For a very modest fee, I will stay with you 24/7 and every time you take a drink, I will smack you in the head with a rubber hammer. (taken from The Office - said by Michael Scott to Toby on the occasion of Michael going to head office to request for a raise - Note: Michael never used the word “rubber” but I think that must be specified).
Soon, you will loose all your desire to drink.
Or, you’ll learn that you have a kink you never knew about. Win-win, really.
LegsAkimbo, even if your husband won’t say congratulations, I will - well done for making the changes you need to, to be healthy!
I apologize for my preceding post. There is nothing comical about someone with a drinking problem who wants to quit drinking.
But, in my experience, if you want to quit drinking, you have to do 99.9 percent of the work yourself. If you want encouragement and help, perhaps you should try Alcoholics Anonymous.
I have been clean and sober for 19 years now. What was my motivation to stop using?
It was all fairly simple. I lost my job. I lost all my savings. I lost my spouse. I lost my family. I lost everything I had except for my apartment and I decided that I didn’t want to try the homeless experience. So, I went to see a doctor in my city who specialized in helping people with addiction problems and he got me into a 28 day program (in patient). That was not enough for me and I can’t imagine how it could be enough for anyone with serious addiction problems. (I had been using 30 years before getting clean). So I found a three month in patient program held by an agency affiliated with the Catholic Church who had an optional 3 month extension program. I stayed in their facility for 4 months and I have not used or drank any mood-alterating substance for the past 19 years. Anyway, loosing all that shit was sufficient motivation for me to get clean and sober. But, what does that have to do with you?
During my experiences I never once had a relapse. Many people who I admire greatly did have one or more relapses and recovered nicely from them and today they are clean and sober and have been clean and sober for longer than me. But, in my experience, the length of time someone has been clean and sober has little to do with the quality of their recovery.
I grew to despise people who seemed unsure of what they were doing in recovery. I remember people who said shit like this, “I’ve been drinking for ten years now and this is the third time I’ve tried to get sober and have entered a rehab program and I sure hope it will take this time.” When they said that, I would think to myself, "What the hell do you mean that you** “HOPE” **it will take this time? Don’t you want to get clean? Don’t you think that you have a part to play in this? Do you think it will somehow happen by magic? If you want it, you are the one who has to do all the work. You can’t expect anyone else to do it for you. And what the hell do you mean that you hope it will **“TAKE” **this time? Do you think recovery is something that someone does to you? Do you think that you just sit back and someone comes around and gives you a dose of recovery? That is not the way it works.
If you want to be clean and sober, you have to do it yourself. No one else is going to do it for you.
So, excuse me if I seem less than charitable in my reaction to your request for inspiration from others. You need to manufacture the inspiration by yourself. You can go to AA or NA (I personally found NA much, much better). But if you think that you can just sit back and wait for someone else to hand you a dose of recovery and “cure” you, you have got it all wrong.
Lots of my fellow addicts in recovery get really angry when I express these opinions. They do not agree with me at all. But I don’t really care. All I care about is making sure that I do whatever I need to do to stay clean and sober for the rest of today. As someone who believes that staying clean and sober is the most important thing in my life, everything else is horseshit, IMO.
That is the bottom line for me. Is staying clean and sober the most important thing in your life? Are you willing to do whatever is required to stay clean and sober for the rest of today? If you can answer yes to these questions, I would guess that you have a good chance of making a recovery. But if you can’t answer “yes”. If there is a whole lot of horseshit that you will spout first, then all I can say is, “good luck to you”.
You don’t like my attitude about recovery? If you don’t, you are not alone. All I can say is that by making staying clean and sober my number one priority, a lot of other attitudes are placed on the back burner and that seems to piss off a lot of other people. But when it comes to staying clean and sober. I have never felt I could afford to care about any of that.
Once more I need to apologize.
I failed to read this entire thread before making my previous posts and that was a huge mistake.
I want to tell you that if you want to stop drinking, IMO, this is a terrible place to talk with people about it - to look for help or support.
I’m offering you my opinions. You may very well not like them and you may very well not want to take my advice. But you asked and so I’m going to offer it to you.
Get away from this thread as quickly as you can. This is a terrible place for you to read the advice of others. I say this after reading what many other people have written. I can’t see how the posts in this thread can possibly do you any good and some of them seem extremely harmful to me.
Go to AA or NA or CA - whichever works for you. Find a sponsor or a doctor or some other professionanl to help you.
But listening to the opinions of anonymous strangers has to be just about the worst thing in the world you can do if you want to get sober and stay sober. Don’t believe me? Just ask a qualified professional to read through this thread and ask their opinon of the posts here.
What is wrong with asking for encouragement from one’s friends?
Well to be fair, I don’t like your attitude about much of anything—Your posts (here and in several other threads) seem to paint you as a garden variety know-it -all, someone who is arrogant and completely certain that her opinion is the only vaild viewpoint in the room.
