The air outside is crisp this morning, the kind of January cold that wakes you up the moment you step onto the porch. I just finished a seven-mile walk through the woods behind my house. There’s something about the winter landscape—the bare trees, the silence, the dormant garden beds waiting for spring—that clarifies my thinking. As I walked, listening to a little acoustic blues in my headphones, I felt a profound sense of gratitude. Not just for the exercise, but for the quiet inside my own head.
Ten years ago, that silence didn’t exist. My mind was a chaotic loop of worry, resentment, and the frantic need to fix everyone around me.
I spent my career building systems and fixing bugs. I understood logic. But I didn’t understand why, despite my professional success, I felt so broken inside. It wasn’t until I found Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACA) that I realized I was running on a corrupted operating system installed during my childhood. As the “Liberation Technology” literature suggests, I had to become a “liberation technologist” of my own spirit, using tools not to write code, but to achieve emotional sobriety.
The solution for me hasn’t been a single magic bullet. It has been a combination of “technologies.” First, the ACA program gave me the framework to understand “The Laundry List”—those 14 traits like isolation and approval-seeking that were my survival strategies. But knowing the traits wasn’t enough. I had to do the work. As we say, we can’t just talk the talk; we have to walk the walk.
That’s where therapy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) came in. If ACA provided the roadmap, CBT provided the daily mechanics of retraining my brain. It helped me catch those automatic negative thoughts—the “loops”—and rewrite them. It was the “psychological practice” of forging inner discipline. I learned to challenge the “colonial mentality” of my upbringing, that inner voice that told me I was “less than” or responsible for everyone else’s feelings.
Earlier, driving back from the market after picking up ingredients for a hearty vegetable stew I plan to slow-cook all afternoon, I glanced in my side-view mirror. You know that warning etched on the glass? Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.
It hit me that in recovery, the opposite is true. For years, the trauma of my past felt massive, looming right over my shoulder, blocking out the sun. But today, thanks to the hard work of reparenting and the Steps, the perspective has shifted.
I had this sudden, vivid image. I looked in that mirror, and instead of seeing traffic, I saw the past. But it wasn’t a scary monster. It was just a group of toddlers in diapers. They were throwing tantrums, yes, but they were small. They were tiny. The etching on my mirror should read: The children in the past are even smaller than they appear.
This is what emotional sobriety feels like to me. It isn’t that the past is erased; it’s that it has lost its power to control the steering wheel. I am the driver now. Those wounded parts of me—the inner children—are still there, but they are safe in the backseat, or fading into the distance behind me. They don’t get to navigate.
Every day is both a challenge and a gift. It requires maintenance—getting my seven hours of sleep, eating healthy home-cooked meals, and keeping my body moving. But the reward is freedom. I have moved from being a “reactor” to an “actor” in my own life. The view out the windshield is wide open, and for the first time in my life, I’m excited to see where the road leads.
