I’ve been sober a little over 2 years now and I am having more issues than when I was drinking! Obviously that was a coping mechanism so a little is to expected but I would have thought that after 2 years I would have settled into my new normal. Has anyone experienced a breakthrough or more mental clarity after the initial 2 years?
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Yes. Its definately a likely possibility, who claims your former self now?
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Are whatever the issues are being addressed somehow? That can help with clarity. Sobriety removes the consequences that addiction was causing for you but everything else stays the same…
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Being sober and clean (3.5 years now) has given me the possibility to embark on psychotherapy and address the issues that made me an addict in the first place. Slow progress and I’m not done with that. Progress nonetheless. My life’s not easier no. But much better yes.
And BTW, the former self is gone IMO. That person doesn’t exist no more. We’re building ourselves a new one in Recovery. Welcome to Talking Sober Joe!
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This is just my opinion…i see it like this…our former self is in the past… why would you want to be your former self because that one for whatever reason got onto the addiction path… sure we retain aspects of ourselves but we all change and adapt as we go through life… you learn lessons from the past and map out a new you in sobriety
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Very well put.
Booze isn’t medicine. It will only cause more problems. So stopping booze means you’ve stopped digging your hole deeper.
However, you still gotta climb out of where you are (typically) and some holes are deeper and harder to get out of than others.
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I don’t want to reclaim my former self. I want to understand her, forgive her, and move past her. She’s the one who had bad coping skills and made some choices that still hurt my heart in memories. I think the way you reclaim anything is by sorting through your past in a way that makes your present self reclaim confidence and self knowledge that strengthens you to move forward past the stuff you never want to reclaim.
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You know how they say that every seven years your tongue has all new taste buds? (I just googled that and apparently they actually change every two weeks!) That’s the way I feel the human experience works. Every day you hear something, see something, speak to someone, have a feeling or experience and a little bit of you changes. You’re always a little bit new every day, and to me that’s kind of exciting because new things are fun. I don’t think there’s a way to go back but there is an inherent promise that things can and may be even better than before with new knowledge and experience. To really stretch the metaphor, I guess I’d say I wouldn’t worry too much about going back because you’re still a tongue, just a bit different each day than you were the day before.
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First off, welcome!! And congratulations on your 2 years!!!
For myself, I drank my entire teen thru adult life…40+ years…so for me, there was no former self to reclaim. I needed to work on building a new self, free from abusing drugs and alcohol and looking for escape.
Yes, this definitely happened with me. While my first year and a half or so of sobriety were spent seriously focused on just being sober and making it through each day…and cleaning / clearing my cells, emotions and mental space…after that I could feel all sorts of ‘stuff’ percolating up. And that is the period when I shifted from needing to be laser focused on sobriety and became focused on recovery.
Recovery being working thru the why’s of my using and escape and past and working on the healing journey that is my life.
Recovery can look different for different people…movement therapy, talk therapy, writing, meetings, psychological or psychiatric therapy, sound therapy, groups, spiritual work, reading…there are so many ways to discover who we are, why we are, where we go from here. 
And yes, until I started that work, I could feel a need or uneasiness within…spirit (intuition, HP, self, xyz) perhaps calling to me to do the work.
There was and is a vast world to discover and explore thru sobriety and recovery. Not just the physical world we move thru in sobriety and recovery, but our interior world. Seeking to understand, forgive and love our former self…and birth our new self…free from the chains that bound us in addiction.
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