Can You Be Sober If You Never Were An Alcoholic?

Dee Rambeau (left) and Joshua Doležal (right)

Friends,

This post is a conversation between

Dee Rambeau

and me about sobriety. It comes on the heels of National Recovery Month, and you’ll see that it begins with a question: can anyone claim to be sober, even if they haven’t struggled with addiction?

I’ve done a few of these email exchanges, and they are a little different from a podcast interview in that we each take more time to think about and craft our replies than impromptu conversation allows.

Hope you get something out of this and share some of your own thoughts in the comments!

Josh

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Can You Be Sober If You Never Were An Alcoholic?

Josh: I think I’ve told you, Dee, that a little over a year ago, the very day that my ex and I decided that we would divorce, I stopped drinking. It just seemed like an obvious choice to only allow good stuff in and focus on expelling as much of the bad as I could.

I thought of it as a temporary thing, fully expecting that once I was back on my feet, through the worst of it, I'd pick up my happy hour habit again. It had always been a little escape hatch at the end of the day: an excuse to stop thinking, take the edge off. But the longer I went without drinking, the more I liked how I felt. At the same time, I started noticing how much I related to what people like you,

Eleanor Anstruther

, and

Dana Leigh Lyons

were writing about sobriety. 

It is kind of shocking to think of myself as "sober," since I still don't think I ever was an alcoholic. What do you think, Dee: is it fair to claim sobriety if I never felt that the terms "addict" or "alcoholic" fit?

Dee: I’m proud of you for changing your relationship to alcohol. I don’t think the label “sober” is all that important. You are currently sober, but the important part is that you examined the impact a habit of drinking had on your life and decided to change it. Oddly, many people get hung up on words like sobriety and recovery, and it can impede their intention and progress toward change. 

With nearly 15 years clean and sober I think I have a bit of perspective. The important part is the self-examination of our own relationship to habits and things. Whether you choose to stay sober or not, you’re armed now with the information on how drinking and not drinking informs your daily life. 

I have a question for you: Do you speak of it to your children? And if so, how?

Josh: I did once. We were all driving somewhere, and I said something about how I don’t drink beer anymore and wondered if they had noticed a difference. My son, who is 5, said he noticed that I…don’t drink beer anymore. Very literal! I wonder where he gets it. 

My daughters said they didn’t think I was any different. But they were probably feeling like it was a trick question. What’s the right answer, Dad? I’d like to think they’ve noticed something, but it’s possible that the change was too subtle. Maybe they’ll tell me when they’re older? I just told them that I like sleeping better, I like feeling ready for a run or a workout anytime, I like having more energy to play with them. 

But part of why I’m interested in talking about this with you is that the sobriety mindset — in your writing, in Dana’s, in Eleanor’s — feels so familiar. When I refer to myself as a recovering academic, I’m not really joking. I’m still unlearning a certain mindset, a predominant bias toward critique. You’ve helped me think more critically about which debates are really worth my time. Can you say more about how your own relationship to habits and things has changed with sobriety? 

Dee: In my opinion we've struck at the heart of addiction and recovery with that idea of our relationship to things. I'm a person who can naturally overdo anything. Regardless of whether it's fun, exercise, food, sex, reading, fast-driving—really anything that catches my fancy and trips my dopamine switch—and I can be off to the races with a smile on my face. 

I think the sobriety mindset is like any that involves self-discipline. Not based upon punishment, although there is a fair amount of punishment of self in the recovery process. More about maintaining the mindset of spiritual fitness. 

In physical fitness training there is a lot of pain and hard work initially, but once your body acclimates to the new loads and resistance, the outcomes slowly over time become more evident. Same thing holds true in spiritual training or sobriety—time and consistency being the key variables. Sobriety is an opening up and accepting of ourselves—good and bad.

You have a sobriety mindset about the academic teaching life. And yet you still teach in so many ways. I still party and have fun with my friends— I just do it without mind-altering substances. 

In your drinking days, do you remember having a time when you literally felt like you "had to drink" in order to feel better? 

Josh: No, I really don’t. And that’s why I’ve sometimes resisted seeing myself as sober, in the sense that being sober means recovering from addiction. For long stretches I’d only have a drink on the weekend, and for probably five years I did Dry January with friends without any real struggle, as I recall. 

But I’ve been wondering if the need for rules at all — the fact that I was consciously defining boundaries that I wouldn’t stay within automatically — is evidence that I lived somewhere on the dependency spectrum? I sometimes marveled at friends who could keep a bottle of bourbon in their closet for months. If I bought a bottle, it wasn’t like I’d go on a bender or anything, but it would get slowly whittled down each day and be gone in a week. 

I had also slowly adjusted to drinking before dinner, because if I didn’t I’d be up several times a night. So the mere fact of carving out space for the habit probably falls somewhere on the addiction spectrum? Maybe this is part of what you mean about our relationship to things?

Dee: Sure it is. You examined it and then changed it. Just as you examined your relationship to teaching in an academic setting, with all the pieces involved in that puzzle. What does it bring me? What am I fulfilling? Does it serve me anymore? Does this decision have to be for forever, or just for now? 

