SOCIETY VS. SOBRIETY

Are You Jeopardising Your Sobriety By Hanging Out At A Bar?

The answer is not as simple as you think

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

“If you walk into a barbershop, sooner or later you’ll get a haircut”

— Popular AA phrase

Most addiction counselors would tell you that hanging out in a bar is a gigantic red flag of impending relapse. But what if it’s your friend’s birthday and the party is in a bar? Or you get invited to a work lunch in a bar? There’s a big difference between actively seeking to hang out in a bar and an event that you want to attend occurring in a bar.

Sadly, motivations aside, the risk is pretty much the same.

Here you potentially are in a bar.

You can have any drink that you want and the server is going to happily serve you. The stakes are as high as they get here, so don’t throw in all your sobriety chips until you have really assessed the risk.

Think about the location.

Bars = Booze. Therefore at the beginning of my sobriety journey, I found restaurants to be acceptable and bars impossible. Apart from Italian restaurants. I still find those difficult, due to my incredibly strong association between Italian food and alcohol. However, these are my rules. Part of your sobriety journey is working out your own boundaries.

On the flip side, bars unlike restaurants are much easier to escape from if you feel a crawling temptation to drink. Leaving a restaurant in the middle of a meal is much more conspicuous than leaving a bar in the middle of a party.

Also, in a bar everyone is doing their own thing, meaning, unlike a restaurant you can drink soda without too much attention. If you keep out of rounds it is totally possible to never have to announce that you’re not drinking.

But you really need to be honest with yourself, is this a bar where you are going to want to drink? Is it somewhere where the cocktails are good and you are going to be really tempted? Or was it your favorite boozer where you used to get s**t faced?

If this place has any kind of attraction or familiarity then everything else aside it is seriously not…