Your Next Move After Months Of Sobriety. Leave The Meetings Behind And Build Your Career Now.

It is essential in the recovery from alcoholism that one reconstructs his four planes of being, which were badly damaged during his time as an addict. For the path of recovery to cure isn’t just about not consuming the offending substance anymore, whether it be alcohol or drugs. It is what the definition of  recovery means: to bring your being from one that was ill to one that is now functioning normally. I will add that it also entails walking on a trail, where by the end, he has transformed to the best version of himself that he can be.

As I have stated many times, this is the fundamental difference between my philosophy and that of Alcoholics Anonymous. Alcoholics Anonymous doesn’t believe you can be cured. They believe you are always an addict. It is a tragedy when they tell me of their “success” stories of being sober for twenty plus years, yet still are living in the rooms, believing they are these sick people. When you are dedicating your life to this mantra, you are not enhancing yourself. You are just living in fear as the remaining addict. You are not advancing your planes. You are simply existing sober. The minority who actually stay sober, that is, which any scrap of brain would tell this is the evidence that the program is a failure.

Not only should one recover from alcoholism, become cured from the affliction but should bring his planes of being to a state that was far superior to before the time he began the addiction. For the former addict wasn’t holistically sound long before he met John Barleycorn most likely. Alcoholics usually had traumatic backgrounds of abuse. And Johnny was lying in wait to meet them with his anesthetic for this past trauma.

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

So this past has to be reconciled as well, which alternate non-AA programs address, such as Passages. If you take away the origin of why the person became an addict, then you eliminate the need for that anesthetic after you cease the substance abuse. I don’t have to mask the pain of childhood and teenagehood any longer, whether it be with alcohol or anything else. I have reconciled it and left that past era where it belongs—in the past. My four planes of being, the physical sphere, emotional realm, career field and spiritual plane only continue to advance and have since that last drop of liquid jolly joy.

I have covered in previous articles the topic of reinvention of the physical and emotional plane. The physical plane being the foundation of your new mansion and the emotional being the framework. Now I address the career sphere. The finishing of that structure of your new existence. And this includes making money. Money isn’t the root of happiness, this is true. But it is also true that poverty will surely lead to misery. I’ve lived in both worlds and the planet I prefer is one of financial freedom.

Now it may be countered that there are functioning alcoholics who are tremendously successful. This is true. Charles Bukowski, the famed writer and poet was an alcoholic. So was Hemingway. There exist corporate tycoons who are alcoholics and are wealthy. But I contend they most likely did not reach their full potential, even though their talent and work effort brought them financial success. Hemingway committed suicide. Think of how many more brilliant writings he could have produced had he not? Bukowski died a miserable example of a human being, filled with anger and depression. My opinion is he wasn’t that great of a writer, only got lucky enough to write in a generation that embraced his depravity. And the tycoon, who is an alcoholic, may have climbed to the high altitudes of the mountain. But he isn’t reaching the absolute summit of his talents. I made it through physical therapy school with a drinking problem. I would have done a lot better in that program if I wasn’t linked with John Barleycorn every night. Just because someone is successful doesn’t mean he is as successful as he could have been. A lot of that has nothing to do with money.

But the vast majority of alcoholics aren’t the exceptions to the rule like the tycoon or Hemingway during their working lives. Most alcoholics are just counting the hours down every day until they can hit that liquor store on the way back home. So they can drink away the night and spend the first few hours the next morning wiping away the haze from their self-induced fog. The primary focus of the life of an alcoholic is alcohol. Everything else is secondary. I did a decent job during the first eight years of my craft as a physical therapist, whose master status was a practicing alcoholic. But I could have done better if I had been sober. I didn’t really start the path to master my trade until I broke it off with the addiction.

There are two types of self-advancement that one can engage in now that there is no interference from John Barleycorn. The first is the career itself in which you have chosen. And the first question to analyze, once the liquid tide has receded and the head is cleared, is whether this chosen field remains your calling.

Many people, former alcoholic or not, don’t like their jobs. This is a tragedy. But since money doesn’t grow on trees, people are forced to spend a great many of their waking hours in their professions. I was fortunate because I had the foresight at twenty-two years old to know that I didn’t know what I wanted to do from the eight to five for decades of my life. So I enlisted into Uncle Sam’s orphanage for the wayward with no prospects until I figured it out. That turned out to be a smart decision because the calling to become a medical provider didn’t occur until I was twenty-six. I didn’t go to physical therapy school until I was twenty-nine and didn’t start practicing until thirty-three. I was late to the party. But it is better to be late and content than on time and miserable. I can say, long after those wayward years even matter, that I didn’t spend my life doing something I hated.

When your mind is cleared of the toxic effect of alcohol, you can evaluate whether you are on the right trail in your walk of life. I recommend this self-analysis for everyone unless they want to reside in the majority of Thoreau’s club of most who live in quiet desperation. Having an unfulfilled career is a sure way to destroy the emotional plane, which will suck the energy out of your being. Many in midlife have fallen into this abyss. They are generally in a state of discontent in which they stop advancing everything. They go home and watch Netflix, have two or three weeks off a year and hope they can leave it all by sixty-five to salvage the little they can with the rest. They have resigned themselves to a life they really don’t like but are at the halfway mark so figure they might as well just wait out the rest.

