What is the secret to living sober?  For the true alcoholic, this can be a baffling question indeed.

The answer involves a process.  If you could sit down and simply whisper the secret in someone's ear, that would be really great and alcoholism would essentially be solved.  But it is not so simple, and the path to long term sobriety is a long and difficult one. 

The process starts with surrender.  The alcoholic or addict must give up all struggle to control the drug or alcohol use in their life.  This is a huge trick that no one can grasp intuitively right away.  This is because our natural tendency as human beings is to fight for control.  We might sense that our drug or alcohol use is spinning out of control, so our natural inclination is to fight to regain that control.  Intuitively, our obvious solution is to somehow figure out how to cut down on our consumption in order to regain control of ourselves.  But of course this does not work, and this approach only leads to more chaos. 

So the solution is total abstinence, even though that sounds very unpalatable to most addicts and alcoholics, it is the only way.  If you can control it then you are not an alcoholic, period.  So the only true path is one of abstinence.

Once you accept this then you must take action.  If and when you decide to take real action in order to make this change in your life, then you have essentially made a decision and your new life has begun.  Now it is only a matter of execution.  Can you learn how to live a sober life?  Do you have the willingness to follow directions? 

In the beginning, living sober is about networking with other alcoholics.  This is critical because you need to learn how to live a new life.  As time goes on, the networking aspect becomes less important, and personal growth becomes the important thing to focus on.  Many people miss this subtle shift in strategy and become dependent on group therapy as a way of life. 

In the end, you need to push yourself to grow holistically, so that you are not stagnating in your growth and just drifting in recovery.  This happens to so many recovering alcoholics, and many of them will eventually relapse because of it.  The key to long term sobriety is therefore to push yourself to keep growing and learning new things.