A few points to consider:
Look for new ways to relax. Often people have never learned to switch off the work thoughts, and have to develop new ways to do so. Yoga and meditation have worked well for many people I know. Also just takign a long walk in the evening, or getting out to nature on the weekends.
At first your body will be prepared for that dose of sugar every evening. A great weaning tool is a bowl of ice cream right before bed. The sugar helps take the edge off the cravings, and the milk helps the body switch into sleep mode.
Even if you don’t want to join a 12-step program, some of the literature may be useful. Tool around at Hazelden Publishing: Recovery and Behavioral Health Resources
to find well-vetted recovery literature. And be careful of the Recovery section at your local book store. The majority of the stuff you’ll find there is not based upon peer-reviewed research; often it turns out to be just the musings of one or two people.
Many people are especially helped by a daily thought or dailey meditation type book. This is just a paragraph or two to read first thing each morning which helps provide a topic upon which to turn one’s thoughts when drinking comes into your mind. If thoughts about drinking do start to intrude (“obsessing”) ask yourself “If I’m not in control of my thought, who is?” Then purposefully turn your brain to a more pleasant and/or constructive topic.
Schedule your evenings. Find a topic of study, a gym class (with a specific start time) or a friend to meet (not at a bar in the beginning) for each evening of the week. Even knowing beforehand what you want to watch on TV can be helpful. Social engagements are the gold standard. Replacing the bottle with friendships is the thing that works best,a nd the reason why fellowship is so important in 12-step programs.
Prioritize fun in your life. Many people begin drinking in their teen years, and substitute drunkeness for fun for so many years that they literally do not know how to have fun anymore. It’s a viscious cycle of consuming depressants to “feel” like you’re having fun, which then sap your motivation to create actual fun, which necessitates more depressants. . . Carry a frisbee in your back-pack, go see a silly children’s movie, buy tickets to a local comedy show, rent that kayak at the local park. Whatever you would find to be fun.
Don’t worry about doing things alone. Dong the things you enjoy allows you to meet other people who like doing the same things. So don’t put off trying that new restaurant or attending that lecture because you are waiting to have a companion. Booze has been your boring, stay-at-home, lead anchor of a companion long enough. What would you do if you weren’t tied to this couch potato every day?
Above all remember this: the primary lie that addiction tells you is that if you take that drink/drug the craving will go away. The truth is that by taking it, you give the craving complete control, and knock your filter/inhibitions/selfcontrol on it’s ass. That’s why having “just one” never works. Only sober time reduces cravings. The longer you stay away from it, the softer the cravings become, until they are just thoughts, with little or no impetus behind them.
Good luck!
Well, good luck and I wish you all the success in the world. Many people manage to stop drinking in myriad ways.
But if you find that you’re unable to stop drinking despite your efforts, and you still want to stop, AA will always be available to you. I won’t attempt to sell it to you; it works by attraction rather than promotion.
But for many of us ‘low bottom’ drinkers, it works when all else failed.
YMMV, of course.
QtM, sober since 1990 via AA, after having failed to get & stay sober other ways, 1984-1990.
I’m glad that you’ve woken up to the reality of your life and I wish you all the best in making the changes you need to make that reality better for you.
I’ve never been much of a drinker, or smoker or used drugs - and I used to pride myself on that inspite of all the trauma I’ve experienced in life. Then I realized I’m just as self-abusive in a much subtler way.
What helps me get out of the cycle of thinking the same way is a little bit of role reversal. I’m pretty big on sticking up for the little guy and have found it helpful to switch roles in my head - my truthful little voice is ‘me’ and the negative thoughts are the bully who is picking on the little guy (my body). So my little voice has the strength to be a little a louder and say 'Hey, seriously? Why would you say such horrible things? That shit’s not true, fuck off." Then ‘me’ & the body talk bad about the bully - “can you believe what she just said?! who does she think she is?” It sounds a little crazy, I know - but I have a weird sense of humour because I find it a little funny to talk to myself (internally!) that way. The important thing is that it stops the destructive thoughts before they really get going.
Good luck to you.
Congrats to Joanie, Legaakimbo, Qadop and anyone else sober here for sharing. Tom made sense about taking care of the defects that got me started. I had to get sober first to figure them out. AA and NA and Alanon are all great programs if nothing else works. They gave me some much needed tools.
I was a dry drunk for 10 years. I quit cold turkey but those were some of the worst years of my life. I was irritable, restless and discontent. My second time around I did the work in the program and came out a much happier person. I was carrying a lot of pain. Steps 4 and 5 took me 3 years to do and step 9 took another year. I felt reborn.
My friend Martha died on Monday night from an overdose and I’m still sad. I have known her for 7 years and she has been in and out a lot. I never get used to hearing ‘so and so’ died from alcoholism or drugs. It is much better to hear there will be a celebration of life for ‘so and so’ who died with 20 years of sobriety.
Perciful DOS 01/02/02 after trying to get sober since 1980.