHOLISM AND WHY ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS DOESN'T WORK

It has now been close to two decades clean without the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, which I not only find not helpful but completely destructive. I think their massive failure rate proves that point for me, regardless of their reasons why. I have given comparison in another article how I felt at three months compared to what I saw in the rooms with members who had just made their ninety days and ninety meetings pledge. I was already much better off than they. But I remember the day I made two years as well. I was not only cured but looked in the mirror and saw an entirely different person.

I have stated and still do that the way to recover from alcoholic addiction is to completely reinvent your Self on all of your planes. The physical, emotional and career sphere in which your spiritual plane will fall into place. And you have to solve why you drank to begin with and that usually comes from dealing with past abuse, whether at home or outside of it. You have a rotted foundation of being as an alcoholic with this past trauma. Therefore, you must fix it. If you fix your past, or at least come to terms with it and reinvent your being, you will cure alcoholism. Willpower past the six month mark does not cure you from the effects of your prior addiction. Re-creating your existence as a non-alcoholic does. If you advance your planes, you will rarely think about alcohol past the two year mark. Because you will envision the person who once was and realize he is long dead.

But when I do go back and read my journal of my recovery, many entries that make up these works today, I am reading a different biography altogether at the two year mark versus the one who was still best chums with John Barleycorn.

First, you cannot comprehend that you were once that person so deep in J.B.’s bottle. I can’t comprehend how I worked as a medical provider, sick every morning, reeling with vertigo, matched by slight nausea. The fatigue that settled in the afternoon. I was good at my job as a PT through force of will, but I wonder how much better I could have been if I was clean? How different my being is today when I periodically contract. Just getting up with only a little sleepiness that wears off in a half hour like a normal person. The thought that I operated every day with physiological sickness is astounding to me. Who was that person?

Then the return to fitness. I started that at day forty-five sober. The first day I felt good. I had been a long-time Thai kickboxer, who fought in school events regularly. If I had a week in those last five years of my alcoholism when I trained twice, that would be a good week. When I returned from the dead, I started with just a few rounds on the bag and a few sets of lifting weights. Within months I had advanced greatly. At two years, I was doing fifteen to twenty rounds on the bag and lifting weights for forty minutes afterward two out of every three days. My new high was the endorphin rush from vigorous exercise.

Fitness alone led me to a new sense of well-being. It is the foundation for reinvention of Self. Instead of being sick in the morning, I always felt rested because I didn’t have nearly the insomnia I did during the Book of John. And I was now living healthy, not in physical and mental illness, which is what active alcoholism is. I also was engaged in meditative activities, which  worked in perfect conjunction with the physical ones.

If one were to run a film at the clinics and hospitals of my personality during the alcoholic days, you would see an entirely different one. Now understand, the world of healthcare is rough and mean. Many times you have to be a non-negotiable SOB to administer ethical care when the higher ups try to interfere for profit margin. But being in a mild rage all the time at big or little issues is not the way to live. During those drinking days, especially the last five years, if I was only a little edgy throughout the day, then that was a good day. I was never that way with patients, at least I can attest to that, but everyone else, if interviewed about my disposition, would paint a recollection of a largely hostile individual.

Of course you are hostile and on your best day edgy. You are going through daily withdrawal from the night before. It isn’t detox withdrawal because the body will hold that as long as you make your checkpoint time at the liquor store or bar on the way home. Anyone who has gone to work with the flu won’t remember being in the ideal frame of mind. The alcoholic is going to work with sickness every day of the week. You aren’t going to be congenial when you are coming out of your skin until you get the antidote. The work hours are just an inconvenience until you can get your hands around that bottle again.

Only two years ago, your life was that cycle of daily sickness, fatigue in the afternoons, the return to emotional normality somewhere in the third or fourth drink then to heavy intoxication once again. The weekends were even worse. You have no inconvenient work hours so the drinking is continuous as I have never known an alcoholic who didn’t start his binge until Saturday evening.

And that is what is incredulous when you are looking back once you have passed that two year cure mark. The tranquility now. Going to work everyday not being pissed off at the world and coming out of your skin. Being able to handle work conflicts with more stoicism. Oh, healthcare is still rough and mean. But I have adopted the attitude with contracts, which I still periodically take, that it is unemotionally my way or the highway. If I get lured into a clinic and find out I got snowed and they are completely corrupt, I don’t even get angry anymore. I simply state it will be done my way or I know the direction to the ferry or airport. No hard feelings. Versus the Mr. Hyde who would practically threaten the director with physical harm and be in a rage about the matter for months after the contract ended before its term. Because this is now normal thinking, not alcoholic thinking.

I thought about that long past cycle when I hit two years clean: drink, wake up, be sick, get through the work day and drink again. Now it is wake, do a smoothie, have a decent breakfast, go to work in a state of calm and enthusiasm to help the patient, come home, go to the gym and mediate before sleep, which will be deep. The weekends aren’t nonstop with the bottle to my lips. They are exercise and hiking or fishing or walking along the Alaska Gulf. Living instead of being in that altered state where John Barleycorn resides. How I lived in that black hole of the universe. Existing in a drug induced state more than I wasn’t. That person was erased two years later. The new incarnation was one who had activities throughout the week and weekend. Someone who was in a state of continual refinement of the physical and emotional. A person who was continuously advancing himself.

Your spiritual plane is destroyed while you are an alcoholic. You don’t see yourself as a functional, integral part of this universe. You’re just going from one drunk to the next. The last day of my alcoholism, I was a drunk who happened to practice physical therapy. Two years later I was a physical therapist who was constantly honing his craft. Someone who was gaining reputation in the small, remote towns of Alaska. Staff members actually wanted to be around me versus the toxic person who existed among them two years prior. I had developed other statuses as well, besides in the clinic. I was an author of several books. I was a proficient stock trader. None of this could have evolved while in the bottle. The first day of detox I was none of these. By the two year mark of cure, I had completely accomplished what I wrote about a few years later in my work, Reinvention of Self: How to Change Your Life and Being Forever.

This is what you set yourself to accomplish after you are past day thirty to forty-five. You don’t need to touch alcohol again. You proved you can abstain, you just did it for a month or month and a half. Now you have to bury that old person. This is why AA fails so many. They want to keep that diseased person, that addict, that alcoholic. They don’t advocate that staying sober isn’t just using willpower to not pick up the bottle after the first few months. They don’t get that the key to being alcohol free for life isn’t living in that mentally alcoholic state in the circles. You have to exit that life forever. You create a new being. A physically and mentally strong being. A being who advances his career or side projects, always and ever more moving forward.

Two years of this reinvention and you won’t be remotely the same person who walked with Johnny. If you do this and rectify your past, that person won’t feel the need to drink ever again.

Because that is a new being, who is not an alcoholic any longer.

To journey on a tale of epic transformation on a 2,660 mile trail check out: THE SHEPHERD AND THE RUNNINGWOLF: A PATH TO FORGIVENESS ON THE PACIFIC CREST TRAIL

(Usually free on KDP)

REINVENTION OF SELF: HOW TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE AND BEING FOREVER 

(Usually free on KDP)

For the condensed and orderly version of how I beat the addiction of alcoholism check out: THE SMALL BOOK: HOW I BEAT ALCOHOLISM AND WHY ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS DOESN'T WORK

(Usually free on KDP)

John Barleycorn taken from Jack London's book John Barleycorn. First published 1913