How have your standards changed?
In this episode, we talk with Denge, Mary, and Michal about our standards and expectations in recovery. As we move further along in our recovery journeys, we often find that our standards change – as they should. Our self worth increases, and we realize we are no longer willing to settle for what we used to. So we ask the question, “How have your standards changed in sobriety?”
We discover several ways our expectations change:
-eating healthier, taking care of ourselves both mentally and physically
-setting, communicating, and enforcing boundaries and expectations with others
-boundaries at work, with friends, and with children and spouses
-how we value and use our time and energy
-standards in friendships
We teach others how to treat us, and now that our standards have changed, we may have to re-teach them.
Denge, Michal, and Mary are all friends we’ve made in the I Am Sober community. You can find out more about the I Am Sober app at iamsober.com
Join the conversation!
throughtheglassrecovery@gmail.com
Instagram – @through_the_glass_recovery
Transcript
Julie: We are here tonight with our friends Denge, Michal, and Mary. Thank you guys so much for being on the show with us.
All: Thank you for having us
Julie: So… how have your standards changed in sobriety, and what are you no longer willing to settle for?
Michal: You wanna go, Denge? Go for it!
Denge: Nah, you go first!
Michal: (laughs) I love the question. I actually had to reflect on it a little bit because you don’t necessarily think about the changes that come naturally with sobriety. So there’s things like, and this is probably a little further down the road, but healthier eating and healthier habits. These things start to click in tandem with it when you realize that you’re not poisoning your body anymore. And that’s literally what you were doing for years. So that’s been a piece for me, I think just overall getting healthier. Particularly where mental health is concerned. Being much more opening to therapy, counseling, learning who I am underneath all that. Recognizing that I did not develop good emotional coping skills, or how to deal with those. Because I started drinking really young, I started drinking in my teens. And so any of that emotional development that should have happened during those year didn’t. My only coping mechanism was drinking it away and numbing it out. And so I get into my 30’s and my 40’s and I don’t know how to deal with uncomfortable emotions. So that’s a big area of focus for me right now, is how to develop better coping mechanisms where those uncomfortable emotions are concerned.
Julie: It’s almost like you’re finally worth it, too. You realize you’re finally worth it, and you start putting more effort into the eating and the taking care of yourself and the growing and… yeah, that’s a really good point.
Denge: Yeah. I think for me that also stands out is the fact that we start this journey off not realizing all these unexpected things that are going to start popping up in your life. Good things, but they are unexpected, because you have no idea the doors sobriety opens up for you. Like yes, taking care of your self is one of the things I’d have never though, Hey, this is really important to me, to start taking care of myself. And then boundaries, for example. Like, all of a sudden, I never thought of myself as a person who has to set boundaries. But I have become a person who sets boundaries and I don’t want… You know, I set boundaries and I set expectations for myself and for others. That’s something I never used to do. Setting those boundaries for family members and letting them now what you’re willing to do and what you’re not willing to do. Same thing with at work, it’s something that I value these days. It’s a priority for me.
Michal: I love that you touched on expectations, because that’s been a hard one for me, and I have drowned myself at work over the last couple of years without setting that expectation for them. I have worked myself in the ground and worked extra hours. I was always the person who preached work/life balance. I still preach it to our new hires and my team. But I don’t take that advice for myself. Until it got to breakdown point, where I had to take time off and I had to confront my boss on it because I couldn’t continue to function like that. So that’s a wonderful one.
