Holidays can be stressful in recovery. Kansas Citians share sobriety stories, offer advice

She just turned down another holiday invitation the other day, this one for an end-of-the-year party at a local brewery, because sometimes when Courtney Lewis is mingling at a business function where brews and spirits are being served, the earthy, buttery, sugary aromas spark a strong physical reaction: She wants to drink.

She used to love a really good mixed drink. Whiskey and Coke. Craft cocktails and shots, too. But Lewis is just days away from being sober eight years and has the Alcoholics Anonymous milestone chips to prove it.

In social settings like that, “you’re just trying to keep yourself calm and present in a room where you can’t relax,” she said. “Those events are meant for people to relax, but I can’t if I’m at a winery and all I’m doing is smelling the wine and white-knuckling it.”

The party invites come fast and furious this time of year. Lewis is a former Kansas City TV producer who now works for the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce where as part of her content director duties she manages social media and the group’s relationship with the media. Socializing is a part of the job.

The last couple of years she’s shared her sobriety story on the professional networking platform LinkedIn, where she encourages local businesses to find places for events “where sober employees, volunteers, friends, members, clients can have a good time too. Be inclusive.”

“Yay! Another end of year holiday social at ... a brewery and winery. No thank you,” she posted a few weeks ago. “I’m happy to volunteer and support your organization but for the love of pants, how about social gatherings at places that aren’t about alcohol?”

People with the chronic disease of alcohol use disorder are “in special danger” during the booze-soaked holidays, says Alcoholics Anonymous. They’re trying to stay sober when everything from hot chocolate to eggnog gets spiked with alcohol. And even people who don’t normally drink indulge in binge-drinking, because ‘tis the season.

“It’s just a societal norm we have here in America that holiday parties for companies or families tend to really have a lot of (alcohol) ... it’s everywhere unfortunately,” said Brit Buell, a therapist at University Health Recovery Health Services in Kansas City. “It’s kind of the way we celebrate culturally here in America. Every holiday has alcohol, has liquor.

“A lot of companies, even ones you kind of wouldn’t expect, even ones in the helping field, have alcohol around them. And it’s kind of the way we unwind during the holidays and destress because the holidays are very stressful.”

The Distilled Spirits Council of the United States says one-fourth of the spirits industry’s $49 billion annual profits are made between Thanksgiving and the New Year.

“If you notice people drink more in December, recovering alcoholics notice it a lot more.” Paul Thornton, the letters editor at the Los Angeles Times, wrote earlier this month in a commentary about what not to say to alcoholics during the holidays.

“Right now, in recovery meetings across the country, I have no doubt that participants are discussing their anxieties and coping strategies for this time of year.”

People are sharing that anxiety on social media, too, where one Twitter user recently wrote that this is their first holiday sober and “all I want to do is go home early when I go out. Anxiety when going to holiday parties. realizing how much alcohol is involved this time of yr and I feel more alone than ever.”

The holidays are stressful enough without someone in recovery feeling added social pressure of not wanting to look “different” by not drinking when everyone else is, said Buell.

“Now you’re around co-workers and afraid of judgment, afraid of looking like a failure because you’re somebody who struggles with substances or alcohol,” he said. “Maybe you haven’t told anybody or nobody really knows. So that extra stress is added to just that general stress of the holidays … and for a lot of people that can be the straw that broke the camel’s back, unfortunately.”

Heading into his eighth year of sobriety on Jan. 2, Michael Mackie of Kansas City knows those feelings well. He admits it. This time of year can be rough.

“It’s weird because my alcoholism lays dormant like 363 days out of the year, and then, out of nowhere and for no apparent reason, this time of year it is like ... in fact, one of my worst, almost slip-ups happened almost two weeks ago. It was bad,” said Mackie.

The self-proclaimed “media darling” is an entertainment writer for The Pitch and content creator and videographer for Lillian James Creative. (He’s @M2Esq on Twitter and Facebook.)

Like his friend Courtney Lewis, he readily talks about his sobriety. In a “warts-and-all” Facebook post last month he revealed the scary night right after Thanksgiving — “sure enough, it’s seasonal” — when he nearly relapsed.

“I got triggered like people do, and I just decided that I was going to be big mad about whatever made me mad and that I was going to go to bed. And as god is my witness I sat straight up in bed and thought, ‘you know what would make this all better is an ice cold bottle of chardonnay,’” he said.

“And the next thing you know, I have keys in my hand, I have locked the door behind me and I am walking to my car like a crazy person in my pajamas.

“And if it weren’t for the snap of cold weather that hit my face ... I was out of my mind. That cold snap, it was like, ‘Mackie, what are you doing?’ I can’t even describe the invisible force that was pushing me out the door to go get a bottle of chardonnay after almost eight years of sobriety.

“Well, I get it now. That invisible force is addiction, it’s alcoholism and it just lies in wait, waiting for you to have a moment of weakness, and then it pounces and then you’re out of your mind.”

