Stop Drinking

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This is a place to motivate each other to control or stop drinking. It is also a place for non drinkers to discuss and share.

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Are gradual, but significant, personality changes normal after muti-year sobriety? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by remotelove@lemmy.ca to c/stopdrinking@lemmy.world

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So, yeah. It's been a few years sober now, so that is nice.

One thing I have noticed about myself is the actual existence of a personality. It wasn't a change that happened within the first few months of being sober, but over the following years.

Strangely enough, a bizarre trait is that if given the chance, I can talk about just about anything for hours. My saving grace is that I was always a repository for massive amounts of random information, but now, I can string all of that data together into coherent sentences then easily pivot into all related sub-topics and associated information on top of that.

I make a ton more off-the-cuff jokes now and I don't even know where they come from. It seems I have the ability to make people laugh, which I never thought possible.

Overall, my personality has become extremely broad these days and the above is just a couple of examples. One might say that I am a pleasant person to be around? (That is a very strange feeling, BTW.)

Has anyone else seen themselves or others go through massive personality shifts like I describe? I am not understating "massive". I surprise myself nearly every day with how intense I can get.

FWIW, I was an extremely heavy drinker when I quit and was about a year into serious dependency.

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[–] schuimwinkel@feddit.org 4 points 1 week ago

That's great to hear!

I also like to think I have become a much nicer person to be around (about 10 years sober now). It's difficult for me to pinpoint it on one thing, since when I stopped drinking a whole lot of things happened and changed at the same time, but I do think alcohol had a corrosive influence on my personality. I was just angry all the time when I was drinking. I didn't act it out openly, but looking back there was an underlying (passive) aggressiveness in all my interactions with other people. I would feel like shit about it, drink a lot to make me happy, but the alcohol would jut make me more irritated ... rinse and repeat, for many years, until I finally started to face my feelings (all of them) head on and sober. I think I have become more "me", more the person I am supposed to be and feel comfortable with. I have had these sorts of sudden realizations, years into my sobriety, where I would suddenly stop and think, hey, I'm .. happy? Just happy and content with myself, by myself? That's new, lol. And I do think other people feel it and react positively to it.