You run a risk of cardiomyopathy which increases your risk of a cardiac event, likely more so when exercising. I’d also imagine your blood pressure is really high, and exercise will increase it (while doing it, anyway), so you also run the risk of a stroke, which could leave you severely incapacitated or dead.
I hope for your sake you do get some help.
If he doesn’t know you are an alcoholic, he is an idiot.
If he does know, he is no friend of yours.
25 years is a long time to go to a useless counselor.
Don’t worry, I suspect the integrity of your profession is 100% safe in this instance.
Loach is spot-on.
Alcoholism is not a pleasurable way to live.
I knew a guy who was drunk all winter, every winter. When spring was coming he’d cut back as he lined up jobs (he painted house exteriors). Eventually he’d be sober and working his ass off.
He worked hard as long as the weather was good. Rainy days he spent maintaining his gear, giving estimates, making phone calls. He lived frugally.
After his last job of the season he would start drinking again, living off the money he’d made painting. He lived like that all through his 30s and 40s, dying at 52. He always seemed happy, wether he was sober and painting or drunk.
Isn’t the main reason most alcoholics fall off the wagon again and again the fact that they are less happy without the booze?
I don’t think the poles “happy” or “unhappy” quite cover the range of biological and pyschological factors at play in alcoholism. The alcoholic I knew best (died at 46) had issues that she was unwilling to face. As family, we knew what they were, but they didn’t make any sense: her views were cartoonish and quite childish.
Long story short, I think there were issues from a few directions (cognitive, personality, psychological) that meant she really wasn’t equipped to face challenges. Substance abuse helped her in the short term, killed her in the medium term, and of course there was no long term.
Which is why I feel compelled to say something in threads like this. If you’re not dead, you can do the hard work of change. It is hard but it will be worth it, and people will help you.
Not really, no. Happens with some too be sure, especially in early recovery or when complicated by inadequately treated depression. But a lot of relapses happen when us alkies are sober and feeling real good, and we think " I know what will make me feel even better! Besides, I’m sure I’m a normal drinker by now." It’s the nature of the disease.
My experience as well.
A drunk dying at 52 died hard. Your body just doesn’t suddenly shut off. That was many years of pain whether he showed it to the outside world or not.
I want to know if you have a family and a job? If you do, how can you maintain either?
I’d say it’s complex and varies by the individual (as do most things in life), but @Qadgop_the_Mercotan’s take was correct for me when I fell off the wagon last year. That said, for others I have met, it could just be basically any extreme emotion: wanted to add to a celebratory feeling by drinking (and feeling, oh, I could do just a couple and not fall out of control – and some people can do this, but it’s uncommon – like I said, everyone is different). For others, it can be a feeling of pain (low distress tolerance) and knowing that something easy and available is at hand that they know will temporarily soothe the pain. The danger is falling back into that cycle of drinking, feeling a bit crappy after drinking and then drinking more to stop feeling like crap, feeling good again, feeling like shit again, and you’re cycling back into right where you left off, with progressively more and more drinking to stave off the negative after-affects of drinking. I don’t think it’s so much not feeling happy as falling back into a cycle of behaviors that is more-or-less hardwired into you, wether by birth or by neural pathways that have been engrained into you after many years of hard drinking habits.
But with most people I’ve met with these issues (including myself), it’s been a positive event, combined with a feeling of “oh, I’ve got this” – a celebratory excuse – that was the initial push off the wagon. Not exclusively so, as self-medication after a distressing affect (death of a loved one, for instance) can also be observed in the folks I know that drove them back down into the bottom of a bottle (or their substance of choice.)
It’s complicated.
Did you consider he might be useless because you were sabotaging your own therapy?
OP has a lot of weird theories about booze and working out, and the self-declarative outcomes. To each his own. Not sure the point of this thread as you clearly don’t want real help.
I think this is one of those threads with a made up story for our shock value. Just my opinion of course.
Yeah, there is defiantly some things that don’t jive with my BS detector.
Alcoholics routinely drink amounts that would literally kill a normal person. It’s like the difference between a couch potato and a professional athlete, if drinking was a sport.
Alcoholics also need alcohol in their system to simply function, and can act, work, train etc. surprisingly “sober” when heavily drunk, as per blood alcohol. The world record DUI is over 1.5 times the lethal amount of alcohol in normal humans.
The OP may or may not be true, but it’s not impossible.
The lack of withdrawal on days he’s not drinking make me suspect a bit of BS, but who knows. We’re all different.