My Story - Crossing the Threshold

I have gone back and forth on the best way to share and layout my story of becoming an alcoholic and the 12 years of struggle that followed before my eventual self-acceptance of the disease. Instead of going into details about each and every story, I feel that it is actually more impactful to talk about the categorical flow of myself from introducing alcohol all the way to accepting that alcohol was making my life unmanageable. In this manner of telling the story, I feel like there is the greatest chance for others with completely different backgrounds and personalities from me to still connect with the general arch of my story. Because I have found that at their core, the vast majority of alcoholic and addict’s stories are strikingly similar.

Let me just paint a picture of my starting point. My first drink was at 17 years old. I had a phenomenal upbringing, two parents that cared and created an incredibly loving family and supportive environment. I had limited to no trauma really from birth through age 20. I was involved with band, German club and sports throughout my life. Coolness oozed from my pores. When I was in the heat of my battle with alcoholism this always confused me how given such a great upbringing I could be an alcoholic. But we’ll paint that picture throughout this post.

My first time drinking I got very intoxicated, busted by my parents, ended up getting sick that night, and basically swore the stuff off until college. During college, drinking got re-introduced with a bevy of bad habits to choose from being presented to me daily. Drinking occurred really whenever and wherever I desired during those years, yet I maintained all of my responsibilities and truly was a student first and foremost during these years. We’ll pick up in the Spring of 2011 and go from there, as this is when I crossed the threshold…

The Three Forces in My Life - Becoming an Alcoholic

Genetics

I had the family history of addiction and alcoholism on both sides. Not blatantly destructive, mind you, and it was certainly something that was not discussed, but the more I struggled with my own alcoholism the more I found out about extended family members (I have a large and very extended family tree to choose from) who had their own personal battles with alcohol. The more I struggled the more I learned that this genetic predisposition was likely coded in my DNA.

Culture

I made mention of this briefly before, but when I decided to re-introduce alcohol into my life when I was 18 and starting college, I basically had the cream of the crop to learn from in terms of horrendous drinking habits. I know that I am about to sound like an old man here, but the culture and “normal” behavior that you surround yourself with, sometimes without choice or intention, plays a significant role in pushing you towards the threshold of becoming an addict. For me, it was every single weekend night having the opportunity to stay up late, play drinking games, and attempt to consume as much as possible. Getting sick was a sign of a successful evening.

There was the discovery that hard liquor gets you drunker for cheaper - enter into the scene what I dub ‘drinking economics’. All of a sudden I realized I could calculate the dollar per Alcohol by Volume (ABV) of a drink, and what do you know, my preferred drinks of choice started leaning towards the most optimized use of cash. In the end, alcohol was always a valid excuse for bad behavior, saying stupid things and just acting not like yourself. Or so I thought. The longer this went on and more frequent it happened friends started distancing themselves.

The normalization of unhealthy habits, like drinking to cure the symptoms of a detox, was a massive driving force in pushing me towards the threshold of alcoholism. I must point out that I have many friends who went through the exact same experience and culture as me and wound up not having issues with alcoholism. This is important to understand as it shows that everyone’s threshold to becoming an alcoholic may be different, and culture is only one of the three driving forces that can push you over that threshold.

Trauma

As I stated before, my life was pretty ideal and uneventful until about the age of 20. In the Spring of 2011, I had around five of the most traumatic experiences of my life occur to me within about a 4-6 month window of each other. I think it is critical to define trauma at this point. In all my learnings and experience with it, I think the best way to summarize a traumatic experience is - when a person’s expectation of the world does not match reality. I always struggled looking at individuals, or hearing extreme stories, where their scenario is unbelievably intense (rough upbringing, poverty, living through war, etc.) yet you can witness an individual with a very sound and calm character. How was this possible? I believe now that those individuals have a different expectation on the suffering life can bring, so these seemingly “traumatic” experiences that I witness aren’t actually all that traumatic to them.

