Stopping drinking is not the same as sobriety

Stopping drinking has a name: abstinence. Sobriety is something else. It is built in the seconds before the drink, in the empty hours of the afternoon and in a body asking for food, sleep and care.

English edition of Isabella Becker’s Portuguese essay, adapted for international readers. The article presents Virtology’s interpretation; its specific theoretical mechanisms should be distinguished from independently established clinical findings.

You have stopped drinking. It has been weeks, maybe months. And still the afternoons feel too long, sleep will not come, your patience runs out at the first no, and the urge turns up where you least expect it. People on the outside celebrate: “he stopped.” You know that stopping was only the first part, and that nobody really explained the second.

Stopping use has a name: abstinence. Sobriety is something else. It is a way of functioning that the drinking used to occupy and that now has to be built. In Eduardo Casarotto’s Virtology, that building happens in three very concrete places: the seconds before the drink, the empty hours of the day and the body that asks.

Before going on, three caveats. The first is about safety: this article is not a guide to stopping on your own. Someone who drinks heavily every day does not stop all at once without a doctor, because alcohol withdrawal can cause seizures and delirium. The second: almost everything that follows also applies to people who have stopped something else, cigarettes, gambling, another drug. The third: nobody here is being accused. Slipping is part of the path for many people who have come through. And when I speak of pride and selfishness, I mean two systems in the brain that every human being has, not the flaws of people who drink.

What abstinence leaves behind

Alcohol works like a brake in the brain. It strengthens the system that calms, GABA, and holds back the system that speeds things up, glutamate. That is why the first effect is calm, a loosened tongue, a body that relaxes.

But the brain does not accept being braked. If an outside brake arrives every day, it compensates from within: it weakens its own brake and strengthens its own accelerator. That compensation is tolerance. And when alcohol leaves suddenly, the compensation is exposed. The outside brake is gone, and the inside accelerator is still at full. The engine races: tremor, a racing heart, insomnia and, in severe cases, seizures (Littleton, 1998).

About half of people with alcohol use disorder have withdrawal symptoms when they cut down or stop. Symptoms begin within eight hours of the blood alcohol level dropping, peak at around 72 hours and usually improve between the fifth and seventh day. In some people, seizures or delirium appear (Schuckit, 2014). And there is an aggravating factor described by Becker (1998): in many people, each withdrawal is worse than the one before. Each “I stopped and went back” without proper care makes the next stop more dangerous. That is why stopping is planned with a health service.

Once the first days have passed, something else remains. George Koob and Michel Le Moal (2001) called what happens over time allostasis: the set point of reward shifts, and that brain’s “normal” moves to a different place. Someone who had been drinking for years was no longer drinking to feel good. They were drinking so as not to feel bad. When they stop, that malaise does not leave along with the bottle. It stays there for weeks, sometimes months, without the one thing that used to relieve it. I wrote about this shift from pleasure to relief in Why you keep doing what no longer gives you pleasure.

This is exactly where abstinence on its own takes a heavy toll. We ask a person to endure a body in alarm on willpower alone, with nothing new inside. Sobriety is the name of what gets built so that they do not have to endure it alone.

Sobriety is another word for Gentleness

Casarotto starts from an observation about the word itself. In Virtology, Gentleness corresponds to temperance, from the Latin temperantia, which means keeping balance: mastery over one’s passions, balance in attitudes and decisions, no excess in appetites. And sobriety, at its root, is exactly that.

Gentleness works on the speed at which a person functions: in speech, in thought and in action. And a person with an addiction has been trained in the immediate. The substance is relief now. Not in a week, not once the situation is sorted out. Now. Years of this taught the brain to tolerate no gap at all. Any wait becomes unbearable, any frustration has to be solved on the spot, any discomfort has to disappear at once.

That hurry does not leave when the drinking leaves. It changes object. It becomes a hurry to win back the family’s trust, to find a job, to have money again, to “be cured.” And the hurry has the same structure as the use: wanting the result now. Casarotto describes many relapses being born this way, in the person who, three months sober, wants everything to be as it was before and gives up on seeing that it is not. A life that came apart over years does not come back together in weeks. And it does not need to. It comes back together at its own pace.

Gentleness is not passivity. Casarotto separates two kinds of caution that look the same from outside. The caution of fear is the alarm switched on, scanning everything for threat: slow to act and quick to explode. The caution of Gentleness is the opposite: the alarm turned down and deliberate thought switched on. Slow to react and quick to resolve.