I still marvel at people who walk away from half-finished drinks or have full bars in their homes. When I had a full bar in my house, it merely meant I didn't have to go to the liquor store as often. 

I'm interested in what you call the "dependency spectrum." Isn't that just the human condition? Most people, with the exception of sociopaths, become dependent upon one thing or another. It could be people (parents/lovers/bosses) or food or busy-ness or achievement or feeling good or feeling bad. I've never seen anything in sober lit or addiction recovery material that speaks to an addiction or dependency spectrum really. There are defined stages of addiction and dependency certainly—​but a lot of that material relates to the long-held theory of addiction as a disease. I personally don't buy into the disease theory, but here it is from Alcohol.org.

Why do you think it's important to you to find a place for yourself on some sort of spectrum?  

Josh: You ask questions like an English teacher! I think the spectrum idea emerged because I was surprised to identify so strongly with the mindset shifts I could see in you and others. I had imagined, somehow, that if someone was shooting heroin with a needle or getting blackout drunk regularly, they were just a fundamentally different person from me, with my two tall boy IPAs per day. But then to hear that person speak about sobriety as a kind of worldview, and to feel a deep echo of that within myself, made me wonder.

Perhaps you’re right that it doesn't matter, but I don’t want to be perceived as claiming sobriety without the mortal struggle that it requires for others. It’s not work for me. It never really was. So it’s possible that I was thinking if I fit somewhere on a spectrum, my sobriety would be more legit. 

What I’ve learned from you, I think, is that habitual or extreme drinking often springs from a deeper root: a void someone is trying to fill or pain they’re trying not to feel. And everyone has something like that. So if we’re talking about our relationship to others, to ourselves, to food, or anything else, we’re getting to a more universal root. And then sobriety is just one form that journey takes? 

You used the term “spiritual fitness” earlier. I don’t think of my own inner life as spiritual in any way, but I do identify with the idea of soulfulness, which I think is a close cousin to the more explicitly religious forms that sobriety takes. This has been a remarkable commonality between us. I often feel that we speak the same language, even though our politics and faith (or lack of it) could hardly be more diametrically opposed. Why do you think that is? 

Dee: I really believe it's a testament to our friendship. I wish more people had it—that they could move past their surface differences--and find some common ground. There's nuance in every issue. Rarely these days can people find the nuance that might establish that common language. 

I've always loved how you think and how your mind processes things. I tend to be more spontaneous and impulsive. You and I have talked about how little time I try to spend thinking about things over which I have no control. This comes directly from my recovery work and the Serenity Prayer.​ I use it to anchor myself when I find myself getting upset about some world event or action by someone else that I really cannot do anything about. As a recovering alcoholic and addict I've been told by others of my kind many times that I don't have the luxury of resentments. Hanging on to slights or ire directed at me doesn't serve my sobriety or my life. In AA we often say, "resentment is like drinking the poison ourselves and expecting the other person to get sick from it." 

My sobriety worldview comes from experience, from self-examination, from honesty, from moving through and past pain. Call it a healing worldview. My path just happens to include substance abuse. Someone else's path might include divorce, loss of a loved one or job, a disease diagnosis. 

Has your worldview changed in recent years—in addition to the choice to not drink regularly? ​

Josh: I love that point about resentment. That rings so true with my experience: learning how to let go of things that don’t serve me, even if I might feel passionately “right” about a certain topic. 

For the past two years I’ve said that it wasn’t me who changed: it was the environment of higher ed. It was the stress of a pandemic, then the hardest life decision I’ve ever made to quit my job and leave my friends behind, then the grieving that followed that pushed long-simmering problems in my marriage to a breaking point. While much of that is true, I hear you challenging me to consider where my own responsibility and volition lies in all this. 

One of the mercies of being broken is that you get to decide how to rebuild yourself. I sought refuge from the rat race and the transactional culture of commerce by becoming a professor. And I think for many of those years I was able, as part of a nonprofit organization, to devote myself to ideals rather than to net revenue. But when economic scarcity creeps in, as it is for many small colleges now, some of the underlying fault lines in the system begin to grate. Now I really don’t know where I fit in a world that wants to measure me according to my skills and my profit potential. Nearly all of the things I care most deeply about are not easy to ‘brand’ or to monetize. So how do I find a way to thrive within systems that often violate my core principles?

I want some impossible things. I want to share the examined life with as many others as possible, to continue examining myself on the other end of that exchange. I want to create beautiful things and help others unlock their own potential for artistic expression. I believe in craft, by which I mean craftsmanship: high aesthetic standards and intellectual depth. 

What you have helped me see is that resentment of systems that don’t share my values, or active critique of those systems, at some point just poisons me. How to tell the difference between principled resistance and poisonous complaint? How to water the things in my life that I most want to grow while serving others meaningfully? These are the questions I still live with every day. It has been surprising to discover that these are questions that recovering alcoholics share, that they lie at the heart of what recovery means.

Dee: It is constant work to accept our own responsibility in things that happen—and it's one of the hardest things I've had to accept about myself. It's so much easier to blame that politician or political party—that system—that pandemic—that person. We all do it. We all must strive to keep our own side of the street clean. It's all that we have control over. 

Peace, Josh. Thanks for the engaging conversation. 

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