The worst feeling is waking up in the morning and discovering that you are apparently timesharing your body with a crazy, sick person bent on self-destruction. I’m like, go kill yourself somewhere else, I’m trying to live here.
Classic alcoholic thinking:
7:00 A.M. Fuck this, I’m never going to drink again.
4:00 P.M. It wasn’t really that bad last night.
6:00 P.M. I’ll just have a glass or two tonight.
6:45 P.M. Fuck this, I’ll drink as much as I want tonight and start afresh tomorrow.
There’s a way out of this.
At this point it’s like “Well, here it comes again.” But it’s not every night. That’s one thing that baffles me. Why some nights and not others?
Today I am going to tell my wife that I just need to be under continuous observation from 8PM to bedtime, I just can’t be down in the mancave “doing the taxes” unsupervised anymore.
That banning was hardly your fault. Not even close.
Why don’t you go to a therapist? Not just a substance abuse one. Someone who can help you get to the bottom of why you are binge drinking a couple nights a week.
Good question. Not a bad idea, I consider therapy from time to time. I just suspect there probably are no reasons. I did have reasons, but those are in the past, and now it’s just a dumb ingrained habit.
She is not responsible for your drinking or your sobriety, and it is wrong for you to try to make her responsible.
Chill out, judgy-pants. I am not making her responsible. I am confessing the depth of the problem and asking for her help in a specific way. Asking assistance from somebody in my own home who cares about me seems like something to try before I reach out to random strangers.
I think you’re trying to identify the conditions that lead you to binge drink on some nights but not others. I’m not sure that works. Binge drinking is just the way you drink. It may not happen every time you drink, but when it happens is not under your control. Stop trying to analyze it to death and deal with it.
Yeah, I wouldn’t set your wife up as monitor. That’s unfair to her and to your marriage. It’s not her job to control you. And it won’t help you–drinking when your wife isn’t home is the likely result.
A sponsor can help keep you accountable. But really, you have to be the boss of you.
ETA: not random strangers–other alcoholics.
If the pattern of drinking you have described in this thread is typical, what you are asking her to do is deeply unfair. There is a reason they call alcoholism a family disease. There’s also a reason that Al-Anon exists.
OK, fair point.
Thing is, while being physically and psychologically dependent on alcohol is not a moral failing, it tends to skew your vision of what is a normal and acceptable way to live. That’s what the first of the 12 steps is really asking people to look at.
The beauty of the sponsorship tradition in AA is that, like therapy, you can tell everything to someone who is not there to judge you, but at the same time is there to call you out on your crap. In the case of AA, it’s someone who has been through the same process.
Gosh darn to heck. It really would have been the bees knees if you had found that video.
It very well could just be an ingrained habit. I also had a habit of binge drinking a few times a month. I am not an alcoholic and have never been dependent on alcohol. However, I didn’t like how I acted when I was drunk and some of the choices I made when drunk. The day after was miserable too.
The key for me was to establish new habits. One way I did that was to schedule things to do at times when I previously might have been tempted to get drunk. For example, Friday and Saturday nights are often the nights I was drinking too much. So for a while I made plans early Saturday morning where I could not be hungover, typically athletic things. In about month these new habits took hold and I am much happier doing things like this. Just a thought…
I really like that song. It’s one of my favorites. I was disappointed that I couldn’t find a video. I thought most every song nowadays (I’m old) had some video associated with it that you could find on Youtube. This is the first song I have not been able to find on Youtube.
With all due respect, HMSI is almost surely an alcoholic. He definitely thinks like one.
When you were binge drinking, did you tell yourself you had to stop, only to drink again and again? Did you try to control the amount you drank and fail repeatedly? Did you try to fool people about how much you drank? Did you drink out of your dinner partner’s glass when he or she was in the bathroom? Did you frequently choose drinking over socializing? Did you make sure you had enough booze in the house to preclude needing to go out for more mid-drunk? Did you spend a lot of time obsessing about drinking and not drinking?
HMSI isn’t just waking up with a hangover. He’s waking up in despair.
I found this one site. But everytime I click on “Play”, it gives me some kind of error message.
There’s a version by Mary Gauthier on Youtube. Be warned, though, it’s about the most depressing thing, musically or otherwise, that you are likely to see today.
I don’t think you are in a position to say if he is an alcoholic or not. He is definitely in despair, but it’s very possible he is using alcohol to medicate the issue that is the root of the despair. If he deals with that issue, the drinking could very well lessen. It is possible to learn to be a moderate drinker. Maybe not for you, but that doesn’t mean that’s the case for everyone.
It is fair to say that I think, act, drink, and smell like an alcoholic. But thread title notwithstanding, I prefer not to self-label that way, it just feels depressing and defeatist. Right now my biggest non-alcohol issue in life is boredom and feeling too constrained by work & family responsibilities to address it. Just wanted to clarify that, not to derail the conversation about whether there are different ways to stop or reduce drinking.
Today is an “absolutely physically unable to drink” day, so I guess we’ll see what tomorrow holds.