Steve: I think that just relationships in general. Relationships with work, relationships with people – you talk about family members, you talk about a spouse. Sometimes when I talk about this, I say ‘The price of admission has increased.’ As in, before, I accepted anything. I accepted being walked on, it was basically whatever I got for attention, I guess it was good, because I got something. Because that was kind of good enough, and I never felt good enough. So I guess I got some sort of attention, even if it was negative attention. And I’ve come to realize that none of that is healthy. And without setting the boundaries, and without “Here is what I need”… I had to figure that out, too. I’m still figuring it out. It’s growth, but you’re not allowed to spend my time the way you used. You’re not allowed to determine is more or less valuable than yours. We are equals now. Before, I never looked at everyone as equal. You’re up here, so you’re more valuable. Everyone’s time was more valuable than mine, lets’ be honest. Time is an amazing currency, when you look at it. All of our time is just as valuable. And I never treated it that way before. I get to treat my time with respect now, and that has allowed me to treat your time with that same respect. And once I realized that, boundaries come into play, everything plays into and around that. That’s how I like to look at. Kind of like what Denge said, these are my expectations. It’s okay if you don’t meet them. This is the boundary though, and this is what happens if that doesn’t happen. You don’t get to treat me like a doormat anymore.
Julie: We all end up gaining self worth when you quit drinking and you start taking care of yourself. I think that’s something that I see in so many people when they quit drinking and they start doing all of the work of sobriety. Self worth increases. So many of us had virtually no self worth when we were just drinking away our lives. And for me, I value my time for the first time maybe ever. And I can look at… and this goes kind of along with boundaries too… I can look at situations, I can look at relationships, I can look at obligations that I have chosen to take on or not, and it’s easy to say now, does this deserve my time and energy? And I can look at it from a really healthy place now. I don’t need to do anything. I don’t need to spend time with people now just to feel good about myself. I don’t need anybody’s validation anymore. I can decide if my time and energy actually needs to be spent somewhere. And I can make much healthier decisions based on that. And then with boundaries too, I used to occasionally, vaguely try to set boundaries. I was never good at it. But if someone completely ignored and walked right across that boundary. I’d just let them. There was no way I was going to try to stand up for myself. And now I’m just not longer willing to let people ignore boundaries that I set. I’m gonna stand up for myself. And that’s definitely new for me.
Mary: I really relate to what you’re saying there Julie. I’ve always been a confrontational person. I always thought I was good at setting boundaries, but I was never actually good at enforcing them. It’s the same thing, if somebody went and challenged one of my boundaries, I would just roll over and let them do it. That’s something I’m really trying to practice at work a lot. I tend to take on way too much and I’m under an unmanageable amount of stress. So I’m starting to make boundaries of, this is what I can do, this is what I can do in a certain amount of time, and I can only do one thing at a time. That’s not something I ever said in my life before when I was drinking. But that’s my new motto. I say it all the time – I can only do one thing. And yeah, asking people to actually respect that, the fact that I can’t be juggling a million things at once. It’s amazing seeing, once you set that standard and people start respecting it.
Michal: Definitely. This is kind of a squirrel, off-shoot. But the time thing. It made me think, when you’re in early recovery and you’re just starting, how uncomfortable that extra time can be. You know? Because you come to value it over time, but in the beginning, like a weekend was daunting. It was scary! You had no idea what to do with that time, because you were used to spending it drinking. I think it’s interesting to even note the shift in getting that shift. As we start to heal as people, that time becomes valuable again.
Denge: I’m agreeing with everything that everyone is saying. The thing about time… when I used to drink, it just helped me do a lot of things that I didn’t want to do. That’s one thing I realized is that it pushed me and helped me to get through situations I didn’t necessarily want to be in. And now I’ve realized I was forcing myself to be in these situations I didn’t want to be in. So why bother being in them anymore? Now I’m just… again, setting those boundaries. I’m like, no, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to spend my entire weekend just doing things I don’t necessarily want to do. I value my time so much more now. There’s always these things – we’ve got to do this, we’ve got to do that. No, we don’t have to do anything. Sometimes that comes as a shock to some people. But I think it’s all for the better that we… as long as you’re happy with the decisions you’re making, and you’re content with what you’re doing with your time, then I think other people have just got to learn to settle with that.