The seconds before the drink

In the brain there is a contest everyone knows from the inside. The amygdala, a pair of nuclei deep in the brain, one on each side, sounds the alarm. The prefrontal cortex, just behind the forehead, is the region that weighs consequences and chooses. When the answer comes out before the thought, the alarm is what answered. Under stress, tiredness or hunger, the part that deliberates is the first to lose strength, and the part that reacts gains it.

Gentleness does not try to beat the alarm by force. It creates a gap where there was none before. The training Casarotto proposes is almost ordinary: count to five. Someone speaks, you count, and only then do you answer. In front of a cue to use, the same five seconds before any decision. Five seconds is the shortest wait there is, and the one that costs the most.

He also proposes waiting exercises that seem too small to matter: letting the song finish, not skipping the opening of the series, not pressing next episode, not speeding up the video. It is the same muscle of the gap, trained where it does not hurt. Someone who learns to wait through the opening credits is training, on a small scale, the gap between the cue and the drink.

And there is a simple measure, worth more than any promise: how long does the gap between the cue and the act last today? If there has been a relapse, that is exactly the question Gentleness asks. Estimate it, write it down, and work to widen that gap next time.

The sign that Gentleness is taking hold can be heard: you let the other person finish their sentence. In a home marked by drinking, the family usually notices it first by the volume. The house gets quieter.

The body that asks and is mistaken for craving

There is a discovery people in recovery often make with surprise, and Casarotto describes it like this: much of what they called the urge to drink was hunger. It was sleep. It was pain. It was the body asking for something they could not name, and the system translated it with the only name it knew. When a person learns to read the body, some of the pulls lose the name of drink and get back their right name: I am hungry, I am exhausted, I am in pain. And that is solved with food, with bed, with a doctor.

Sleep deserves special attention. During the drinking phase, it is destroyed by the substance: passing out from alcohol is not sleeping. In withdrawal, it is destroyed by a body in alarm. And many relapses start right here: three nights without sleep, and drink once again seems the only thing that brings sleep. Persistent insomnia is the first place where it is worth asking for medical help.

There is a reason this weighs so much. Alcohol, lack of sleep, pain, hunger and illness lower self-command. The brain’s brake is expensive to maintain, and it is the first function to fail when the body is under pressure. Caring for the body, then, is not a whim. It gives the brake the conditions it needs to work.

Casarotto organizes this care into four areas: sleep; food; movement; rest and hygiene. And he asks the person to work on one or two at a time, not all of them. A time to go to bed and a time to get up. Meals at regular times, sitting down, real food. A walk. A shower, clean clothes, a made bed. For someone who lived for months without any of this, it is the first sign of having come back to live in themselves. And it includes the doctor: tests, the dentist, the liver, the heart, and a psychiatrist when the condition calls for one.

Two cautions along the way. First: many people swap drink for sweets. It is worth noticing this without condemning yourself. It is the reward system looking for another object. The second is a trap that looks like health. The person leaves drink and enters the gym, the supplements, the mirror. Sometimes that is care. Often, in Casarotto’s words, it is pride in a tank top: the body has become a shop window, measured against others, waiting for approval. The question that separates the two is this: is this body serving what I need to do, or what I need to show? I wrote about the body that signals while nobody listens in Self-neglect is selfishness turned inward.

And there is a grief that is rarely named. The body from before does not come back. The lost tooth, the scarred liver, the illness that stayed. Looking in the mirror and seeing proof of failure brings shame, and shame asks for anaesthesia. Accepting the body that remains is saying: this is the house I will live in from now on, and I will look after it.

The empty hours

Drinking used to fill the whole day. Not only the hours of the effect: the hours of getting it, thinking about it, hiding it, recovering, planning the next time. When it leaves, there is a hole in the clock. And empty time, for a brain in which wanting is still sensitized, works as a cue.

The virtue that works on that hole is Usefulness. It is not about filling the day with distraction. It is about filling the time that is left, after resting and meeting your needs, with something worthwhile.

Casarotto points to the two most common ways out of an empty afternoon, and both are traps. The screen: endless scrolling, one series after another, the phone until the early hours. It is the same system with a different object. And the bed: the whole day lying down, “resting,” which underneath is the body avoiding any effort. Neither one rests. At the end of the day, the person is more tired and more empty than in the morning.

Why is it so hard to choose the useful thing? Because the brain weighs cost and return before acting. Rest has zero cost and an immediate return. Being useful has an immediate cost and a delayed return, and the brain heavily discounts what is far away. It is not a flaw of character. It is how the system is built, and in recovery it weighs even more, because everything that is not drink seems dull. That is why Usefulness starts small: one task, today, even without wanting to. The wanting comes after the doing, not before. And each time the person does something useful without wanting to and feels, hours later, their energy coming back, the brain records that the delayed return exists.

