When Coping Falls Away Into Being
I Didn’t Realize I’d Outgrown My Old Coping Strategies Until One Day… I Just Had.
I’ve been clean and sober long enough now that the early years feel like a different lifetime, close enough to remember but far enough to see with clearer eyes. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how strange it feels to outgrow the coping strategies that once kept me alive.
People talk about letting go of substances. They talk about letting go of chaos, or relationships that were basically emotional demolition derbies. But no one warned me about the quiet heartbreak of realizing that the things I used to rely on, the things that once felt like oxygen, don’t fit me anymore. I’m living a completely different life.
Back then, those strategies were the best I had.
I used to numb everything. If I was sad, I drank. If I was anxious, I drank. If I was bored, lonely, overwhelmed, or breathing too loudly, I drank.
And when I wasn’t drinking, I was distracting myself with anything that kept me from feeling: overworking, people‑pleasing, disappearing into relationships, disappearing from relationships, you name it.
I don’t look back at that woman with disgust, I look back at her with love and honesty. She was doing the best she could with the tools she had.
Growth felt awful at first.
When I got clean and sober, I thought I’d feel better right away. Spoiler: I did not.
I felt exposed. Raw. Like someone had peeled off my skin and told me to go live my life.
Every feeling was too loud. Every conversation felt like a test. Every quiet moment felt like a trap. I didn’t know how to cope without my old strategies, and I didn’t yet trust the new ones.
It was so unfamiliar, I felt like I was constantly failing even in my small successes.
I didn’t have to hate who I was to become who I am.
There’s this idea in recovery that you’re supposed to reject your past self, like she’s the villain in your origin story.
But I don’t buy that.
The woman I was back then? She survived things I didn’t think I could survive. She kept going when she didn’t have support, or skills, or clarity. She got me here.
I don’t need to shame her to grow beyond her.
The process of letting go happened slowly, almost accidentally. There wasn’t a single moment where I said, “Okay, I’m done with these old coping strategies.” It was more like this:
One day I realized I hadn’t lied to myself in a while. Another day I noticed I’d sat through a hard feeling without trying to escape. Then one morning I woke up and thought, I don’t need that anymore.
It wasn’t dramatic. It was gradual. Like outgrowing a pair of shoes, one day they just don’t fit.
Sometimes I still reach for the old ways. Even now, years in, I have moments where I want to disappear into old patterns. Not because I’m failing, because I’m human.
The difference is, I don’t stay there. I don’t unpack my bags. I notice the urge, take a breath, and choose something different.
That’s the real miracle of long‑term recovery: not perfection, but choice.
Outgrowing old coping strategies isn’t glamorous. It’s slow, tender work that reshapes you from the inside out.
If you’re in that in‑between place, where the old ways don’t fit but the new ways feel awkward, you’re not doing it wrong. You’re just walking the path and one day, without even noticing, you’ll look back and realize you’ve grown into someone you once couldn’t imagine becoming.
