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 in 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 should consider emotional pain. Hello, courageous Bessie, I'm Kirsten Johnson, and welcome to the sobriety bestie podcast, where we adventure together through emotional sobriety, unapologetically expressing yourself, and building a purpose driven business, because the world needs your wisdom. Each step you take opens up infinite possibilities, because your transformation's not just for you, it's a beacon of light for those you're called to serve. So get on comfy, repeat your mantra, this is courage, and take that next aligned step into creating the business and life of your dreams. I'll be your guide. The invitation is to drop the word pain from your vocabulary. There is a lot of emotions that arise in us, 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 expressing ourselves and being vulnerable and letting people get to know us, whether it's on the internet through a business or just in our personal relationships. Also a lot of us have a lot of fears with emotional pain, the word for, you know, I don't want to say pain so much because it 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 on 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 we're broke in it. We might 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 inversion 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 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 change our relationship with emotions, especially the emotions 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 as 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 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 see sensations, I'm talking literally about the feelings, the emotions, the so-called emotional pain, right? So generally, a lot of my own personal experience, but also a lot of people that I've worked with since getting sober in 2009 and started 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 they come into my work, they come into my world, they're 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-enough-ness or unlove-ability. 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 in a phobic way where I would do anything to not feel them. So my relationship with my feelings before I got sober was avoidance, distracting, numb, right alcohol, we'll 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 for their feelings or you 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 is what it is. So if you're feeling a lot of feelings, 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 no anxiety in a new way. I was getting to know joy. I remember like six months over, 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 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 hot. 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? 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 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. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
