Rob Lowe’s Advice on Sobriety
Actor Rob Lowe has a warning about what it takes to quit drinking.
Benya Clark
Benya Clark
Jan 18·4 min read
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Image for post
Rob Lowe. Photo by David Shankbone via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 3.0.

Rob Lowe has spent over half of his life sober. After an infamously hard-partying youth, he quit drinking in 1990 — when he was just 26 years old — and has stayed alcohol-free ever since.

Lowe has also become an outspoken advocate for his fellow recovering addicts. In addition to working privately to help teenage addicts and their families, he is also incredibly open about his addiction during public interviews.
“You Have to Want to Do It”

Last week, on The Today Show’s Sunday Sitdown, Lowe talked about his sobriety with the host, Willie Geist. When asked how he had successfully survived after his early struggles, he credited “recovery, sobriety, therapy, [… and] hard work.”

However, Lowe also had a warning: “You have to want to do it. […] Unfortunately, no one can get healthy for their job, or for their relationship, or because of their court case, or because of mom or dad or sister or brother. They can only do it when they want to do it.”

As a recovering addict, I completely agree with this point. External motivators like work and family might add to our inspiration to get sober, but they will never be enough to get us to actually quit. Ultimately, my getting sober required a strong, internal desire.

When I was in my early twenties, I stopped drinking because the psychologist I was going to warned me that I needed to for my health. I stuck with it for a few months, but eventually went back to my daily habit. I simply had no real desire yet to get sober.

It wasn’t until about seven years later that I finally stopped drinking for good. This time around, it wasn’t because someone else had told me to quit. In fact, very few people in my life even realized that I had a drinking problem. Instead, I quit because I wanted to: I was finally fed up and disgusted by how much alcohol had taken over my life.

Having this strong desire to quit drinking still didn’t make sobriety easy, but it at least made it possible.

Of course, it isn’t just the addicts themselves who struggle with this. On the other side of things, as Lowe explained in his interview, this can be incredibly “demoralizing” for an addict’s loved ones. As much as a parent or friend might want an addict to get sober, “it’s not going to happen for you. It only happens if they [the addicts] want to do it.”

As a lawyer, I used to do juvenile delinquency defense work, which gave me a unique view at this other side of addict relationships. I regularly represented teenagers who had started experimenting with drinking and drug use at a young age. Some had already developed addictions.

The court system I worked in had a juvenile “drug court.” This provided alternative sentencing for young drug and alcohol users, which focused on recovery rather than punishment. However, if the juveniles failed to quit using drugs and drinking, they would often end up with even worse punishments than if they skipped drug court altogether.

Many teenagers saw “drug court” as an easy alternative. Their parents would often encourage them to choose it, because they desperately wanted their children to get sober. However, on the defense side, we were always extremely reluctant to recommend it.

We had seen many times that a court-ordered program was not enough to get someone sober when they didn’t actually want to quit. Far too many teenagers had made their lives more difficult by choosing drug court solely to appease their parents. If these teens weren’t really interested in sobriety, then they simply would not get through the program.

It can be incredibly frustrating to watch someone that you love or care about seem to throw their life away. Unfortunately, as Lowe says, you just can’t force someone into sobriety.
Finding Hope

There’s very little that anyone can do to push an addict towards sobriety if they aren’t interested in it. Ultimately, the addicts themselves need to want to quit. However, this doesn’t mean that there’s no hope for addicts. Once they find that desire to quit, sobriety absolutely becomes possible.

Although Lowe didn’t get into this in his most recent interview, he talked about it last year in a similar interview on the Kelly Clarkson Show. There, he told Clarkson: “The good news is that when the light goes on, there is hope. When the light goes on […] there’s definitely a great life beyond it.”

Again, this is something that I can see reflected in my own life. When I failed to quit drinking the first time around, I was dejected. I worried that sobriety might never be possible for me.

Once I found an internal drive to quit, though, I was able to find much more success. I’ve been sober for just four years, barely anything compared to Lowe’s thirty, but I’ve already seen my life rapidly improve.

I don’t believe that addicts are ever truly lost causes, no matter how much it might feel like it at certain times. Lowe’s own story proves that long-term recovery is both possible and worth the work.
Medium
Me: I have been a non smoker and non drinker my whole life long. At work, I saw how a guy became totally drunk at lunchtime and inebriated for the rest of the work day and I thought I don’t want to be like that, so I never did. Smoking, I used to steal my father’s cigarettes and smoke them whenever my parents left me home alone. This time I was horribly sick afterwards and I never smoked again.
The way to a much longer life than many is to look after your body and your body will look after “you” – as is the case with me.
We only have one life and we are a long time dead, so it makes sense to enjoy our life for as long as we can.