I'm an alcoholic

so, then, how does one figure out "whether they're chemically dependent (alcoholic) or not?"

Pretty sure the answer is in whether or not you experience withdrawal symptoms when you stop drinking.

x-post - and yeah I don't think that is true at all either

it's not

chemical dependence can be induced if you drink enough for long enough, the predisposition in yr soul may be a bit more complex than a simple genetic trigger. i know there are lots of professionals who do great work for their clients and change lives and save lives but i am wary of any simple causal account for all problem drinking, and wary of a hard line between alcoholism and problem drinking to be honest

situation plays so much of a part in all addictive or self-destructive behaviour

wary of a hard line between alcoholism and problem drinking to be honest

same

btw by way of update, i've mostly done well here--this has been a bad week, and i've found myself suddenly called to drinking in inappropriate places at inappropriate times, but my measured roll off has gone well overall and even my slips backwards have been unusu,ally cognizant and self-aware: "do you really want to drink this right now, knowing you'll feel fine in 30 minutes if you don't?" i've yet to decide how much this helps. but i have a better sense than ever of what drives my problem drinking, and i think that's a valuable thing.

good luck, hoos.

chemical dependency is imo in the big picture not a huge reason for the existence of addictions.

so i rolled backwards hard this week. drank at work. went through a bottle of rye in two nights at home. had a flask of bulleit saturday afternoon, then a friend came over and we had beers and i must have switched back to whiskey because at a certain point my memory stops and i woke up in bed in all my clothes with a text from aforementioned friend that i'd been an asshole the night before and they didn't want to see me for a few days.

set em up, knock em down. let's try again.

part of the process

onward ho!

I feel lucky that my stomach won't let me black out. Before I can make really bad decisions I start puking.

baby steps hoos <3

some great posts on this thread. puffin and sleepingbag, thanks. hoos i wish you all the best because you are a great poster and seem like a great guy too.

I feel lucky that my stomach won't let me black out. Before I can make really bad decisions I start puking.

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Monday, August 24, 2015 1:18 AM (12 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oh yeah, keeps my drinking in check for sure.

I ordered a book called "Refuge Recovery" by one of my favorite Buddhist teachers that sort of remakes AA around the Four Noble Truths & the Eightfold Path. Really looking forward to it, and restarting my long dormant meditation practice.

:( Sorry to hear about your faux pas Hoos; as someone who used to date a substance abuse therapist and enjoyed the little bits of secondhand info I picked up re: cognitive behavior therapy (her preferred approach), I find your ability to think like this

"do you really want to drink this right now, knowing you'll feel fine in 30 minutes if you don't?"

Just remember -- & hopefully you don't need to be told this, because you seem like a very self-aware dude, but I will say it just the same -- there will be times when it's hard for you to see or feel good about the progress you have made, but no matter what, you are ALWAYS on the road to recovery, and the work you put in to get you this far is in no danger of being lost. The mistake you made was simple overexertion: you put too much pressure on a part of yourself that is still growing and finding its way. But the sober part of you is only getting stronger! <3

at a certain point my memory stops and i woke up in bed in all my clothes with a text from aforementioned friend that i'd been an asshole the night before

saw this friend tonight, got the story--mortified. i said i was "angry" that they'd started seeing someone else, then tried to tip over some bit of furniture on our front porch. i hurt my hands doing it, which explains the scratches on my hands in the morning. they put me to bed, fixed the furniture, then went home. amazed this friend is still taking my calls.

and bernard, thank you. your encouragement means a lot.

i moved from my cubicle to an office today, and the former officeholder left me half a bottle of rum as a "housewarming gift." i put it in a drawer. got some very bad news in the afternoon, and a friend on gchat talked me through getting rid of the rum instead of drinking it.

All's I can say is that diet citrusy soda (or non-diet) can help at night b/c it feeds sugar to your brain. When I'm on the road a lot, I don't drink beer at all, yet I'll go for Diet 7up or whatevs and it'll fulfill the need.

Whenever I went thru dry periods at hot, diet or non-diet non-caffinated soda helped fill my brain's need for sugar.

Funny you should say that. I don't consider myself an alcoholic but I have enough hereditary bullshit that my 2(+) beers nightly (or near-nightly) were starting to indicate some health problems. I foreswore any alcohol for about a month or so, and in the last 4 months have drank about what I would have over a 2 week period. The key to it all has been diet 7-Up, which I now worry I'm drinking way too much of. Anyway the point is it has worked for me.

Yeah, at some point, as long as yer drinkin' soda or diet soda, you're probably better off than the heavy beer load. Alton Brown talked about trying to deny his brain sugar at night, which helped him not chug beer as much.

Hoos - so sorry all that happened, but hope the missteps become part of your path to a healthier situation. You may want to save the associated texts as a reminder of why you shouldn't get out of control.

Congrats on the office, but sheesh - these days it's vanishingly rare even for journalists to have Desk Booze. I speak as a former practitioner both of newspapering and office drinking. It's been twenty years since I encountered a workplace where it would have been an acceptable thing to be open about.

In any case best of luck to you, hope you get more control over things soon.

hi.

don't fucking hug me, don't try to hold my hand.

i hate AA.

whoa hey we got james frey up in here

Hypothesis: Going to any kind of meeting (book club, rotary club, knife fighting club) is just as helpful for alcoholics as an AA meeting. It's about filling in that hole, finding stuff to do/meaning in life/fulfillment that takes the place of the booze crave

But of course, nothing can substitute talking fellow alcoholics.. maybe alcoholic knife fighting club then

talking to fellow alcoholics. geez.