‘High-functioning alcoholic’

A couple of years ago Lewis told the chamber’s event director that she was tired of having to drink watered-down Diet Cokes at business functions — at one event paying $10, the same as a mixed drink. The next thing she knew, a mocktail showed up on the menu at the chamber’s biggest event of the year. “It was YOUR idea,” a co-worker told her.

“I was moved because I felt like I had been heard and I had been listened to, and that meant a lot,” Lewis said. “It sounds small but it really means the world to me.”

“My sober heart is full,” she wrote on LinkedIn after that night. That story sparked more comments than anything she’s posted there, several coming from people who revealed they too were sober.

Last month there was another specialty mocktail offered at the chamber’s annual dinner, a festive red drink made with pineapple juice and a splash of nonalcoholic grenadine.

Lewis, mother to a second-grader, was a “very high-functioning alcoholic for a very long time and I thought that I wasn’t an alcoholic because I was killing it at work and I was winning awards and I was still active in the community, and I was showing up after partying and drinking, and as I got older it got harder to show up, not just physically at work but it got harder to show up and be present for people in my life.

“I knew it got to be a problem when I would be producing a show at my desk and I would have to throw up in an empty Coke can that I kept on the side of my desk for just such an emergency.”

She said there was no “big moment” when she realized she needed to change.

“It was a lot of little things and I started recognizing that behavior and realizing that I wasn’t making the best decisions and basically I started realizing that other people my age didn’t function like this,” she said. “And while this may not have been eyebrow-raising at 24 or 25, a 35, 36-year-old woman shouldn’t be doing this. And I just felt like it was holding me back, that I was holding myself back ... by choosing not to address my alcoholism.”

There might not have been a breaking point. But there was New Year’s Eve, the last night of 2013, when she “hurt a lot of friends” at a party.

She won free tickets to a fancy gala in town. She wore a beautiful dress. The food and live music were wonderful. She saw a lot of people there she knew. And she drank. And drank.

And drank more until around 1 a.m. she was sitting alone in a corner with a watered-down Jack and Coke feeling “very sad ... and I didn’t know what I was sad about. I just knew I was sad about something and I just kept drinking the rest of the night and it just sort of turned into me taking things out on friends and colleagues. And it wasn’t pretty.

“It just showed that .. it was a gorgeous event, it was a gorgeous evening. Everything should have just been a wonderful night out, but no matter how much glitter and beautiful lights and flowers and clinking glasses and sparkling champagne there was, I was just still a mess by the end of the evening, the same way I had turned into a mess almost every other night when I was drinking before.”

She went to her first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting two days later, on Jan. 2, and that’s been her path ever since.

She doesn’t hide the fact that she’s sober and has grown more confident speaking about it publicly because she sees more people with the same struggle. Maybe, she hopes, talking about it will inspire empathy for a family member, friend or colleague going through recovery, or change the way people think about it.

“Because you never know who’s going to see something or read something that could lead to them sharing something with you, or they could see something that you post or hear something that you say and it could kind of give them their own aha moment, and it doesn’t necessarily mean they realize ‘Oh I have a problem with alcohol,” Lewis said.

Michael’s story

Wine was Mackie’s go-to. “I would drink out of the bottle, just classy as all get-out,” he said.

Just a couple of weeks after he took his new job, already well into recovery, his boss invited him to go to a “fancy schmancy” charity event, “which, if you knew me, I would literally go to the opening of an envelope, you just need to invite me.”

Sitting on their table, waiting to be enjoyed, were five, maybe six, bottles of wine.

“And I was so triggered that I just got up and left. I was like, I gotta go. And I think (my boss) thought I had lost my ever-loving mind, because she didn’t know,” he said. “If people were having mixed drinks I would not have been bothered. But those multiple bottles of open wine on that table, I was like, I gotta go. Right now. And I did.

“Wine is my downfall. Wine is my Achilles heel. Not the booze, not beer. I can legit say I am a wino.”

The next day he told his new boss he was in recovery, “and she totally got it.”

When he was drinking, Mackie said he didn’t realize he had a problem, “like most people do. Unfortunately my problem, or what became problematic, was I was drinking alone at night after work.”

It started when he “got canned” from a local entertainment TV show and then soon after his mom died, a “weird one-two punch, a weird double whammy that really sorta spurred my drinking. It was not like my drinking was ever out of control, but I just started self-medicating after work. And that became almost an entire bottle every night.”

He drank like that for almost a year, unaware he was packing on that much extra weight until his doctor — “who I love and had seen for a hundred years” — called and told him he was overdue for his physical. Then came another gut punch.

“He informed me that I had gained, in one year, 59.5 pounds. He said ‘Michael, that is literally five pounds a month. And Michael, that takes effort. I don’t know what you are doing but you need to knock it off.’

