The Relief of Grief
How I use grief as a recovery tool
A sober curious friend asked me the other day if there is any one thing I credit as being the thing that got me sober.
My answer: grief. Grief scared me into drinking more. Drinking more made me scared of myself.
Like many, for me 2020 was the year the wheels came off. I look back now and can see how much collective grief we were all ingesting. Heartache was the common contagion. Sorrow and fear spread like wildfire. We were all forced to grieve the way things were, forced into a new normal that felt anything but.
My father died in March of that year. My family waked him the same week the world shut down. Looking back, I can see how losing him was the launch pad for my sobriety. A gift I was able to dig out of the rubble. A diamond in the rough. As I was walking through those early days of sobriety, I realized the stages of recovery and grief interconnect. They mirror one another.
You bargain, you deny. Until you succumb to the pain.
What I’ve learned is that there is no time stamp on grief.
There is no time stamp on recovery.
You weave and grieve.
Whether macro or micro, there is no such thing as one-size-fits-all loss. We are not in the Pain Olympics. Our hearts break and mend over and over and mulch together to make up a life.
You ride the waves and sometimes get washed ashore.
You may have lost your loved one 15 years ago or 15 days ago, it doesn’t matter. Today may be the day that loss brings you to your knees.
Recovery is the same way. I can look back at my words from journal entries at month 6 or month 46, and I’m on sturdier ground 6 months in than at 46 months.
The ground will open, close, hold you, drop you, shake and then feel sturdy over and over again. It’s not linear. There isn’t a pattern.
Yet, there is a way.
And that way is surrender. To let it rip through you.
Because what you resist persists.
Because with grief comes growth.
And change.
And yet.
This is the kind of change where despite remarkable breakthroughs and stretching into new awareness, there is no growth chart.
No measuring stick to firmly plant in the ground as recognition that you made it. You went through it and came out okay. Healed.
Just like we all grieve at our own pace, those of us with addiction recover at our own pace. Two steps forward. One step back. Rinse repeat.
There is no map to follow. No direct route. The GPS is you. Your own navigational system will guide you through it. Even if, especially if, you take detours.
What I find fascinating is how uncomfortable it makes (most) people to talk about this stuff. The elephant in the room. The “sending my condolences, thoughts, and prayers” sticker statements that never quite stick to the heart.
People don’t know what to say to someone who is deep in grief.
People don’t know what to say to someone who is deep in addiction.
People don’t know what to say to someone who is deep in depression. Deep in an eating disorder or deep in a divorce.
Especially if that someone is doing a great job of hiding it. Especially if that someone is highly functioning, drinking, or grieving right beside you.
I had no idea how much of my recovery work would be blanketed with grief. And not just the traditional kind. Not just the obvious kind (mourning the death of a loved one).
What took me by surprise was how I would be continually rolling in the deep mourning of my former self. I had to replace her with a woman who reached for different things in order to self-soothe. I had to relearn how to cope. How to sit in the everyday pain unarmored.
Sobriety reshaped my relationship with everything. My work, my marriage, my kids, my friendships. Myself. I had to put all of those things under the microscope of my mind’s eye if I was really going to live in integrity.
Grief is sprinkled throughout the chapters of my recovery story. As I rewrite how I show up on the page of my life, I’ve had to come face-to-face with the parts of myself that prematurely died. The parts I cut off and stopped feeding. The pieces of myself that were crystallized together by shame. The shapes that took root in childhood, that grew like gnarly roots in my psyche. When the thorns of them poked at me, I would deflect and distract. Overdrink and overwork. Restrict or refuse to look. I leaned heavily into compulsions to shop and scroll rather than patrol my actual feelings.
I still dissociate and numb, I am only human. The difference is, I see it sooner now.
I realize now that none of this makes me unique. Or flawed. It simply means that I am paying attention to the water that many, many of us are swimming in.
We live in a world that values the climb, not the drop. We are expected to rise, not settle. Therefore, most of us don’t honor our pain when it tells us to downshift because of grief or depression or addiction. Descent is not championed or endorsed. So, the ones who hurt get stuck in the molasses of remorse. While the world continues to rehearse. What is it we are supposed to say? It gets so uncomfortable, so we look away.
The etymology of the word “grief” goes back to the Latin word gravare, meaning “make heavy; cause grief,” from gravis, meaning “weighty”—a close relative to the words “grave” and “gravity.”
This might explain why so many of us put it down too soon, before we’ve metabolized it. We’re conditioned not to put our grief on display, so we pack it away, out of sight—an internal poundage that we never shed. The weight of it can feel unbearable, so we place it down with blinders on, without truly unpacking it. We just drop it to the ground, step over it, and “get on with it.”
The thing is, there is also grace in grief. If you wait for it. If you hold it long enough.
For most who identify as problematic drinkers, it was never about the alcohol. The alcohol wasn’t the problem. Alcohol was the answer to the problems that made us reach for the alcohol in the first place. We anesthetize to “get on with it.” Numb it rather than name it.
Alcohol used to be my salve. It was what I thought I needed to find relief. Relief from the pain and the hard. Big and little. Now that I no longer use it as a crutch, I find that letting myself fall when life feels too heavy has evolved into a strange comfort. Because the ground can hold me. It doesn’t swallow me.
Turns out grief is the release. The button to push when you need to mitigate and investigate. When I realized I could trust my grief, it ended up filling that void I was always trying to fill with alcohol. I never knew grief could be a release valve. Grief is a relief.
By letting myself access the hard and heavy tears, the joyful ones come more easily. Grief has taught me to tend to this moment now, not to plug it, but instead to place it front and center.
The beauty in doing this is now I have greater access to joy. I never knew how close sorrow danced with joy. They share the floor most days.
Tears of joy. Tears of pain. They are all holy.
I will continue to let them fall, hold the mess and the best of it, and know that they make up all of me.
Now you.
We’d love for you to share in the comments:
How has grief played a role in your own recovery journey?
Have you noticed any moments where grief and recovery seemed to overlap for you, making one feel like the key to the other?
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Thank you for this beautiful share, Allison. I’ve experienced deep anticipatory grief for as long as I can remember - all the way back to childhood, when I grieved knowing that childhood would someday end. In many ways, that remains the greatest loss of my life, and I’ve been trying to numb that loss ever since. No longer with alcohol, thankfully, but still with overwork and other distractions. More generally, I think there’s such a profound disconnect in our culture - from grief, from death, and from our very humanness - how to be with the whole of it and with the whole of ourselves.
Ah, yes. I feared losing the grief when I got sober, my final connection to my sister and my best friend, but it actually deepened and grew until it was nearly unbearable but I bore without the numbing. Love how you describe this and your insights into the inability of most others to understand. Forty years later I still grieve adding parents etc but my life is a gift.