Episode 274: Sober With Purpose Beyond Belief Sobriety

Every Tuesday at 7:00 PM Central, we have a meeting for listeners of the podcast, that you are free to join anytime. Typically, we’ll have a guest from a previous episode speak or we’ll play a clip from one of our episodes to use as a basis of conversation. This week, I needed to get an episode published and I was having a hard time.  So, I asked the group if they would mind if I used the meeting to record an episode. They agreed and the result is what you are about to hear.

Sober with Purpose

A few weeks ago, I posted episode 270 “What is Recovery”, based on a pamphlet published by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), called “SAMHSA’s Working Definition of Recovery.” In that pamphlet SAMHSA defined recovery as “a process of change through which individuals improve their health and wellness, live a self-directed life, and strive to reach their full potential.” The pamphlet went on to list four major dimensions that support recovery: Health, home, purpose, and community; as well as ten principles of recovery. I liked the pamphlet so much, that I thought I would record episodes to cover each of the four dimensions and ten principles. So, for this episode, I will be talking about the dimension of purpose. We’ll look at what purpose is, how to go about finding it, and why it supports recovery.

What is purpose?

Purpose is my reason for being, why I get up in the morning, what motivates me to learn and grow, and the passion that makes life worth living. There isn’t any one thing that gives me purpose, either. There are many things that bring meaning to my life and motivate me to live to my fullest potential. This is true with my life overall as well as with my sobriety.

I find meaning by doing what’s important to me based on my values. This gives me a sense of purpose and it’s a freedom I didn’t enjoy while drinking. During that time, I lived from one crisis to the next. I was alive but not really living. There was no purpose, no intention to how I lived. There was no direction in my life.

Sober, if I had any purpose at all, it was this vague idea that life could be better, and self-improvement seemed to be my purpose in recovery. It was important to me to participate in recovery meetings, and to get some stability and joy in my life. This was pretty much the extent of my purpose during the first ten years of my sobriety.

But when I stop to think about it now. I didn’t have any specific goals and I wasn’t trying to reclaim any of my dreams that I lost to drinking. Before my drinking completely took over, I had this vision of how my life would play out. Education was important to me, so I assumed that I would go to college and get a degree. I wanted to have children, so I thought after college, I would get a job, marry, buy a house. I guess it was the white picket fence American dream that I gave up on when my life got crazy.

I carried a lot of guilt and shame because of my alcoholism. When I stopped drinking, I had no idea who I was. I have this memory of sitting in a jail cell waiting for my day before the judge. As I sat there, I had a thought of what I wanted out of life. All, I wanted was to be free. I saw myself getting a job cleaning offices, living in a studio apartment, and going to AA meetings. That was honestly the best that I could do.

I think that because of all the failures I experienced during my drinking years, I figured that I too was a failure. I was ready to settle for something less. I have a friend who reminds me from time to time about a conversation he had with me when he first started out in AA. I was there for a year, and he asked me how I was doing. I said something like “I’m miserable, but I’m staying out of jail and that’s all I care about.” We laugh about that now, but that was my mindset.

Then, in my tenth year of sobriety, my father died unexpectedly and that was the shock I needed to begin to take a seriou...