What is your sober date, Brian?
Did you attend 12 Step or modern recovery or how did you find your way?
I went into rehab or treatment as it is now called in 2003 and thankfully haven’t relapsed since then. So I’m coming up to almost 20 years sober. When did your drinking career start and can you tell me a little about how it looked? Growing up in Ireland, what I would now see as problematic or dysfunctional drinking was a cultural norm when I began drinking aged 13 or 14. Even though the legal age was 18, it was possible to be served alcohol in some bars from the age of 15 or 16 onwards. So my drinking progressed, and through a series of life events, accelerated through my early 20s to the point it was impacting my relationships, work, living environment, and mental and physical health. By the age of 27, I was very fed up with the life I was living, and at that point, my family intervened and helped me get help. How long do you think you had a problem before you took the decision to make the changes and do the work? I think looking back alcohol and I had always had an uncomfortable relationship, and I wasn’t able to drink socially or moderately often. There are signals now when I look back in terms of repeated blackouts etc that I thought were just a normal part of drinking but now realise it isn’t. So really in the last year or two I wasn’t able to mask the impact it was having on other aspects of my life and regardless of the damage it was doing, I was finding it hard to stop.
So the treatment programme was a 28-day model, with a recommendation people follow up with 90 AA meetings in 90 days afterward. I didn’t follow that guide and struggled with the religious aspect of AA as it was in Ireland then. It may have become more secular since. I got lucky in that a friend went through a similar journey shortly after and helped me hugely in terms of having support. I also found that my life changed very quickly in early sobriety and that work opportunities increased and that helped me stay sober. Work probably became an addiction of sorts for a number of years.
Professionally has your sobriety helped or hindered your career or neither?
A few years into my sobriety I wrote about my experience being a late twenty- something person who was sober and trying to have a social life in Ireland. The article seemed to resonate and following that I signed a book deal and wrote about my drinking and Ireland’s relationship with alcohol in the book ‘Wasted’. I think my owning my narrative and using journalism to interrogate it, was a very public way to also help keep me sober. It led to opportunities and definitely in terms of being able to capitalise on opportunities, being sober was essential during this period. I would say therefore that sobriety has been a huge asset in terms of my career.
Have you seen great changes within your personal relationships in sobriety?
Did the family intervene or did you take the decision to seek help?
I was lucky that my family intervened, with a family addiction counselor, and in a group setting, they challenged me on my drinking and the impact it was having on me and the family. At that point I was fed up with the life I was living so in reality I grasped the chance to avail of an in- patient treatment program.
There were friendships and relationships I had to drop during sobriety. I do sometimes regret that but when I took alcohol out of the equation, there wasn’t enough in the friendship to sustain it. I now tend to surround myself with people of a similar mindset.
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