How I Stopped Drinking

Sabrina Vallis
3 min readOct 31, 2023

And Why I started — I worked it out!

Why I stopped drinking — the relevation and equation
Working out what happened and why helped me to stop. Image created with Bing.

For years the drinking was getting the upper hand, I was coming to realise that I was not a happy drunk…but I began to reach for the bottle as soon as I could identify a problem that would give me an excuse to drink.

It did not start like that! It started for a genuine reason, my father had died, my world imploded, I had no support, I was effectively alone with a young child propping a mother who I had not recognised as totally narcissistic.

I should have had clues in the way she took to mourning; an excuse to dramatise with her friends how sad and awful and so cleverly — it was all said in the doleful looks and the Eeyore silences. But in private she was revelling, I think, in her newfound freedom.

I was not; I was swimming in a sea of raw unaccustomed grief, made worse by the swiftness of my father’s demise. Two weeks or so from diagnosis to death. I was also dealing with an unemotionally available man who expected me to continue running a house, a business, organise a wedding and a funeral and who finally stormed off three weeks after the rather grand funeral pronouncing that I did not have “Time for him!”

I don’t think anyone gave any thought to “time for me”! So, the drinking pattern that had crept up from the New Year’s Day when it was clear that my father was…

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Sabrina Vallis

Sobriety writer. NLP Master Practitioner and Nutritionist. Current research: Addiction and the Brain: Ways to Heal. Neuroscience helps us quit.