This is not the outlook to have. If you are now clean and sober and realize you really don’t like your profession, then now is the time to change it. Yes, it is not easy. There will be a time when you will have to be in that job you don’t like while training for a different career, whether in the trades or another degree. And most people don’t have the will to take on this endeavor. Most don’t even have the vision to see themselves doing something else. So they sit in the cubicle everyday as their life passes in that state of discontent. If one drank every night and went to work in his recent past, one can now spend those nights getting the qualifications to do something else. If it means downsizing your lifestyle, then so be it. No one on their deathbed relishes they had the extra five hundred square feet in the house they owned.

Possibly, you are in the right career. Maybe you picked the one that linked with your Zen before and during your alcoholic days. Well, congratulations to you. Now is the time to excel at it to your maximum potential. Unless you were the exception to the rule, you were probably just getting by through your once daily hangovers. Now you step your stride to reach the summit instead of meandering around the base of the mountain. If you are an IT guy, then start getting those certifications. If you are a business guy, then there is the MBA to pursue. There are advanced courses for electricians and other tradesmen. If you are in the career you like, then start being the best you can in it. That energy will overflow into your other planes as well to keep your being in a state of holistic health.

For myself, it was physical therapy courses in continuing education. I wanted to be a physical therapist before I was an alcoholic, was one during my alcoholism and I am still one today long after I quit it for good. I am mostly retired now, but when I wasn’t, I began a path to master joint mobilizations, myofascial release techniques and muscle rebalancing. I not only went to yearly courses but studied two hours a week on my own. It was only two hours, but I did it every week while I was working. Even though ninety percent retired today, this is a practice I continue. I state that if I drop dead at the clinic during one of my infrequent contracts, I hope it will be while learning something new. There is no end to progression of Self in the career field.

What if you have no real trade, profession or degree and never have? Maybe you only worked menial jobs your whole life. Now is the time to start building yourself up. Maybe you work unskilled labor at thirty-five. No one said you have to be the same at forty. You probably have never considered what you could be because of your prior addiction’s focus. Who says you can’t become an electrician, mechanic or executive at forty? I once knew a successful car salesman who decided to become an RN at fifty-five. His friends on the lot told him he would be fifty-seven before he got his degree. He told them he would be fifty-seven anyway. He is a traveling contractor today, like myself. You don’t have addiction holding you back now. There may be some professions that have bypassed you. I can’t apply to the F.B.I. in my fifties. But there are many occupations that most likely haven’t. I know of a graduate from the Alaskan trooper academy. He was late forties when he completed the course.

But there are other types of self-advancement besides the basic career that you can now pursue since your days with John Barleycorn are over. Maybe you are fine with your job but yet want something more. Something to break away from the day to day pack that runs in the same circle year after year. Not too long ago, the idea of an internet business wasn’t an idea at all. No one could have imagined that you could start a blog, vlog or even a product business right from your home. The idea of self-publishing on Amazon wasn’t possible as there was no Amazon or cyberspace. You can even start your own sitcom on YouTube if you like.

These internet self-advancement ideas aren’t easy. They certainly were a lot easier for those who had the foresight when the internet was novel and YouTube was a first year platform. But the most important take away is that it is the pursuit, not the outcome, which gives meaning to life. You cannot run in that race if you are in the stands three sheets to the wind when the starting gun goes off.

I wrote the first draft of my dystopian novel, The Second Fall, when I was in the last years of my alcoholism. I had always wanted to write a dystopian work of an offbeat apocalyptic Christ returning to a world that had fallen into ruin. The first year I began it, in the spring 2005, I wrote 109 pages. The first edition didn’t publish until 2012. It took seven years because I was drinking every night. If I hadn’t been drinking, I would have had the first draft, the rewrites and final edits done in a total of two or three years. Once I got sober, I not only quickly finished that novel but published another short fictional book the same year. A few years later, I decided to write two self-help books, one being the topic of this blog. I also published a memoir of spiritual reinvention on the Pacific Crest Trail. It took far less time to get these books out now that alcohol was permanently out of my life.

But you can’t focus on advancement and progression when your master status is that of an addict. The people who sit in the rooms most nights focus on their continued sobriety, even ten and twenty years later. You aren’t thinking about starting your own business of selling offbeat T-shirts when you are still telling your story of your alcoholic past in that circle of AA’s constant negativity. You’re just happy that you are sober today and don’t know about tomorrow. You aren’t thinking about pursuit of excellence or advancement of career planes. You are thinking about how you are diseased and forever in fear that the remission is only temporary. You won’t have the time to devote to writing that book because your life revolves around AA.

What I am offering is to leave the alcoholic past behind you. You have stopped drinking. Eventually the cravings will become minimal, transient and rare, if you are living a holistically healthy life, which is the opposite of what Alcoholics Anonymous offers. Once you reach this normality, this is where you start the path to become the best version of yourself that you can. You aren’t simply collecting milestone chips of sobriety. You attempt to reach the summit to greatness. And if one endeavor fails, then you begin another. You can’t do this if you are sitting in negativity and never let go of the past, which is where AA keeps you.

Most members of AA are so distracted by the AA cult that they will never consider bringing themselves to a state of excellence. And that is truly a tragedy. Because the greatest triumphs aren’t from ones who just became successful. They are from those who were at the bottom of the abyss, climbed to the surface and then rose to the top of the highest peak itself. And this is where everyone, former alcoholic or not, should direct their walk of life.

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)

To recreate your life on all planes for the best version of yourself as possible: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