Not really. One can admit things to a fellow addict(s) one wouldn't admit to the book club or knitting circle. Making some human connection is much faster than for other shared "interests".

right. i'm just saying it can't be the only thing, i guess.

and tbh i'm kind of "talked out" at this point, have had my fill of bonding with other alcoholics for awhile.

not that i think i won't need that support ever again

have had my fill of bonding with other alcoholics for awhile.

nb: not on this board, just irl

the refuge recovery program and an attendant deepening of my buddhist practice have been really invaluable for me in the last 2 months sober. finally finishing my 'inventory' has been really hard and (uh) sobering as i've had to confront the ways this stuff has manifested not just in my recent past but throughout my life. it's been eye opening, heart opening. i'm learning a lot.

facing being human is the whole show. sounds like you are deep into it right now. you'll know it's getting better when you laugh.

btw, I'm not sure why monster mash revived this thread, but it sure looks like a pointless hit-and-run of a revival. wassup?

Maybe it's an explanation/apology for why he's pissing all over the Joanna Newsom thread.

I'm happy to go on record to say that most "alcoholics" are probably more in need of a scrip for naltrexone, a good (really good) therapist (who won't obsess or get overly distracted by the alcohol use disorder symptoms), followed by a psychiatrist who will write a scrip for something that will actually start to resolve the root cause issue(s).

AA is trash. There is no science that proves that it works for any appreciable percentage of people. We have a few famous anecdotes and maybe some of us have a few anecdotal relatives for examples. Basically nobody talks about the millions of people that AA has failed.

That's a little strong I guess. AA does work for some people. But the prevalence of the idea that it deserves to be the first preferred option for treatment is pretty much the worst.

Does AA fail any more often than other alcohol addiction treatment programs that are run on a shoestring by volunteers?

Probably about the same!

Having spent about 10 years around the recovery culture (rehabs, meetings, halfway houses, relapses, repeat repeat) I don't know that I've ever heard anyone claim that the 12 Steps failed them. But it's chicken/egg -- the program claims to work only for those who "work it", as in follow all 12 steps, a program which is so rigorous and involved that you can't complete it unless you've pretty much ceased abusing your substance chronically.

I've probly mentioned this before, but I'll rep for Smart Recovery, which is far more CBT-based and doesn't involve the potential for self-fulfilling labels:

http://www.smartrecovery.org

It's helped me out a lot.

yeah, smart really got me going & refuge kinda wedded the CBT to a buddhist framework i was more instinctively comfortable with--can recommend both to folks so inclined.

I did a yearlong group outpatient program through my medical provider. Helped a ton. CBT stuff, relaxation techniques, info about addiction, no moralizing. I used to drink heavily every night, now I drink a little every few months. I'm still a dunce, though. But I'm happier than I've been in a very very long time.

i should also say i'm on zoloft, which has REALLY helped the transition to occasional drinking. underlying depression, anxiety, blah blah. turns out you can't really drink if you want these pills to be effective.

Counterpoint: Zoloft drove me to drink (after 6-7 years, granted).

Probably also worth mentioning that I'm back on Lexapro after 5 years off--I think the renewal of meditation, sobriety, anti-depressants, and a clutch of new friendships all coming in at once have worked wonders for me overall.

I don't normally do longish posts and am pretty fucking shit at them, but this is what it is and it has been bothering me.

There is this dangerous person I grew up with who is possibly a psychopath. I don't have a FB account but about 5 years ago an old friend informed me he was using FB to stalk people and his latest tactic was maintaining a faux recovering alcoholic narrative to elicit sympathy or draw vulnerable people into his grasp, and one lass we went to school had bought this routine and had moved in with him. Just a couple of months later it was on the front of the local rag that he had subjected her to a violent assault that required hospital treatment, it was reported that he headbutted her and smashed her face into a coffee table.

Anyone who is switched on knows the guy is a menace. He has a history of extreme duplicity, fraud, theft and there are other far more unsavoury things. One example is when my niece (who was 11 at the time) told me he was asking her for naked pics on FB . I went crazy with my sister for not shopping him to the cops, but she didn't want to make a scene.

I say he is a psychopath because when I was 15 years old he once stole some of my paper-round money from my bedroom so I went to his house and threatened it back out of him. His mother complained that I was a thug, my mum retorted "well, he is a thief" and then she admitted he had a diagnosis of something like, erm from memory "psychopathic personality disorders" and had already been stealing from his granddad, who was in the latter stages of senile dementia.

I know alcoholics and drug addicts and am quite a heavy boozer myself and have a very good instinct for gravitating towards other boozer types. This fucker has never been an alcoholic and would make it look like hard work to become one. Some alcoholics drink Carling, but usually 10-20 a day at least.

His next move (after the violent assault) was to do a confessional piece in the local rag, cynically to wash away his last heinous crime. It is a criminally terrible piece, even by local rag standards. It contained no reference to his previous violent assault, nor the headline quote from the time "I will beat you all night long", just a lot of faux angst bs from a violent psychopath trying to stamp his own bullshit narrative on his own appalling history without taking any responsibility.

I am going off on this because this fucker has recently set up a local addiction support group on the premise that he is a recovered addict (which is patent bullshit) "who wants to put something back into the community". I dread to even contemplate how dangerous, or even useless he would be in the vicinity of vulnerable people looking for help.