Julie: I think that’s something, too, that – we teach people how to treat us. And if we’ve been teaching the people around us to walk all over us for the last ten or fifteen years, and then suddenly we’re like, hey, here’s a boundary, they’re gonna completely ignore it and walk right over it. And I know so often we’re like, but I just set a boundary! And it takes awhile to teach all of these people, to re-teach them how we’re going to be treated now. It takes a lot of patience from us, too. And that’s with kids and spouses and friends and everybody. They’re used to use being a certain way. So it comes as a huge shock when we suddenly say like, no I’m not going to spend my weekend doing whatever it is you want to do. Then you stand by it – it’s hard for them. And I think sometimes we just have to be patient and remind ourselves that they’re not used to this, and then it takes effort on our part to teach them what life is going to be like now.
Steve: For sure, we used to reward them for overstepping our boundaries. We go and we say, this is what I don’t want to do. And then ten minutes later you’re going ahead and doing it. So it’s like, here’s the reward for saying no, I’m gonna do it anyway. I just gave you exactly what you wanted. And we sit here and we’re like, ah crap, I just did what I didn’t want to do. For me, I say time, but everyone has value. So if I treat you with respect, and you don’t treat me with respect, then we have a problem. And it’s up to me to communicate that to you. If I don’t communicate that to you, then this is where it gets difficult. If I don’t communicate that to you, then I’m saying that that’s alright. I’m allowing it. And that’s hard, I’m still not good at doing that. It’s like, oh my god, here comes another hard conversation, I am just gonna let that one go. Because I don’t want to have that hard conversation, whether it’s with work, because that’s a hard conversation. Or whether it’s in a relationship, even when it’s with your kids, geez. Right?
Julie: I think I have forever seen other people as having more value than me. I always place other people’s feelings above my own. I’m just starting to realize we’re equal. So I was always really bad at communicating anything. Communicating my needs or communicating how I was feeling in a situation, because I didn’t want to make someone else feel bad or make someone else feel uncomfortable. And now I’m realizing that I’m kind of obligated to myself to start communicating those things. It’s not easy. It’s really, really hard for me because I don’t want to make anybody else feel bad. But it’s an absolute necessity. And so I guess my standards of communication are changing. I’m no longer willing to just sit back. I’m almost forcing myself stick up for myself now and I never would’ve done that before.
Michal: I’m noticing this recurring trend with a lot of us in this community of being people pleasers. And we have a really hard time, myself included, with the thought that anything that I do making someone else uncomfortable. Be it their emotions, be it inconveniencing them, be it making them do something that I would otherwise do for them. So many of carry that. I hear this story over and over again and I think it goes back to exactly what you’re saying. We did not have boundaries or we let people walk all over them. You’re just not aware of those things when you’re drunk. None of it even crosses your radar as wrong. Becoming aware of these things is a journey, it’s a process. It’s hard. It’s definitely hard.
Denge: Yeah, and I think it’s about your happiness as well. I think we always put everybody else’s happiness above ours. And one thing I’ve come to realize these days is… I don’t want to keep getting on the parenting thing, but I’m parent. I’m not a martyr. There’s certain limits to what I’m willing to do. And I still think it’s a lot, what I’m willing to do. But there’s certain things, just setting expectations, these days I don’t necessarily need to be doing. And I think I just need to be content with that.
The other thing that’s based on what we were talking about earlier, how your standards change. I think for me, honesty and truth has become such an important thing for me. And I think when I was drinking, it just disguised or masked the truth about a bunch of things. I find myself thinking about a lot of things, and just wanting basic honest and truth regardless of if it hurts me or hurts others. But just speaking the truth. And I think to what you were saying Julie, is communicating the truth, saying someone has hurt me. I’m over-communicating now, as opposed to just shrugging it off or drowning it in some booze. Now I’m over-communicating certain things. I’ll say no, what I think you just said hurt me. And I’m doing that a lot more, just getting it off my chest. And I’m realizing that so much stuff was buried. So much stuff was buried. I just kept it internal, and that really obviously made my drinking worse because I just continued drowning my sorrows.