That actually means that someone with a “soft” or “ideal” upbringing could be at risk for being impacted by trauma throughout their life - their expectation of the world is oftentimes not aligned to how much suffering can exist in this world. Enter me at 20 years old. I know that my entire ethos with Chapter 3 Stigma is to be an open book and share my story, but this is the one topic that I will take pause with in terms of sharing details. Some of the trauma that occurred in my life is not my story to share, and I want to respect that boundary.

However, what I can say is that I attempted dealing with this trauma alone. I refused to talk to anyone about the struggles I was having while navigating this period shortly after the traumatic experiences. Generally speaking, my traumatic moments led me to the belief system that the world was full of evil, people (friends especially) could not be trusted and I was powerless to influence anything. This started me down the path of seeing myself as a useless and worthless person that really exploded during my final 2.5 years of drinking.

Everyone’s experience with traumatic events is going to differ. Look to your past and try to identify moments where your perception of reality was upended or disrupted by the facts of reality itself to start identifying what experiences may be most impactful in your story.

Ignoring signals

Let me rattle off a quick list of terrible things that happened to me while intoxicated: three near death experiences, run ins with the police, fights with friends, fights with family, losing valuable items, buying stupid useless stuff. The very first item - the fact that I have had three near death experiences with alcohol involved every time, should have scared me straight. It didn’t. And I’m not even counting the final attempt at my life in 2023 where I decided I would let alcohol take my life. So I guess four, maybe. But a single one of those should have scared alcohol straight out of my life, yet, as we’ll find out in the next section there was always an excuse.

Coming up with excuses

I could paint a picture for you of the phases of my life as an alcoholic based on the underlying excuse that I used to justify my overindulgence, and eventual anxiety attacks. At first it was feeling that my wife and I could not move our relationship forward and get married when we wanted to (when in fact no one but myself was holding us back on this one). After the wedding, it became financial concerns. It always felt like there was never enough and that we had to constantly stash away for that disaster scenario. Once our finances felt like they got squared away, I transitioned my underlying excuse to the stresses of work, establishing a career for myself, defining my purpose and just worrying about what my legacy would be. What an odd thing to use as an excuse to drown your sorrows in alcohol, but so goes the alcoholic mind.

For me it was always, ‘I won’t be satisfied until we reach XYZ milestone.” Then we would actually reach that milestone and guess what? I was still an alcoholic! Or the other classic alcoholic thought pattern that I had was, “my job sucks, I need to switch roles or companies and then I’ll stop drinking”. Or even more extreme, “I hate where we live, if we move I’ll leave my alcoholism behind us.” I could never change jobs or move away from my alcoholism as hard as I tried.

In addition to all of this, my family, close friends and I danced around the world alcoholic for years. We would talk about it, and wonder if I had a problem, but no one really wanted to say the word alcoholic to me because they feared how I might just blow up in their face out of rage at them. So for months and years I was an ‘alcohol abuser’, a ‘hard drinker’, a ‘problem drinker’, and my personal favorite an ‘alcohol super-user’. The excuses and deflection of the root problem carried with me for years.

Bad habits turn worse

Around the time I was 25 or 26, those habits that I had picked up during college started to come forward and manifest themselves in the worst and darkest ways in my life. Primarily, seeking out a drink to cure the symptoms of a detox that I was going through came to be one of the more destructive habits that I created in my struggle with alcoholism. This is the action that turns a single slip up, or bad night into a 3-7 day bender. Drinking the next morning to try to quell the anxiety, racing thoughts or physical tremors that would manifest due to my body detoxing off of alcohol is probably the most dangerous habit I ever created. Because I was already an alcoholic when this habit started, as soon as the first drink would hit my system and the detox symptoms were quieted, my alcoholic mind would tell me that I could have more and I would be fine. So started another cycle that really intensified during my last 2.5 years of drinking.

