The Truth About Cravings

Last week my sweet father in law, and the most incredible grandfather to my kiddos passed away after a long battle with cancer. Last night I dropped my daughter at boarding school. Suffice to say,I am feeling pretty emotional this morning as I write.

Drinking Christy used pretty much any excuse to have a glass of wine, but if tough emotions were involved, I was definitely opening up a bottle. It's the only way I knew how to handle it. I've learned that I could not heal when I was numbing.

Clients will ask me, "but do you ever get cravings at all anymore?" Here's the truth. At the end of 2020, about 9 months into my sobriety, I got some news that I had lost a dear, dear friend. Immediately after receiving the call I pictured myself getting in the car driving to a nearby restaurant and sitting at the counter and ordering a glass of cold white wine. It was an almost out of body experience. Thankfully I coached myself through it, playing the tape forward and knowing that the wine would only make me more sad.

Fast forward to today, and I feel like I've been hit with a 1, 2 sucker punch to the gut, dropping my daughter off and losing my father in law- I feel no desire to drown out any of the feelings. Because mixed with the sadness is an extreme sense of gratitude. Gratitude for getting to have an incredible role model in my father in law, and gratitude for a school where I know in my heart my daughter will thrive. If I numbed out the sadness side, I also would not be able to feel the blessings.

So can I encourage you today my friend? You'll probably still have cravings in the beginning. They suck. I get that. But you can get through them. They will dissipate over time the longer you stick with this. And after a while you will want to experience all of your emotions in their entirety, you won't want to miss any of it. Even the sad, because in pain we can find gratitude, and in trials, we grow.