5d ago

Are gradual, but significant, personality changes normal after muti-year sobriety?

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.

10 comments

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.
Yes, changes in behavior led to changes in other aspects of behavior. It is inevitable, but not always important and noticeable. And not always nice.
- And not always nice
  There have only been one or two people I have met that were more tolerable when they drank, so I get what you mean.
  Still, I find it hard to believe that long term sobriety wouldn't be a net positive unless it wasn't a person's own decision to stop drinking in the first place.
  
  I find it hard to believe that long term sobriety wouldn’t be a net positive
  Depends on many nuances. If you're talking about straightforward alcoholic -- yes, almost always the result would be better. But sometimes moderate drinkers stop drinking for medical or other reasons. These people just lose an additional way to have fun, lose a good chunk of social interaction, which easily may lead to deterioration.
I wouldn't describe my personality shift as "massive", but there have definitely been some noticeable changes in the 7 or so years since I stopped drinking.
I think it really just comes down to the fact that alcohol addiction (or any chemical addiction, really) stunts personal growth. When we get deep into our addiction, it becomes our primary form of entertainment (or it did for me, at least) so there's no longer any motivation to branch out and do new things. We just sort of stagnate, because any need we'd otherwise feel to work on ourselves has been blunted by alcohol.
The biggest long-term change that I noticed after quitting is that I was suddenly getting bored again. For like 10 years I had completely self-medicated that feeling away so when it came back, it came back with a vengeance and suddenly I felt incredibly motivated to start trying new things and expanding my horizons.
Maybe your change in personality is just that? Your body and mind are finding new ways to entertain themselves now that the reward center in your brain has had time to return to normal, and your life has opened up new opportunities now that it's no longer structured entirely around drinking.
- The boredom and accompanying loneliness sucks ass. The boredom was the first thing that hit me and our situations seem nearly 1:1.
  And yeah, the boredom is probably a key factor in my personality change and I didn't make that connection. The loneliness absolutely is too. ie: All my drinking buddies seem to have disappeared and I wasn't quite prepared for that, TBH. (I knew it was a thing already though.)
Do you every so often have periods of depression? I was undiagnosed Bipolar until my 50's. Many Bipolar (over 60%) Self medicate. I'm not doing a diagnosis here, just explaining that what you describe rings a bell. Bipolar can be a bitch to diagnose, and since the heightened well being never worries, and the depression cycles can be very short, it's often overlooked.
Do you spend impulsively? Take risks; financially sexually, other types?
Just in case this may be helpful.
- It's more anxiety that can cause my depression and my anxiety and depression is only a shadow of what it once was since quitting the booze.
  Most of that stems from ADHD and the bubble of problems that come from that. It could be possible that some ADHD'isms have simply gotten the chance to blossom fully over the last couple of years.
  
  I also have ADD. Nice combo, no? ;)
  You do know that ADHD people also have a very large percentage of substance abusers? Self medication...

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