Creating rules to be broken

I would get so creative with the rule set that I would make with myself to try to contain my drinking. Just to list a few off the top of my head:

• Only drink Friday and Saturday

• No drinking before 5 pm

• Only beer or wine

• No credit cards at the bar, cash only

• 3 drinks max per day

• 7 drinks total per week

Literally every single rule I ever set for myself I would break. And usually rapidly after setting that rule for me. I could not constrain or contain my drinking or my desire to drink.

Doing Sobriety for Others

Hidden in this section may be the key to unlocking long term, active recovery. I have experienced this in my own life, but now that I am in active recovery and addicts are my people, I see this all the time. A sure way to set yourself up for relapse is to dedicate a period of sobriety to someone other than yourself. This sounds really rough, but if you are avoiding drinking to prove to your spouse, child, family or friends that you can do this, I would bet a significant amount of money you’ll reintroduce alcohol to your life. I did this. Countless times. I continually committed to a period of sobriety for my wife. I would prove to her that I was a man and that I was in control. And I would stay sober! For a few months that is... But I was also incredibly irritable and pissy. Never in a good mood. And then I would find an excuse to re-introduce alcohol (our honeymoon, a vacation, a celebration) and it would be ok for a while, but then the alcoholism would strike back harder and my lowest point would suddenly get lower.

I will detail this more in my podcast and post about my recovery journey, but as I sit here and write this, I am committed to active recovery ONLY for myself and no one else. I’m not doing this for my wife, my son or my daughter. I am doing this for ME, Kyle, someone who is worth staying in active recovery for. I selfishly guard my active recovery now, and my wife and I openly talk about the fact that I am not doing this for her. BUT, and this is the beautiful part, she is the beneficiary of all the best parts of me. In active recovery, I am not as irritable or pissy as when I was sober for other people. There’s much more to this topic I’ll cover later, but I am becoming convinced that a surefire way to set yourself up for relapse is to do sobriety for someone else.

Alcoholism always came back and hit harder

Every time after a period of sobriety that I permitted alcohol to come back into my life it eventually led me to a lower low than I ever experienced before. And this started occurring rapidly after re-introduction. I got married in June of 2018 during a few month stint of being sober. I was am so incredibly grateful to have been sober that day, it is seriously the most memorable and enjoyable day of my life. However, it had been a few months since I had drank and the next week when we found ourselves relaxing in Maui on our honeymoon the temptation was just too much - I asked my wife if we could buy drinks to have at the beach.

As I said, during the honeymoon it was innocent enough. A few drinks over numerous hours while we relaxed at the beach and a cocktail or wine at dinner. But now, the permission was there for me to consume. And shortly after returning home I entered into yet another cycle of benders mixed with periods of staying sober and feeling like there was this monster I was wrestling with each and every day just trying to get through the day without drinking. My problem, that I didn’t realize at the time, was that I could not envision my life without alcohol in it. I always said, ‘I just want to be able to sit on the porch with a glass of wine and hang out with my wife’. Even in my ideal vision of my future there was a glass of wine in my hand. I just couldn’t shake the idea that alcohol had to be completely eliminated from my life. I desired so badly to be normal, to be able to have a drink and not have your mind start racing about where and how to get the next one. I wanted the obsession gone.

As with most everything, I tried to solve this by myself. This led to the deepest and darkest period of my life thus far. I can only call it my own version of hell on earth. We’ll cover that period of time in the next blog.

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This is certainly a touchy subject and not one that most people are comfortable with showing engagement with this type of content. However, if you feel like any part of this story resonates with you, and you want to chat, please feel like you can reach out. I absolutely refuse to involve myself with your own need to accept your addiction issues, however, I am happy to engage with you and just listen.

You can reach out via Instagram (@chapter3stigma or @kyle.zibrowski) or email (kyle.zibrowski@chapter3stigma.com).

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That’s all I’ve got.

Kyle