What does it feel like to give up the booze if you are addicted to it? Veronica Callanan, a recovered alcoholic, compares the early days of recovery as feeling like “flying to Barbados”:

Wake up!

Your life is happening right now, it’s not going to start when you find the right job, house, partner, lose 10 pounds. These precious seconds right now are your life – are you going to make them count or are you going to fall back into your numbed state and sleepwalk through your life.

I often tell clients that early recovery – those first few painful months when you ‘wake up’ to who you are and what you have become, is like the experience of when you have to wake up at 3am to catch a flight to Barbados because your going on your dream 2-week holiday that you’ve been looking forward to for ages. For those few seconds when the alarm goes off in the middle of the night, in the pitch black when you are in the deepest of sleeps, dreaming about a wonderful fantasy, you grope around trying to still that intrusive bleeping, your mind begins an argument with itself where for a few seconds you consider just closing your eyes just for a couple of minutes to experience that warm, comfortable, seducing lure of sleep again.

Despite knowing you don’t have long to get to the airport, there is that voice calling you to just shut your eyes and go back to sleep and everything will be ok. The pull is intoxicating, nothing matters other than the bliss of sleep, of unawareness. But, of course, you force your tired eyes awake and stand blearily in the shower with the excitement in your belly and the adrenalin beginning to pump through your veins because you know that very soon your going to be on a plane to Barbados and what a wonderful place that will be.

The first few months of recovery for an alcoholic are like the first few seconds of being awoken by the alarm clock. Even though you know where you are going to is the most wonderful place you’ll ever visit, even though you know that this will be the best experience you have ever had and you have been waiting for so long for the time to come around, even though you know you would be devastated if you gave in and shut your eyes and woke up to realise you’d missed the plane, even tough you know all of this, there is still a strong temptation to go back to sleep and block out all of those possibilities and experiences for the sake of a few hours of nothingness.

This is what the alcoholic experiences in early recovery, for so long they lived half asleep, half aware, missing their lives and now finally the opportunity has arrived for them to be fully awake, fully conscious to their experience its very tempting to go back to sleep, this is because recovery is hard and painful at times, especially the beginning. Even though Barbados will be great, the getting there can sometimes be uncomfortable, painful, irritating and inconvenient. The driving to the airport, carrying bags, queuing at security, airline food, cramped seats, all of those things we would rather do without but we put up with them because of the destination.

The destination is our truth, our real, authentic selves, living out loud to the fullest being who we really are.

And becoming the best version of ourselves we are capable of being.

Who wouldn’t want to visit that place?