Mackie went home, crawled under the bed covers, then went on a three-day bender, “drank myself literally into oblivion.” When he emerged from his “drunken cocoon,” he decided he was never drinking again and “that was that.” He signed up for AA.

“If my doctor hadn’t got in my face like he did ... I mean I was aware I was drinking too much, I was aware I put on weight, but I didn’t realize I was out-of-control drinking. But you know what? A bottle of wine a night, that’s pretty ambitious,” he said.

“I really firmly believe that I had low-grade depression. And I think I was seriously like the ostrich who sticks his head in the sand and just ignores everything. And I was like that for almost an entire year.”

He’s never hid that he’s a sober person and, much like Lewis, “I talk about it openly and freely,” he said. He wrote about his near-relapse last month on Facebook and made the post public.

Less than 24 hours after he posted, four “really good friends” contacted him and said they were spiraling out of control and needed help, people who “seemingly had it all together and they were circling the drain,” he said.

“Not that I’m the sober whisperer, per se, but you know what? I’m the first one to jump on the I will help you bandwagon, but you gotta want to help yourself first. You know all the spiel, one day at a time. Everything I say starts with just don’t drink. I am my own little Nike slogan. Just. Don’t. Drink.”

‘Avoid triggering family members’

At this time of year Mackie has a game plan. If he’s going to a party he’ll say something to the host — ‘Hey you guys know I don’t drink, or maybe you don’t’ — and makes sure there will be non-alcoholic drinks because, like Lewis, “if I have to drink another Diet Coke I will literally die.”

Sometimes he arrives with his own bubbly water. “It’s BYOBW, Bring Your Own Bubbly Water,” he said.

He appreciates party hosts who don’t assume that everyone is going to want a glass of wine or a beer or a mixed drink, and offer non-boozy options. It happens more frequently now. Lewis is happy that mocktails have been “having a moment,” though some counselors warn that even mocktails can be playing with fire for some people in recovery.

The holidays don’t necessarily pose a challenge for her, Lewis said, because she’ll just leave an event now if she feels uncomfortable, or not go at all. But that also means people in recovery might find themselves spending time alone at the holidays.

“I think for a lot of alcoholics this time is really challenging because it’s all about being festive with friends and families and you really don’t want to put yourself in that space where there’s a lot of alcohol,” said Lewis. “So you might stay home and might not be around friends and family.”

Staying sober at the holidays takes planning, said Buell. If, for instance, you’re not required to be at that work party where alcohol will be served, if it won’t affect your job, don’t go, he said. That’s a red flag moment. Another one is seeing family members you haven’t seen in a while — maybe because your drinking caused problems.

If you must attend, make decisions before you go, said Buell. How long are you going to stay? Who can be there with you or for you if you struggle? Who can you lean on and tell “that hey, I’m really craving something, I’m really stressed out, somebody brought me a drink and I didn’t ask for one,’” Buell said.

Alcoholics Anonymous says many people in recovery find it useful to have a helper, a friend, to go to parties and events with, to run interference when people start asking about recovery, or even plan activities that don’t involve alcohol.

A stay-safe plan should also include people to call after you strip off the party clothes that smell like alcohol, said Buell. Many recovery groups have a holiday phone list or run a crisis helpline.

Social media users have been swapping stay-sober techniques for weeks. One Twitter user and recovery advocate, @guyfelicella, recently posted: “To anyone who has a sober lifestyle or is staying sober over the holidays: what are the small but significant things you do to keep yourself sober during this season? Let’s inspire each other! I’ll start: avoid triggering family members.”

Another Twitter user and Ironman athlete @louieruvolo, 20 years sober, recommended that “whenever possible go with another sober person. Being the only one at a party who’s not drinking can be a little annoying... ok, it can be really annoying! It’s always nice to spend time with others who celebrate as you do.

“Arrive early/Leave early Gives you time to spend with the host before the crowd shows up and The later hours of a party are often fueled by alcohol which is never pleasant to be around when you’re sober.”

January and February will get busy for Buell, he said, when he’ll start seeing everyone who “has been holding it together the whole time, just kind of white-knuckling it or just unfortunately maybe they’ve been drinking or using extra heavy through the holidays.”

Relapse, unfortunately, is inevitable for anyone with an addiction, he said.

“I just really like the term that’s become popular inside recovery circles of giving yourself grace,” said Buell. “I’m just a person. Failure happens. It’s not the end of my recovery journey.”

Those are the kinds of things Mackie wants people to be mindful of at the holidays. In fact, as he spoke to The Star, Mackie was headed to a happy hour with colleagues, planning to have his obligatory club soda with lime, just like every time he goes out.

“Here I am, almost going on eight years and I’m still on the struggle bus sometimes. So I need people to be mindful of just how bad alcoholism can be,” he said.

“It is a legit illness and I want people to be aware of that. It isn’t something that just dissipates or goes away. No. This is going to be a lifetime struggle for me.”