Vigilance is the Price of Sobriety

July 24, 2025

Tim Lineaweaver, Author & Mental Health Counselor 

Tom O’Connor, Publisher

A meerkat scanning the horizon, looking for threats.

Author Tim Lineaweaver is a Mental Health Counselor. Tim has been helping clients of all ages with addiction, trauma, anxiety, and depression for over 20 years. He is an adjunct faculty member at Lesley University and has written about and lectured widely on addiction and mental health topics. He has applied his clinical expertise in treating addiction across various residential, outpatient, and community-based settings. Tim has extensive experience in substance abuse and has contributed to addiction counseling through advocacy. He believes it is vital to build and maintain strong trust and advocacy with his patients while also holding them accountable on their recovery journey.

In January, Tim wrote Lessons Learned From Recovery Trauma for the Vital Voyage Blog. Tim can be reached at his website: https://www.timlineaweaver.com/. Tim is a member of our Vital Voyage Blog Editorial Advisory Board.

According to Tim Lineaweaver

At the peak of my alcohol and cocaine addiction, I led a chaotic, narrow-minded life. I was utterly focused on getting drunk and high. Everything else was far behind in importance compared to using. Relationships, children, and career weren’t priorities. I drifted from one binge to another, doing and saying whatever it took to keep getting high. Anyone who has faced addiction can understand. My motto was: get high, stay high, and to hell with everything else. My self-medication aimed to erase the part of me that worried about the long-term consequences of my lifestyle. I maintained a state of mindless carelessness while immersed in a culture of addiction that dulled my moral sense and glorified the addicted life.

But avoidance doesn’t make problems go away, and the consequences began to accumulate: Divorce, financial ruin, and custody battles. The IRS came after me for unpaid taxes, leaving me stunned. These consequences served as a wake-up call, pushing me toward sobriety. But recovery was just the start. Fifteen years of self-medication left me unprepared for responsible daily life. Suddenly, I had to confront my actions. I had to face problems head-on. Most importantly, if I wanted to stay clean and sober, I had to plan carefully and vigilantly monitor my emotions, daily routines, and who I spent my time with. Neglecting to do so could risk relapse, which could be life-threatening.

For those in early recovery, self-reflection, awareness, and planning are essential for preventing relapse. If someone feels anxious, depressed, or stressed, developing coping skills to handle these feelings without self-medicating is necessary. Ask yourself: What am I feeling? Why am I feeling it? How long has this feeling been present? What can I do to address it? These questions are often unfamiliar to those with substance use disorders (SUD) because, in the past, they self-medicated these feelings at their onset.

In early recovery, maintaining self-awareness is vital. One helpful tool is HALT. HALT is a well-known reminder for those in early recovery to practice self-care. Self-care helps prevent dysregulation. Don’t allow yourself to be consistently hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. Getting enough sleep, eating healthily, exercising, and spending time with other recovering peers—while managing anger to reduce its harmful effects—are all critical for ongoing recovery.

People with SUD need to be mindful of whom they spend time with. Are you surrounding yourself with other people in recovery? Do the people you spend time with respect your recovery, or do they challenge it or offer you alcohol or drugs? If someone intentionally does this, I consider it comparable to someone putting a gun to my head. I know this may sound dramatic, but my life could fall apart if I relapse.

People in early recovery should also be careful about where they go. Any place where substances are likely to be abused should be avoided. Alcohol is omnipresent in our society, so I know avoiding it entirely is very difficult, but being around people drinking heavily is needlessly triggering. When I first tried to get sober, I stubbornly insisted on maintaining old associations with using friends. The result was relapse. I needed to accept that being around alcohol and drugs increased the risk of using them.

Recovery doesn’t happen spontaneously; we need to actively make it happen. Support networks can be beneficial, including therapy, structured treatment, self-help groups, sponsors, and simply talking to someone knowledgeable about recovery, which can make a significant difference. I still remember the encouragement from many of these sources when I was feeling alone and broken. The message was: “Don’t quit, stay with it. Much better days ahead.” And it turned out to be true.

Over time, I maintained self-reflection and ensured that I kept my recovery safe at all times. Through consistent vigilance, my recovery gained momentum, and life began to improve. Recovery became ingrained and more intuitive—my new normal. If you stay vigilant, your life will improve exponentially in ways you couldn’t have imagined during your addicted days. Stay with it!

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Tim Lineaweaver can be reached at his website: https://www.timlineaweaver.com/ 

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