Steve: I think the light bulb comes on and you realize that I realize I’m not emotionally responsible for anyone else but myself. I’m not emotionally responsible for you, I’m not emotionally responsible for how or when you communicate how you feel to me. I’m responsible for communicating how I feel to you, and if you can’t communicate that to me, there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s not up to me to guess how you feel or how you’re going to feel. If I’m concerned, then I can ask. And I think that’s my responsibility. If I’m telling myself a story, I think this is how you feel, it’s up to me to just ask you. Michal, right now I’m uncomfortable because this is what I’m thinking. I’m allowed to say that. I’m allowed to ask that. It’s not easy to ask. But I’m allowed to ask that. It clears the air. It opens up the conversation so my standard is that I’m emotionally responsible for myself.
Mary: Not only are you allowed to ask that Steve, in a lot of ways you’re obligated to ask that of other people. I think if we’re talking about a pissed off Karen of this but it’s also… it improves your relationship so much whenever you’re having that kind of communication and you can’t expect the people in your life to read your mind or anything like that. And we’ve gone through so many years of being pushovers and being like, I’m fine, that’s fine, everything’s okay. And when you start communicating that to other people, I think it takes a lot of anxiety and stress away from them because they actually know how to behave around you, because they know how it’s affecting you.
Steve: It goes right to what Denge was saying about, I’m hurt, now I have to say something.
Julie: In general, I think my standards for friendships and relationships have gotten so much higher. There are so many people who are my friends, just because they’ve always been my friends. And spending time with people, like the people that we have in recovery groups, we talk about real stuff, and we talk about deep stuff, and we are willing to be vulnerable and honest. And that’s where really amazing connections come from. I’m looking at some of these friends I’ve been friends with for fifteen years and all of our conversations are just surface conversations. There’s not one bit of vulnerability or real anything in them, and now I feel like we’re just talking to fill up the silence. The value of those friendships seems to be going down. I’m valuing the friendships where there is a good bit of shared, mutual vulnerability and willingness to connect on the deeper level. That seems to be where my time and energy belongs these days.Michal: I love that. I was actually thinking earlier about the barfly friends and the fair weather friends that just started to disappear when I went on this path. It wasn’t even really a conscious effort. A lot of those people I didn’t see anymore. I stopped hanging out at the same places. But even some of those less authentic friendships. The ones that only reach out for help, things like that naturally start fading away. I think you’re right, we do become a little bit more aware of the value of the ones that we do have. What relationships are important for me to foster. I think for my most important relationships, it comes relatively naturally that I can have these in depth conversations, that I can be vulnerable, that I can feel heard and in turn, hear back. It’s generally a sign to me that that is one of those healthy relationships that I should probably work to preserve. The ones that aren’t feeling comfortable are probably the ones that need a little bit more of my attention, figure out what’s going on and why. Clearly this level of connection is possible.
Julie: I never experienced this level of connection. I don’t think ever in my life have I experienced the kind of connection that I have experienced here. Never had conversations the way that I have had here where we’re just so completely open and honest. I guess that’s new for me, even like some of my closest relationships, there’s virtually no vulnerability. We touched on authenticity and authentic relationships and there’s so much to be said for that. I think too, I’m becoming myself instead of the person everybody wants me to be, so that plays into it, too. But yeah, my standards for friendships are completely different now than they were a year ago.
