I wrote about family, I wrote about habits, I wrote about ADHD. But how does this impact my current state of mind regarding my journey to sobriety?

Well, Today I am lying sick on my couch, not being able to do my sports or other activity that normally would regulate my mood and hormone levels in a way that I can keep it in tolerable ranges.

I haven’t been sick in 2 years and it bugs the heck out of me, because I am unable to pursue what defines my identity (identity formed by your habits, a chapter in James Clear’s “atomic habits”). I now find out how this can turn into a cloven hoof.

What do I take out of it? Reflect on the path so far and learn from it. And that includes tying new knots in my system of insights and how I can incorporate them into my habits, without crying wolf at myself for not doing what I should do, because I can’t at the moment.

So, where do my combinations and relation-knot-tying come down to?

I think I realized, with the last post still echoing in my mind, that family system and family biography has still a bigger influence on my identity than I thought and that lead to the fact that I have still a long way ahead of me to firstly change habits to get firmer in my own identity and secondly wo accept aspects of my identity that I shouldn’t (or even don’t want) to vanish.

ADHD has (not outspoken, but very clearly) a big influence in my family tree: My grandfather and my mother show a lot of traits that speak for ADHD, and their way of dealing with it in their own life or passing their thoughts and values and anxieties through education to their descendants. And it makes it very probable, that I have ADHD myself, because my kids have it too. But even if I don’t have it, the way it is incorporated in my family (or at least the symptoms that have strong similarity to ADHD in my mother and my grandfather) it has a lot of implications of how I can and will deal with it in the future and how it explains why I had been an alcohol addiction in the first place.

The insights I got out of it, the experiences I made recently (including forming new habits to shape my identity) and the way I am going to deal with these aspects, through reading, contemplating and trying out, is very helpful for future dealing, also in education. So this has an implication for my kids and (maybe) their kids as well.

The takeaway is for me today, that even in the felt backlash of sickness I can take a good impetus to take improved paths in the future. Taking a step back is always a good thing to have a look at the wall you can’t break through and see, from a distance, another door you could go through. Or: When one door closes, a window opens. You just have to see it and find a way to get there, instead of standing with your head to the wall, complaining about not getting farther. Help is always recommended, if you can’t make it on your own. This is why it is so important to…

…never lose the faith in yourself and take one step at a time.