Ah, singlehood.
Society, and maybe even your grandmother, have frowned upon not having a husband, wife, or kids by the time you’re in your 20s. In the media, we’re constantly hearing that we need a romantic relationship to feel complete. Yet, at the same time, we’re hearing that we “can’t love someone else until we love ourselves.
Where does the truth lie, and how should those in recovery from drugs and alcohol navigate their love lives – especially in early sobriety? Here, we’ve provided a short guide for you that is meant to help navigate your singlehood while also getting clean and sober.
Get To Know YOU
When someone gets sober, chances are they don’t know themselves very well yet. Entering the sober world is much like beginning a process of peeling layers off the layers of ourselves, again and again, to reach the core reasons we used drugs and alcohol to mask our feelings, escape, or take the “edge” off of life.
Perhaps you:
- suffer from anxiety and depression that has long gone untreated
- suppressed the trauma you experienced as a child
- find your identity in your romantic partner, only to be crushed, lost, and hopeless when you and that partner split
No matter what, relationships can be risky to navigate in early sobriety, which is why most veterans in the sober world recommend staying away from romance for a fair amount of time. But, that’s not easy for everyone. It’s crucial in sobriety that you identify your detrimental thoughts and behavioral patterns, and start to understand your past and present self. This way, you’ll know exactly where you must start to get to work.
Take Your Growth Seriously
You didn’t end up in a rehab or a twelve-step program for no reason. Your old thinking delivered you to your current position. To grow, you’ve got to become serious about changing the personality flaws, habits, and thinking that contributed to your addiction. You have to save your own life first before you invest in your own, and taking your growth seriously is one way to provide yourself much-needed self-love.
So, how can you commit to growth? Here are some recommendations:
- Join a 12-step program, like Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, or Codependents Anonymous
- Invest in talk therapy for a safe space to process your feelings
- Develop new hobbies
- Try out meditation
- Identify past traumas
- Set professional, financial, spiritual, and emotional goals for yourself
- Develop a relationship with a power greater than yourself
- Begin to identify unhealthy habits you exhibit in your relationships closely
- Invest in self-care
- Discover new hobbies
- Form new, enriched, and healthy friendships
- Reconnect with family
- Make amends
Take your growth seriously so that others do, too. Protect your time, invest in self-care, and commit to a journey ahead of long-term growth. This way, when the time is right, the right person may come into your life. Relationships can serve as distractions if they’re pursued at the wrong time in someone’s life.
Build Your Self-Confidence
Confidence and self-love is essential to survival.
When people arrive in early sobriety, they’re often battered, beaten down, and downright ashamed of the lives they’ve been living. How, possibly, can anyone in this state of mind enter a relationship with positivity and the stability to handle a romantic relationship healthily? True love and successful relationships involve hard work, forgiveness, and a commitment to continuously shed more layers of the ego (like pride or judgment). When people aren’t confident, they seek validation in others and sometimes and act from a damaged ego. They even tend to hurt others while they, themselves, are hurting.
Invest in your interests
So, you’ve just gotten sober. Things are complicated, and maybe a little bit scary. Your past is close behind, but your future is also well in-reach. This is also a fantastic time for you to rediscover the interests you discarded while you were using drugs and alcohol. For example, maybe you used to love art or to play a musical instrument, but drugs and alcohol quickly became your only source of pleasure. Well, now is the time to pick up that paintbrush again or start strumming on those guitar strings. Investing in your interests and friendships helps enrich your heart and build your confidence, which we touched on above. Singlehood doesn’t have to be boring (or lonely)! Respect yourself, your time, and your hobbies so that someone else will respect them in the future, too.
Codependency Or Love?
Many people in recovery tend to rush into a relationship. Sure, it’s possible to find your soulmate in rehab – but that chance is probably low. We get involved with those who are a mirror of our current state of being. Who we match with is a reflection of where we’re at in our own lives and our own level of self-awareness. So, would you rather wait for the partner your future self would want or the partner you think you need right now? Codependency is tricky. Many addicts and alcoholics tend to mistake codependency for love. But codependency isn’t love – it’s an addiction, and one that must be fought as hard as an addiction to drugs or alcohol. Codependency is based on fear, while love is faith-based. Before you jump into a relationship, become familiar with codependency, and develop a strong understanding of its signs so you can distinguish it from real love in your future.
Look At Your Challenges As Opportunities
Be curious. You’re sober now, which means can’t really avoid or run from your fears or feelings for long before they catch up to you in some way.
So, lean into what is holding you back in your life, whether that’s a fear, unhealthy coping mechanism, or past trauma. Get to know it and become curious about it so that you can understand it, make friends with it, and overcome it. Once we shift our perception of challenges from hardships to opportunities, our entire locus of control will change from one of victimhood to one of the entire internal locus of control.
Decondition Your Mind From Thinking It Needs A Relationship
Being alone doesn’t mean you need to feel lonely. Loneliness is okay to feel, and is inevitably part of the human experience.
Yes, relationships are tempting, but they aren’t necessary. You simply don’t need someone else to validate you or make you feel worthy – the point is to learn to do those things on your own, first, so that your future relationships will be based on choice, not dependence. Listen, no one is telling you to stay single in early sobriety to keep you from finding the love of your life. On the contrary, they’re encouraging you to be patient so that you can, eventually, stumble upon the love you deserve – if you’re open to it.
You are never alone, whether you’re in a relationship or not. Reach out to ASANA today if you’re interested in getting sober and changing your life from the inside, out!