There is also a very concrete side to it. Drinking took away the person’s place in the world: the father who could be counted on, the worker, the son who showed up. Being useful again is recovering that place, one task at a time. Someone who discovers they are useful to someone discovers that they exist, and someone who exists for someone has less of a hole to fill.

An important caveat. Work can also become an escape. The person stops drinking, starts working fourteen hours a day, has no time for the group or for their child, and everyone applauds. Sometimes they really have turned things around. Sometimes they have only changed altars. The test is to ask what would happen if you stopped. If the answer is “something important would be left undone,” it is usefulness. If it is “I would have to deal with something,” it is escape dressed as productivity. And discouragement that lasts for weeks, with sadness and no will for anything, is not laziness: it may be depression, and it is a matter for a doctor.

The sign that Usefulness has taken hold is a subtle one: rest starts to rest you again.

Why these three come later

Gentleness, Care for the Body and Usefulness are virtues of the Development level. In the Pyramid of Virtues, they come after the foundation, and not as a formality. Without the foundation, they turn into performance: calm becomes a pose, the body becomes a shop window, usefulness becomes a rushed attempt to make up for the lost years.

The foundation opens with Humility and Selflessness, as a pair. Humility works on pride, the system of the need for importance. It is what allows you to admit the problem, ask for help and accept that rebuilding takes time. “I’ll stop when I want to” and “I’m not like those people” are pride protecting its position. Selflessness works on selfishness, the system that puts my relief right now above everything. It brings back to the center the people who live with you: the one who waited up at night, the child who was learning by watching.

Then comes the rest of the foundation. Acceptance, of what happened and of the body that remains. Forgiveness, for what was done and what was suffered. Responsibility, for looking after your own treatment without waiting for the family to do it for you. The State of Certainty, to keep going without a guarantee. Perseverance, for day thirty, day ninety, day three hundred. And Individuation, to discover who you are without the glass.

Only then do the three virtues in this article come in, each with what it needs first. Gentleness needs Humility, Acceptance, Selflessness, Responsibility and Individuation, and it goes together with Truth, so that calm does not become an escape from a necessary conversation, and with Patience, which carries the waiting further. Care for the Body needs Humility, Acceptance and Individuation. Usefulness needs Selflessness, Responsibility and Perseverance. Virtology’s canonical combination for addiction, compulsion, impulse and immediacy is Humility, Selflessness, Truth, Gentleness, Patience, Responsibility and Acceptance.

On the horizon, at the top of the Pyramid, is Helping Others, which is Usefulness carried to the top. It is no accident that one of the treatments that works best for alcohol is a peer group. A Cochrane review of 27 studies showed that twelve-step facilitation programmes produced more continuous abstinence at twelve months than other interventions (Kelly, Humphreys and Ferri, 2020). And a large American survey found that, among adults whose alcohol dependence had begun more than a year earlier, only a quarter were still dependent (Dawson and colleagues, 2005). The way out exists, and many people find it.

Three questions before the drink

The practice is not about resisting harder. It is about looking at three places before letting the pull decide on its own.

A note on step five. If there is a drink, what you write afterwards matters a great deal. Alan Marlatt described what he called the abstinence violation effect: after a slip, the person tells themselves “I’m weak, I’m hopeless,” and that thought pushes them from the slip into a binge (Marlatt and Gordon, 1985).

I wrote more about the day after in A relapse does not erase the path.

What gets built in its place

Abstinence takes the drink away. Sobriety puts something in its place: a gap where there used to be only reaction, a body listened to before it becomes a symptom, an afternoon with something in it. None of this appears all at once. It appears in small signs, which the family usually sees before you do: he went to bed on time, he ate sitting down, he let the other person finish the sentence, the house got quieter.

And perhaps that is the most freeing point. Someone who has only stopped lives fighting the absence of drink. Someone who is building sobriety gradually comes to have something else to do with their life.

If you drink heavily every day, do not stop all at once and on your own: contact your doctor or your local addiction services first, and plan the stop with the people who will support you. Severe tremor, confusion, hallucinations or seizures in the days after stopping are an emergency: call your local emergency services. Support groups, such as twelve-step groups, are free and help a great deal. If the urge to drink comes together with a wish to disappear or to die, contact emergency services or a crisis line in your country right away. If at home the drinking comes with aggression, the safety of the people who live there comes before everything else.

Continue with SNO and SNE: two systems at the root of neurosis, Pride is not what you think, or the 12-Step guided trail.