Expect those feelings. Expect that life will continue to happen after you quit drinking and it can be/feel really hard at times. It can also be/feel really good!
For me, when I quit drinking for good, I said to myself during The-Hardest-Yet-Most-Important-Conversation-I-Ever-Had-With-Myself. “No matter what happens in the future, good or bad, alcohol is no longer an option for me.”
I was resolute about that on day 1 and feel that same level of resoluteness (probably even more) on day 1,245. But, being resolute doesn’t mean I’m protected from hard feelings and pain. I had to find other ways to discharge and deal with my emotions besides drinking. And drinking, by the way, doesn’t actually discharge and deal with our emotions anyway.
I also think it’s important to understand spiritual bypassing. It’s something I learned in my trauma-informed yoga training. We often want to quickly get past something and wrap it up with nice platitudes “everything happens for a reason.” etc. But, sometimes (often) that’s not the case, and we simply have to go through things and actually feel things in order to move past things.
One of my wise teachers says, first we want to Fix it, then we want to say F*ck it, then we have to surrender and simply Feel it.
For more info on spiritual bypassing, check out Robert Augustus Masters Ph.D., Spiritual Bypassing. He wrote a great article on this topic.
