I'm an alcoholic

Good luck man. Good steps too!!

I hope you can get something out of AA. I forced myself to go many times and hated it just as much the nth time as I did the first time. I'm not just trying to ironic or funny when I say that going to AA actually made me want to drink more. But, if you can get something out it, then go for it.

ya, i had a friend who bailed on AA after one session and instead just found a therapist to talk to.

AA can be great if you find a mtg that suits you. meetings can vary widely depending on who's there. they can be really fun or serious. they can lean heavily on the higher power stuff or barely mention it. the one consistent thing that I've noticed are that they are very welcoming and non-judgey. definitely worth giving it a shot. good luck!!!!

good luck! my little brother OD'd over ten years ago and has been using AA to stay clean ever since. i know several people that have maintained sobriety thru AA, it can definitely be a big help. especially if you travel often, you can find AA meetings pretty much everywhere.

Yeah aa isn’t for me - I want to quit drinking, not join a cult thx - and it can be a bit annoying when it’s pushed as THE treatment to the point of crowding out more effective/appropriate things. Luckily here in the uk there are a ton of group therapy programmes on the nhs that have nothing to do with 12-step doctrine - you sometimes get a tiny bit of culty talk from some members but on the part of the ppl running the sessions it’s not like “you must follow this method a couple of randos came up with a century ago”, it’s more about practical evidence-based advice. I can’t say I got much from Inclusion on the whole, I barely saw my case worker & never got the drugs I was supposed to get but the groups I attended were helpful I think. “Welcoming and non-judgey” about sums it up

i dont think i’m getting a ton out of AA, but my work wanta me to go and the people there are pretty interesting/funny and hey its a place to go that doesnt involve booze (generally, that is... apparently a guy got 86d the meeting before i joined because he was sauced)

I did AA for five years and it saved my life, and I needed every meeting I went to & am grateful for my time there.

huh there was a v drunk dude at one of the first meetings i went to and i was like OMG!!!! and nobody else even batted an eye.

i think it's totally possible to benefit from AA meetings without doing the 12-step program. It's just a nice place to sit and meditate and listen to ppl talk and I just about always walk away with a new insight into my own issues. i think maybe the meetings I go to are pretty low-key on The Program and especially the higher power talk.

this guy was apparently yelling and threatening people

Back in Reno, on the recommendation of my psychologist, the first AA meeting I ever went to was inside a casino. It was weird. It was upstairs, away from the gambling floor, in the area with meeting halls and such. Still, you literally had to walk past three or four bars to get there. And in the casino, the bars are always open. This particular meeting was Sunday morning at 9am. I guess it was mainly held for people that were staying in the hotel portion of the facility. I guess my therapist thought it would be a good idea to just sit in with a bunch of tourists. Less of a chance of bumping into someone I knew, maybe. I don't know.

I think, ultimately, I didn't get anything out of it because I had had my moment of clarity and stopped drinking before I even set foot in a meeting. I don't want to say I was "better" than the program, but I walked out of every meeting I went to feeling like I had regressed. I had already made the decision to stop drinking, so that wasn't really a problem for me. But, like I said earlier, being around those people and hearing nothing but (what I interpreted to be) depressing stories made me feel worse.

But, yes: that is a very good point — all of my uncomfortable feelings came from within. Everyone that I encountered in those meetings, regardless of where the meeting was or how many people were there, was always completely welcoming and empathetic. I had to get a little note card signed off for proof of attendance for a while for work and that was never an issue. It was always done gladly with a smile.

AA probably just helps a subset of alcoholics: those who drink to self-medicate psychological issues stemming from emotional isolation.

I viewed the actual Steps, including the higher power talk, as somewhat arbitrary and probably not that important. What was important was just getting into a room with empathetic others, and working one's way through the guilts and resentments that brought (at my estimate) 80% of the long-term attendees there.

Well guess what I fell off the wagon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60Wz-FSF-nk

Don’t beat yourself up. Happens to lots of ppl everyday. Think about why it happened and whether or not you really want to get back on the wagon. If you don’t want to, it’s very hard to make it happen. If you do want to, you’ve got some work to do.

on the cusp of a week of sobriety! that sounds small, but not for me who was up to a twelve pack of like pale ale/IPA a day and a daily heavy drinker for years before that. there's the cliche that you have to want to quit. i did treatment and stuff but secretly didn't want to quit before, but now i finally do. i get why it's a cliche.

i was having dark thoughts about what my funeral would be like while drinking beer in bed at 5am before calling in sick to work and shit and realized this absolutely had to stop and my life was literally on the line. and when i did make it in i'd get afraid i was going to have a seizure from withdrawals at work.

in order to get on track i quit my job which was driving me insane (mon-fri, 9-5, with maybe 20 minutes of actual work throughout the day, at best- that's enough to drive anyone insane), underwent medically supervised detox (yeahhh valium) then holed up at my brother's house for the weekend to get away. i've made a two week sober calendar so my days are packed and it's been great. i make it a goal to submit at least one job application a day, go to two AA meetings a day, and i've started eating again, and sleeping well!

i figure it's time to dig into my savings and make myself right. i couldn't fake it anymore.

