The American calendar year is riddled with holidays both big and small that come with a lot of drinking. Whether we have a day off work or an entire cultural celebration, we tend to go overboard with the party compensation. Any reason is a good reason to get dressed up, throw a theme party, watch major corporate companies hold a sale, and also for us to get unnecessarily drunk. Few commercialized and co-opted holiday celebrations create intoxication like St. Patrick’s Day. A vast majority of the people who go out of their way to celebrate St. Patty’s don’t have a single drop of Irish blood in their bones. Yet somehow, the day of Irish Blessing has become a country-wide celebration, full of corned beef hash, green beer, and outrageous parties.
One of the truths we come to face as men in recovery from alcoholism is that our drinking needed no celebration or cause. If we find ourselves feeling uncomfortable coming up on a holiday cerebration, we can remind ourselves that the holiday is just another day and at the end of our alcoholic career, we didn’t need any kind of special day to make it a day that we drank. Despite our best attempts at convincing ourselves, we can still face the most difficult part of being sober on a “drinking holiday”: the fear of missing out.
Part of the trick of our alcoholic thinking is thinking that we can drink normally like other people. Though we are well aware of the fact that we haven’t drank “normally” in many years, there is a part of our addicted brain which would like to convince us that we could- even at the level of normal belligerence which takes place on days like St. Patrick’s Day. The way that our brain has been reprogrammed by alcoholism tries to make us believe that there is some kind of pleasure awaiting us at the bottom of a few green drinks, among the green-wearing people, in a green-themed party. Nothing bad would happen to us, our mind would have us believe, and all of those people are having so much fun.
We don’t have to fall for the thoughts happening in our mind if we have fully accepted that for us, as alcoholic men in recovery, there is no more having fun with drinking. What we do have is our sobriety and our recovery, which we are learning to have more fun in every singe day.
Tree House Recovery of Orange County, California is a premier men’s addiction treatment facility that uses eight different modalities to help our men become the best versions of themselves they can be. We teach our men that every day of their journey is something to celebrate, and that recovery isn’t a sprint– it’s a marathon. By showing our men how to celebrate each day’s victories, we show them that self love isn’t about what we have or haven’t done. It’s about getting a little closer to where we want to be. To get started with Tree House Recovery, call us today at (503) 850-2474
