Addiction is a feelings phobia?

Sobriety Bestie Blog/Emotional Sobriety/Addiction is a feelings phobia?

Most of us are super scared of our feelings by the time we get sober. And then we are faced in sobriety with what can feel like an emotional rollercoaster.

A couple years into my sobriety, when I was "thawing out" emotionally, I realized that I was legit almost phobic of some of my feelings. A lot of my students have felt the same way. We've been afraid of our guilt, shame, anger, boredom and even feared fear itself!

And so, getting sober can feel like, welcome to your f*cking feelings. No booze to numb them, no where to hide, just feels (even the scary ones) popping up left and right. And so let's dive in to a little emotional sobriety and what it can be like if we find that we're afraid of our feels.

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If you want to get and stay sober, if you want to start and build and grow an online business, if you want to live your dreams, it's going to be important to have a new relationship with what maybe you would consider emotional pain.

The invitation is to drop the word pain from your vocabulary. There is a lot of emotions that arise as. Especially as we are in sobriety and getting sober and especially the first several years of sobriety, but also as we start businesses and put ourselves out there and go into public speaking and sharing a message and, um, expressing ourselves and being vulnerable and letting people get to know us, whether it's on the internet through business or just in our personal relationships.

Also a lot of us have a lot of fears pain, the word for, you know, I don't want to say pain so much because let's just drop the word pain. Right. But a lot of us have a lot of fears around the emotions that we feel inside.

Like we're afraid that we might relapse if we feel a certain sort of way or have emotional pain, or if it's too much for us, or we might become a burden to the people around us. If we are in it, or we might not like who we find when we go in the personal development journey when we start looking through our past or looking inside of ourselves through meditation contemplation, journaling, and all the personal development work that we might not like who we find a lot of us secretly fear that we're bad, where there's something wrong with us that were broken it, we might fall into.

Find that we are as bad as we secretly have thought we were. It's like a self-loathing thing. You know, we might not know that we have this self-hatred looming inside us, or we might secretly fear it or be, have an aversion towards discovering our true self and finding out who we are and why the fuck we're here.

I know for me, when I got sober, I wanted to find out who I am. I went through a whole existential crisis. I didn't know who I was without alcohol. Alcohol was my hobby. It was what I did. I didn't have hobbies without drinking. You know, I got, I got to discover who I am. I got to discover why I'm here. I got to figure out what I felt like my purpose was and move towards the work I felt called to do.

And so a huge, huge thing to do is to, um, change our relationship with emotions, especially the motions that we might consider negative or difficult or hard or bad or unwanted or unpreferred. The way that I really look at it and the invitation for you is to consider looking at it as there's, there's sensations that we prefer and sensations that we don't prefer.

And the emotional pain would be fall under the category of sensations that we don't prefer. And we can choose how we relate to the sensations we don't prefer. We can choose to actually be Become friends with them to become curious of them, to allow them, to expect them, to accept them, to go into and appreciate and cultivate a positive and a loving relationship with the sensations that we don't prefer.

When I say sensations, I'm talking literally about the feelings, the emotions, the so called emotional pain, right? So generally a lot of my. My own personal experience, but also a lot of people that I've worked with since getting sober in 2009 and starting my business in 2012 is we are afraid of what we feel inside.

We're afraid of our feelings. That's kind of how people, when I, they come into my work, they come into my world, they're afraid. I was afraid of their feelings, whether they directly know it or not. I was afraid of my feelings. It's almost like we have feeling phobias. I was afraid of my anxiety. I was afraid of my anger.

I was afraid of my guilt and my shame and my doubt and insecurities and feelings of not enoughness or unlovability. And so I had a fear of a lot of these. I mean, I wasn't afraid of the good feelings, right? There were some feelings I did like, but I was afraid of a lot of my feelings, almost Phobic way where I would do anything to not feel them.

So my relationship with my feelings before I got sober was of avoidance, distracting, numb, right? Alcohol will calm the feelings down, but even the good feelings like, so maybe this is you. It's like when you feel bad, you drink, when you feel good, you drink, when you have a feeling you drink. Right. And so we get sober and it's like, we have this new relationship with our feelings or your start a business.

And all the feelings come. There's a lot of feelings in entrepreneurship. Do you know what I mean? There's a lot of feelings in sobriety. It's kind of welcome to your fucking feelings. That's the journey that, that, that is what it is. So if you're feeling a lot of feelings, you're on, you're on the right track.

That's the adventure that we're on here together in sobriety and in entrepreneurship, especially if you're a sober entrepreneur, it really is like, welcome to your fucking feelings. And so for me, it's become like. In the beginning, it was like a journey of one at a time. I was like getting to know, like air quotes, like getting to know my feelings, like I was getting to know anxiety in a new way.

I was getting to know joy. I remember like six months sober, I was walking down the street in San Francisco and all of a sudden I felt joy. And I had this thought, I was like, wait a minute, what is, what is this? What's this feeling inside my body here? Is this, is this what they call joy? Like, I feel like this must be joy because it had been so long since I had felt like genuine joy.

And by six months sober, a lot of my life had changed. Like, things were getting good. They were not great. I was still having like Way too much anxiety. I still couldn't really think straight and I wasn't really employable and I had a lot of problems, right? But my life was so much better at six months sober than it had been six months earlier.

I had progressed so much and maybe that's where you're at right now. You're not exactly where you want to be in your life, but you've come so fucking far. Look how far you've come. Look where you were six months ago, six years ago. You have come so far. You have overcome so much. You really have, you know, and, um, maybe there's more to go.

It's so much easier on our mindset. If we really look at how far we've come, then how far we haven't gone yet. Yes, we have goals that we're moving towards. And yes, we've also come really far and how we think about things and how we see things in the perspectives that we choose are going to affect our feelings, our thoughts, our actions, our beliefs.



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Hi, I'm Bestie Kirsten

Founder of Sobriety Bestie and Creator of the courageous community Bestie Club, here to guide you on a  journey to freedom and self empowerment.

Do you want the secret to feeling comfy, confident and courageous in sober skin? Get the free mini course!

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