top of page

The Kitchen Sink: A Different Way to Look at Sobriety

Writer's picture: Beth BirdwellBeth Birdwell


A phrase I use often when trying to solve a problem is: "Throw all the things at the thing", meaning: try everything. I found this sentiment mimicked in a book I recently listened to on drinking and alcoholism, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in A Culture Obssesed with Alcohol. She says: “Throw the kitchen sink at it. Do whatever it takes.”

 

It is a truly unique perspective on drinking and offers an entirely new framework for understanding drinking and alcohol addiction in our culture. Her approach is framed within the context of our culture, marketing of alcohol, and the need for a less archaic path to sobriety that is geared toward women, marginalized populations, and focuses on empowering yourself.

 

There is nothing trite or shallow in this book, and although there are the requisite recommendations of meditation, yoga and journaling, they are all part of a much deeper, therapeutic intervention and framework for drinking and addiction.

 

There is a plethora of scientific information included on what happens in the brain when we drink, what happens to the body when we drink, and what our culture’s marketing teaches us about drinking. But she also spends a great deal of time talking about the voids and “holes” that people use alcohol to fill, instead of filling them with what will heal them: numbing instead of working to heal.

 

This last part is probably what I like so much about the content: heal the voids. It's not just about abstaining, although that is necessary as well. It is about HARD work. And CONSTANT work. It is not that if you start journaling you will suddenly be OK with not drinking. It is not that if you go to yoga you will suddenly feel peaceful and no longer want to drink. It is an all-encompassing way of rebuilding your life so that you don’t want or need to numb out of it. And like the “kitchen sink” analogy, this includes tackling trauma with a therapist, regular meditation and yoga, journaling, reading, getting new hobbies, creating morning and evening rituals that, with time, will take the place of the drinking rituals. It is about getting better nutrition, restful sleep, mothering yourself (don’t roll your eyes too hard :)), sitting in your emotions and knowing they will actually pass. It is about letting yourself hurt because it’s normal to hurt. It is about seeking out many forms of healing like energy work, massage, acupuncture…anything you think might help. Build yourself up, don’t break yourself down. Throw all the things at the thing.

 

On the authors Instagram, I found a post that echoes this sentiment of doing the hard work over and over. It’s intense but poignant:

 

Last night someone asked me if there was a tool that helps manage the hard first few days of not drinking. There is a tool, and the tool is to burn.The tool is to throw yourself into the fire of the absolute suffering you encounter when you break old habits, drop old terrible toxic patterns, decide to grow beyond what you’ve settled for.We do not know how to suffer. We are padded things who cannot stand to be with pain, with loss, with heartbreak, with craving. We do not need another thing to pad it. We need to learn how to be with ourselves through the torture that is growth.That is all breaking addictions really is. It is finally confronting your shit, confronting the things that have you by the ankles, finally saying absolutely not one more day, finally making the choice for ourselves. And when we do that, when we say “no more” and remove it, we can try and make it soft, easy, but that misses the point, b/c the point IS the burn. The point is to approach the edge of what we think we cannot handle, the point where we think we will absolutely break, and stay there, in it, on the dot. B/c, babies, that is the only place change can happen. Pema said: “Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.” If we really want to show up, if we really want to live, if we’re serious about growth and love, we have to throw who we think we are onto the fire, again and again. It hurts b/c it’s supposed to hurt. That is the design. We either cling to our shit and live in this forever dull ache, this low-grade game, or we expose ourselves to suffering and have it all.

 

 

 

 

Comentarios


BWellTherapy | Beth Birdwell, LPC-A | Supervisor Carissa Cano, LPC-S

bottom of page