After Getting Sober, I Still Thought I “Deserved” a Drink
By: Benya Clark
Tags: Addiction, Mental Health, Self Improvement, Sobriety, Alcoholism

After Getting Sober, I Still Thought I “Deserved” a Drink

I struggled to stop thinking of alcohol as a reward.

Before getting sober, I thought of alcohol as a reward. When I got through a rough day at work or finished a hard project, I told myself that I “deserved” a drink.

It didn’t matter if I was in a good mood or a bad one. I used alcohol to celebrate my successes and to lessen the sting of my failures.

I drank far too much and far too often. I’d go to sleep drunk nearly every night. I had long crossed the line into excessive drinking. However, I downplayed the extent of my addiction by telling myself that the alcohol was a reward for all of my hard work.

When I was in my early twenties, working at a warehouse, I spent my days carrying around heavy boxes. I was physically exhausted at the end of each day. I would come home tired, feeling like I had earned the right to sink into my couch with a beer in my hand.

In my mid-twenties, I left warehousing for law school. I could have used the transition as an opportunity to quit drinking. I was no longer wearing my body out each day, so my excuse for drinking should have disappeared.

Instead, the excuse simply transformed. Instead of coming home physically exhausted, I’d come home mentally exhausted. Again, I fell into a pattern of telling myself that I “deserved” a drink. I thought my hard work during the day had earned me the right to be an alcoholic at night.

Getting Sober

When I finally quit drinking, it was hard to break the mindset that alcohol was a reward. I had graduated from law school and was working as a lawyer at that point. My life was just as stressful as ever.

My job was at a public defender’s office. It was work that I believed in, but it was incredibly difficult, low-paid, and under-appreciated. More than ever, I felt like I “deserved” the right to drink at night.

Despite this, another part of me wanted to quit drinking incredibly badly. I couldn’t deny how much alcohol had interfered with my life over the years, and I knew that the longer my addiction wore on, the worse things would get.

This split in my thinking— something which most recovering addicts experience — made getting sober incredibly difficult. I went back and forth between wanting to quit and wanting to go back to drinking. The trouble was that letting the “go back to drinking” side win for even a moment could derail my entire sobriety. (In fact, this happened many times before I quit drinking for good.)

My mind played a lot of tricks on me while I tried to get sober. I came up with all kinds of ways to convince myself that I needed another drink. During these early days, I still thought of alcohol as a reward. Every time something good happened, I’d tell myself I should break my sobriety for just one night to celebrate. Every time something bad happened, I’d tell myself I should have a drink to get over it.

The most ridiculous excuse that I ever came up with was that I should have a drink as a reward for lasting so long without one. After a week without any beer, I thought I deserved to have “just one.” Quitting drinking had been an incredibly hard struggle, so I thought that I earned a drink for making such a hard effort.

This thinking is laughably ridiculous in retrospect, but it felt completely logical at the time. Why not reward sobriety with a drink? I had spent the past ten years rewarding everything else with it.

Fortunately, the longer that I stayed sober, the fewer of these thoughts that I had. Getting some distance from my daily drinking habit helped me to think more clearly and logically, and to recognize the absurdity of treating alcohol as a reward.

Alcohol was an incredibly destructive force in my life. It damaged my mental and physical healthy, increased my anxiety and depression, and got in the way of my social life. It seems crazy to me now that I ever thought submitting myself to this pain could have been a “reward” for anything.

These days, when I have a hard day, I no longer reward myself for getting through it with alcohol. I find healthy ways to unwind instead, like exercising, reading a book, or cooking something nice. These help me feel better without ruining my life the way alcohol did.

When I first quit drinking, it felt like I might never break the mindset that I “deserved” alcohol. Fortunately, with time and effort, it was possible to see alcohol for what it really was: not a reward, but a punishment.