I Didn’t Quit Drinking All at Once: How Counting the Wins Changed My Recovery

Quitting drinking was hard. Not because I didn’t know I had a problem.

I knew.

My relationship with alcohol had been problematic, in one form or another, throughout most of my adult life.

In my twenties, it was just getting started. Then, over the years, there were periods when I drank more and periods when I drank less. Sometimes I could pull it back enough that I could convince myself I had it under control.

That was part of what made it so complicated. It never felt bad enough that I couldn’t tell myself:

“I can fix this.”

But like a lot of dependencies, it gradually got worse.

When Drinking Became My Way of Coping

Alcohol had become one of the ways I managed uncomfortable emotions, and when my life became more painful, my drinking increased with it. During my divorce, everything felt like it was falling apart, and drinking went from something I might do occasionally to something I was doing every night.

Then came 2020.

During the pandemic, drinking became incredibly normalize. People joked about day drinking, virtual happy hours were everywhere, and alcohol became one of the culturally acceptable ways of saying, “I have no idea how to deal with what is happening right now.”

The problem was that I was already using alcohol to cope. I didn’t need another reason to drink, and I knew I needed to change.

Knowing you need to quit drinking and actually figuring out how to quit drinking, though, are two very different things.

I Knew Shame Wasn’t Going to Get Me Sober

I’m a marriage therapist, so when I started seriously thinking about sobriety, I did what I tend to do:

I started researching.

I looked at treatment programs, read books, and explored different approaches to recovery to figure out what might actually work for me.

I knew traditional 12-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous had helped many people, but I also knew that approach wasn’t the right fit for me personally. There were aspects of the model that didn’t align with my values or with the way I understood behavior change.

Eventually, I found SMART Recovery, which was a much better fit for me. Its emphasis on practical skills, self-management, and evidence-informed approaches made sense to my brain.

But before I found an approach that worked for me, I struggled with something incredibly simple: counting days.

I would stop drinking and make it one day, three days, a week, maybe longer.

I would start thinking, "Look at me. I’m doing it."

Then I would drink again, and suddenly I was back to day zero.

Psychologically, that was brutal for me. Instead of seeing the seven days I hadn’t consumed alcohol, I saw the one day I had.

Instead of seeing progress, I saw failure.

Instead of becoming more motivated, I became ashamed.

Then Simon Chapple Taught Me to Count Differently

One of the resources that helped change my thinking was Simon Chapple’s How to Quit Alcohol in 50 Days.

There was an idea I took from the book that fundamentally changed the way I approached my own sobriety:

Instead of constantly erasing my progress every time I drank, I started paying attention to all of my sober days.

If I went seven days without drinking and drank on Saturday, those seven days didn’t suddenly disappear. I had still spent seven days sober, and those seven days still represented seven days in which I had practiced living without alcohol.

So I stopped constantly resetting myself to zero and started collecting sober days instead.

One sober day counted.

A sober weekend counted.

A sober week counted.

If I drank after that, I could acknowledge that it happened without allowing it to erase everything that came before it.

The question became less, "Why did I fail again?"

And more, "What happens tomorrow? Can I collect another sober day? Can I stretch the next sober period a little longer than the last one?"

That tiny shift changed something enormous for me.

The Year I Had More Sober Days Than Drinking Days

Eventually, I started attending SMART Recovery meetings, and I remember sharing with the group that I had been counting all my sober days instead of only measuring sobriety by an uninterrupted streak.

Over time, I reached a milestone that felt huge to me:

I had more sober days that year than drinking days.

I was so proud of myself, and they were proud of me, too. Nobody responded by pointing out the days I had drunk or dismissing my accomplishment because my progress hadn’t followed a perfect trajectory.

Progress was progress.

That mattered because recovery stopped becoming another opportunity to prove how badly I had failed.

Instead, it became an opportunity to notice how much I was changing.

More than half of my year was sober, and then I kept going. There were hiccups and there were times I drank again, but every stretch of sobriety taught me something.

Every sober day mattered.

Every time I practiced dealing with an emotion without alcohol, I was building a skill.

Every time I made a different choice, I was becoming someone who knew how to make that choice.

I Wasn’t Just Learning How Not to Drink

Looking back, I think one of the most important parts of my recovery wasn’t simply learning how to stop drinking.

I was learning how to stop shaming myself into changing.

For years, I had absorbed the idea that failure should motivate me. If I screwed up, maybe I should feel bad about it, and perhaps feeling bad enough would finally make me change.

But shame wasn’t particularly effective at helping me build the life I wanted.

Self-compassion was.

Instead of telling myself, "You drank. You failed. Start over."

I learned to think differently: "You drank. What did you learn? Look at everything you’ve already accomplished. Now let’s keep going."

That is a very different way to approach recovery, but it’s also a very different way to live.

I didn’t become sober because one day I suddenly developed enough willpower to never drink again. I practiced sobriety, collected sober days, learned skills, stretched those periods longer and longer, found support that actually fit me, and celebrated progress instead of demanding perfection.

Somewhere along the way, those individual sober days started adding up to a different life.

And that is one of the biggest lessons sobriety has taught me:

The days you succeeded don’t stop counting just because you struggled again.

They still happened.

You still grew and you still learned.

Tomorrow is another opportunity to add one more.

Check out this book if you’re seeking inspiration, healing, or the courage to begin again:  

https://www.amazon.com/Its-About-TIME-MOMENTS-UNFORGETTABLE-ebook/dp/B0GDRW9LJD?dplnkId=5bd789db-fcd9-497a-91c9-6fff4213bfa8