9 Months Sober. No AA. No Sponsor. No Bullsh*t.
How I Rebuilt My Life Without Meetings, Mantras or Meds – Part 1
I turned 58 this week. This is How I Got Sober Without AA and Rebuilt My Life After 45 Years on the Bottle
And I’ve been sober for nine months, after more than 45 years on and off the bottle. No AA. No sponsor. No “higher power.” No dusty church halls. Just a raw, deliberate rebuild. Brick by brick. Choice by choice. Discipline over drama. Truth over tactics. I wasn’t looking for salvation. I was looking for ownership.
Sober Without AA: Why I Took a Different Path
You need to understand: I didn’t get here clean. I’m not some weekend drinker who caught a wake-up call and got lucky. I drank hard. I used. I numbed. I served 12 years in the army and did most of that half-cut. Then came civvy street chaos. Functioning on the outside. Dying slowly inside. Jobs, relationships, even hobbies — all of them bent around the bottle. Alcohol didn’t ruin everything. It became everything. My relationships became transactional or toxic. My work suffered. Missed deadlines, foggy decisions, a constant undercurrent of self-sabotage. Even the hobbies I once loved became excuses to drink. It wasn’t just a habit. It was the lens through which I saw and shaped every part of my life.
When you’ve been drinking for decades, it becomes your identity. Your brain wires around it. Your body breaks under it. Your habits form around it. You don’t realise how much of your life it’s swallowed until you try to walk away from it. And then realise there’s almost nothing left that isn’t soaked in it.
This past year, I decided to stop drinking. But more than that, to rewire my entire operating system. I wasn’t just quitting booze. I was building a new foundation for my life. Not a better version of the old me. A whole new model. Clean. Sober. Conscious.
No Group. No Guru. Just Grit.
This isn’t an anti-AA post. But I knew I had to go a different way — I had to get sober without AA, without a sponsor, without anyone else’s steps but my own.”
I’ve been in the personal development space for over a decade. Certified NLP Master Practitioner. Mindset coach. Breathwork facilitator. I’ve helped people transform. I’ve taught rewiring. But this time, it wasn’t theory. It was me, naked against the world, with no one watching and no one clapping.
Here’s what I did:
- Cold water therapy every morning. Tap, tub, river, hose. Didn’t matter. The water didn’t care about my mood. It demanded presence. It reset my nervous system. Every time I stepped in, I won.
- Functional movement despite three prolapsed discs. No ego lifting. Just movement, stretching, walking, and carrying. I trained to be useful. Mobile. Capable. Not aesthetic.
- Paleo/Keto nutrition. Food became fuel, not comfort. I stripped back to primal eating. Fewer ingredients. Fewer insulin spikes. No sugar to soothe the stress. Inflammation dropped. Brain fog lifted. I lost 4.5 stone. My knees stopped hurting. My mind started firing.
- Daily journaling. Some days it was one line, others a deep purge. I wrote what hurt. I wrote what healed. I wrote without filter until the noise in my head turned into a signal.
- Visualisation and quantum jumping. I met the version of me ten years sober. Strong. Clear. Respected. I imagined him in the room with me, and I asked him what he’d do next. Then I did it. (Quantum jumping, if you’ve never come across it, is about mentally connecting with your future self — the one who’s already overcome your struggles — and borrowing his mindset and decisions today.)
- Breathwork. 4-7-8 for sleep, box breathing for calm, Wim Hof for energy. I used my breath like a switch. To shut down the chaos or spark the fire.
No hacks. No silver bullets. Just consistent daily reps. When your brain’s been hijacked by alcohol for decades, repetition beats motivation. Routine beats relapse.
The Psychology of Addiction: Why Sobriety Isn’t Just About Willpower
Addiction isn’t a moral failure. It’s a nervous system response to pain, trauma, and long-term stress. It’s your body’s best attempt to avoid emotional injury, dressed up as destructive behaviour. I remember nights when I wasn’t even chasing a buzz. Just trying to silence the weight in my chest. One drink to slow the heart rate. Another way to numb the loneliness. It wasn’t about partying. It was about peace, even if it was fake and fleeting.
Addiction is survival in disguise. And when you’re getting sober without AA, you see just how much of it is embedded in your nervous system, not just your habits. Your brain isn’t broken. It’s doing what it thinks will keep you safe. That’s why alcohol addiction, sugar cravings, compulsive scrolling, and even porn addiction are rooted in neural pathways, not weakness. The brain finds what numbs the pain and hits repeat. Over and over.
That’s why rehab isn’t enough. That’s why “just stop drinking” advice is dangerous. You can’t just delete a neural loop. You have to replace it.
I stopped feeding those grooves. I built new ones. Breath instead of booze. Cold instead of comfort. Stillness instead of escape. They didn’t vanish, but they lost their volume. They lost power. Because I stopped negotiating with them.
But alcohol doesn’t leave quietly. It hides. It waits. It shows up in the fridge, in the pub, in the casual “just one” offer. It disguises itself as a reward. A release. A right. If you haven’t built something stronger, it wins.
So I built something stronger.
The Quiet Wins of Sober Living
Here’s what no one talks about when they quit alcohol:
- Waking up and looking in the mirror without shame.
- Feeling grief fully, instead of numbing it.
- Sitting with tough memories from the army without reaching for a drink.
- Finding joy in cooking a simple meal.
- Knowing you can face life unfiltered.
- Laughing and actually meaning it.
- Sleeping through the night without guilt, waiting on the pillow.
- Being proud of a Tuesday morning.
These aren’t headline-grabbing moments. But they are the real rewards of sober living. They’re the anchor points that keep you going when everything else feels ordinary.
They’re how you build trust in yourself. And trust is the real foundation of freedom. Not just abstinence. Not ticking days off a calendar. Showing up for yourself when it’s boring, hard, or quiet.
Nine Months In: Clean, Clear, and Still Climbing
At nine months sober, I wasn’t skipping through life. But I wasn’t hiding anymore.
The clarity, the rawness. It’s worth more than any buzz alcohol ever gave me. The buzz was short, chaotic, and numb. A false peace wrapped in poison. This clarity is steady. Honest. It lets me feel joy without consequence, pain without panic, and presence without performance. I could feel again. Think clearly. Hear my own intuition. I had my agency back. That alone was enough.
This was no longer about sobriety. This was about sovereignty. Choosing who I want to be every single day. Staying present without distraction. Enduring without escaping.
But even then, I hit a wall.
Not because I relapsed. But because the next level of healing required something deeper.
In Part 2, I’ll share what happened when I introduced mirtazapine. It helped me sleep, but nearly derailed everything else. Why I took it. What it did. And how I came back.
Start Your Midlife Rebuild
If this hit home, don’t wait for rock bottom. Start now.
👉 Download the free 7-Day Midlife Restart guide — it’s how I got sober without AA and rebuilt a life I actually wanted to live. begin my sober journey, rebuild my identity, and reset my life.
