How I Accepted My Drunken Regrets

When I first quit drinking I was inundated with memories. Morning and night, that which had been rendered hazy from too much beer, wine, and liquor, came flooding back at random.

It’s easy to get swept up in the rush of regret and shame when living with the ghosts of your drinking past.

At a time when almost all of my energy was trying to focus on healing, little echoes of my indiscretions kept breaking through. The ugly things I’d said to my friends, the internal battles between insecurity and jealousy, the tumbles resulting in blood-stained knees, and the rideshare fees from particularly pukey nights. The longer I went without a drink, the more my past insisted on haunting me.

One day, as I was sitting on the couch reading, I was struck with a deep pang of humiliation caused by a replay from a particularly upsetting night nearly a decade prior. In an instant, I was torn from the middle of the chapter and transported into a loud, dark club in Downtown Atlanta; it was time to come up with a solution.

A Temporary Fix

I followed my initial instinct and bought a small, pocket notebook dedicated to the private, uncensored documentation of every memory that arose. As I felt and wrote my way through these reminders of days past, I found the period of time I’d spend stewing in the discomfort diminishing.

For the next several months, this process worked well. I kept my 3x5 inch notebook close by at all times — on the coffee table, in my purse, by my bedside. Whenever a memory would pull me out of my book or TV show or, occasionally, conversation, I’d jot it down and resume what I was doing.

What I didn’t realize until later on was that I was missing a crucial aspect of true healing. Inevitably, the same forgotten shames would revisit; once again catching me off guard and demanding my full mental and emotional attention.

I was acknowledging the regrets and shames of my drinking days, I was allowing the associated feelings to linger for long enough to experience them yet not so long as to qualify as wallowing, but I wasn’t forgiving myself and truly moving on.

A More Sustainable Solution

For those of us with drinking histories that we’d like to forget, it can be dangerously easy to create a narrative in which we are unworthy individuals who lack self control and are now forced to exist as social outcasts in an alcohol-laden society. (Or is that just me?)

I knew that I had to discover a way to permanently reframe my perspective on my previous behavior while intoxicated.

I began devouring books on sobriety, the science of addiction, and mental illness. In gaining a deeper understanding of how alcohol affects our brains and impacts our behavior, in general, I further understood how the effects of alcohol were on display in my actions, specifically.

The more I could step outside of the feelings of guilt and embarrassment and assess the past more objectively, the easier it was to look back upon those memories with compassion and understanding.

While I had to acknowledge and own the ways I had behaved when I was drinking, I also had to acknowledge the reality of being stuck in an addictive cycle. Armed with knowledge, I saw myself for what I had become: a person who needed help stepping out of a toxic place. And, once I did that, I was finally able to treat myself with the respect, love, and patience that my past and present self needed in order to truly heal.