Steve: I’ve got something really interesting coming up. I used to play dodge ball on Monday nights. And speaking of friendships. I’ve got a fake front tooth here, a cap here, and a root canal here, because I was playing dodge ball, I dove to catch a ball, and I went down smiling. And I lost three teeth. I was drunk. I didn’t even rip a lip or anything. But I was drunk. Really drunk, playing dodge ball, that happened. This is the same team. So I continued playing. I was that guy who lost his teeth playing dodge ball. Nobody knew, I never told anybody I was drunk. One of the guys on the dodge ball team is also an alcoholic. He’s sober probably a year, year and a half longer than me, maybe two years, somewhere in that range. But anyways, he quit before I did. I left the dodge ball team because I wanted to play golf. I ended up drinking a bunch when I played golf, because I created my own league. Anyways. There’s like 8 people, this team used to be like family, you want to talk about friendships. I, then, found the courage and I wrote a little post in our dodge ball Facebook and let everyone know that I’m an alcoholic. I think it was just after I passed my year. And they asked me this summer if I would play. It took a lot of thinking, took a lot of figuring out. I know what these relationships were like back then, back when I was drinking, back when I didn’t really have boundaries, back when… things are really different now, at least for me. And I’m gonna go back to those same people this coming Monday. And it’s gonna be really interesting to see how that experience is because I haven’t really hung out with these people in like three or four years. There’s a lot of blur back there. But three or four years, I haven’t hung out with these people, seen them at all, including the guy that was there on my one year on zoom. He came, I asked him to do one of the readings. But I’m gonna see all these people again. It’s gonna be really neat, but it’s also gonna be different because I have a different set of expectations on how I’m gonna act, and everything else around that. I’m gonna feel some social anxiety for sure. Just because I have this set of standards on how my relationships are going to be, and I’m going to have to figure that out with a whole bunch of people in a really short period of time, and I’m going to put pressure on myself because that’s what I do, and I’m going to want to try to figure it out as soon as I can, and I know I’m not and what’s going to end up happening is by the time I get there and say hi to everybody and give hugs and talk a little bit and say everything and I’m going to start playing dodge ball and it’s going to feel normal. And I mean, this is probably what’s going to happen. And we’ll shoot the shit afterwards, and I’ll probably hop on a meeting. That’s probably what’s going to happen. But it’s going to be really neat because I’m starting venture, after a year and a half, I’m starting to venture out into the 3D world, because I’ve practiced enough in this 2D world with you guys, that these pieces and the courage and even if it’s not going to go right, or even if it doesn’t go right, I know I have a place to come back to.
Julie: It’s an exercise in authenticity. Which is terrifying. We’re all just learning how to be our authentic selves, but once you start figuring out who you really are, which I think for most of us in recovery, it’s one of the first things we start looking at. Who are we even? We’ve lost ourselves, we have to completely re-find ourselves. And so we start practicing, and it can be really scary to take that out into the world. And especially out into the world where it’s people that knew you before and suddenly you’re a completely different person with a completely different set of standards.
Denge: Yeah, I’ve had two pretty big events. Last night and the night before, actually, some industry events. Usually in years past, I have taken the day off purposely, the day after, knowing that my plan is to get completely hammered. And it was surreal going to these events. The first one had a bit of difficulty, going into a big ballroom with people just standing around with drinks in their hands. But last night’s, it was easier and I enjoyed it and I made a point of making sure that I spoke to a bunch of people. And I left at 9:30 sober and was able to wake up nicely this morning. And these are the events again that I had to take the day off, or knew that I was going to have to take the day off after. And it’s just so refreshing to be able to wake up and remember what you did, remember who you spoke to, and I was able to work the next day. So it’s just… these are the kind of joys that you find when you stop drinking. It’s awesome.
Michal: Steve, I love what you said about practicing in this world before you go back to that sort of that environment because that’s been very much my experience, too. In my earlier recovery days I was in AA a lot, and I would go to dances, sober dances with them. And those were super uncomfortable at first because God knows I’ve never been on a dance floor in my life without being wasted, right? It had not happened. So it was a skill I had to learn, to be around people and act my authentic self and have fun and socialize, without drinking. It was absolutely something that took practice. I think that’s a great point.
Julie: I think too, our standards of behavior change, right? What used to be acceptable on a dance floor or in a ballroom or virtually anywhere, is just no longer acceptable. And we know that, and we know that we’re going to wake up in the morning and have held by those standards, and no have a thousand things to regret or wonder about when we wake up. Those are really nice standards to have changed.So on that note, Denge, Michal, Mary, we want to thank you guys for being here tonight, it’s been a pleasure.
Denge: Thank you for having us.
Julie: Yeah, and hopefully we’ll get to see you guys again on here soon.
Steve: It was awesome having you guys on. Thanks for taking the time tonight we really appreciate it.
Michal: Yes, thank you. It’s always wonderful to have these conversations and stay plugged in and get to know each other just a little bit better.
Denge: Thanks for hosting Steve and Julie. It’s a great service that you do.
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