Wow! Good for you for taking these steps!

truly, i do not think i am a solitary cube 9-5 salary man. i like talking to people or having a tangible task. so in addition to looking within my field i've pursued some leads that are a complete 180 through friends like customer service at an art museum (weird schedule which would help me get to meetings, and have me working on weekends so i wouldn't sit around drinking all day) or harvesting lettuce and tomatoes all day at a hydroponic farm. and i always thought being a mailman wouldn't be so bad, pays okay, probably a pension of something, you have a tangible task to complete, get to go walk around around the city, i dunno it sounds like you could make it walking meditation.

i even googled 'garbageman salary' lol. idgaf it's my life

oh- the last irony of it all! i qualify for unemployment insurance which would technically be a significant pay cut- however, with all the money i was wasting on booze and the attendant shit like takeout and delivery and stuff it'd roughly equate to the same income. lol

gt i am very happy for you, that is amazing

Good job gt that’s huge.

Can’t go a day without 3-6 beers - I dont get drunk anymore but it’s like a comfort thing. Did get drunk last weekend and it was scary how wasted I was ...of course it was while making a new friend, probably why I don’t socially drink with new people

Very happy to hear your update global.

congratulations global!! you sound like you are really approaching this life change with a new attitude
i am especially glad to hear you are eating and sleeping again. you are going to feel so much better!! in so many ways. great work!

Hi everyone, I fucked up my life real good. Got any books to recommend? Yes I'm gonna go to AA although I'm sure I will hate it, I want all the tools in the toolbox.

'this naked mind' is a good one

nothing to recommend but good luck man

best to you, sleeve

yeah good luck sleeve.

thanks y'all, appreciate it

the only book i've read about being an alcoholic is drinking: a love story but it's v good. <3 to you sleeve

Take care, sleeve.

yeah, thoughts with you

Second vote for This Naked Mind. Also good rehab. SMART and Refuge Recovery are good AA alternatives. Getting sober is a pain in the ass but beats the alternative by a LOT. Also gets a hell of a lot easier with time. Good luck and keep posting; you never know who it helps.

Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering is excellent and somewhat out of the usual quit-lit model.

all the best, sleeve.

as a fair problem boozer meself sleeve I hope it works well for you pal.

echoing calz here. good luck.

One of the biggest problems is really accepting that you can't drink again. It's impossible to imagine life without. This sense of impossibility is what the phrase "one day at a time" is supposed to combat. It's like someone has brought in all the food you're going to eat in the next year. It's filling up the room, piled high to the ceiling and after being told you'll be consuming all of it a certain feeling of despair is natural. At that point you need to remember that you've already eaten several rooms full of food. Our relationship to the present doesn't call for imagining 30,000 barren days of no drinking. And when you do imagine your future that way you're leaving out some very important things you cannot know: all the good things that will fill up those days, things you are completely blind to now.

When you get sober you're going to start appreciating things you've been completely numb to. You'll be raw, like a newborn. Your senses will come alive. Emotions will resurface. You'll have to relearn how to do things you learned while drunk. Be patient with your new incapacities (usually things like socializing). It takes a long time for your brain to heal. The way you feel for those first six months or the first year is not the endstate. That's why you can't draw conclusions like "so this is how it's going to be from now on." That kind of thinking is going to make you miserable, and it will make you relapse. Your brain has stopped making certain chemicals because you've been bringing them in from the outside. Those areas come back online but it takes awhile. So, there's depression at first. You can outlast it.

As mentioned on another thread, I am struggling with booze. I never struggled until I tried to cut back/quit! Then it became weird and insidious, the drinking. Saturday night I brought a bottle to a friend’s bday party and got through half of it on my own. Didn’t drink last night and don’t plan to again.

What is hardest for me is just the sight of normal folks enjoying a drink... a patio with pints is the nicest thing to see on a hot afternoon. I tend to tell myself “they are drinking poison”, act (correctly) as if they are doing something that I myself am allergic to. I don’t have any serious allergies but I just think it: “you cannot do that thing”.

I’ve been very successful in staying off the booze. I think a lot of it is that my body reacts totally differently nowadays. Might be the meds I’m taking but I just end up feeling bloated and crappy when I have more than one drink, none of the electricity of the past.

good luck, friends

my drinking was a bit problematic earlier in the summer. like having one day off the booze in the space of a week, being hungover as hell at work day after day. i fell out out my bed one night and my gf had to rouse me from the floor because i hadn't woken up from the fall and just was content to sleep there. i didn't drink for 4 weeks this month. got drunk on saturday to break the fast. i can find an equilibrium sometimes, between too much and abstaining. like - just at weekends, just a bit drunk not shit-canned. but then invariably things will eventually get worse. of course when i abstain i also feel bad, but as del's quote says, id probably feel better further down the road.

Best indeed, sir.

sleeve, maybe check out lifering? Or rational recovery (Buddhist based). I’ve found NA meetings to be a lot better than AA meetings, in my limited experience.

No book recs, apart from like Pema Chodran and stuff not directly related to addiction

<3

Good luck, sleeve.

I had a much longer post that I deleted. But after reading del and flambo's posts (which have been posted since I last looked), I wish I had kept it. Main point is that I didn't think I was an alcoholic back when I was drinking, but I'm two years mostly dry and I'm realizing that the life choices I made and habits that I ingrained under the influence of booze are still having ripple effects for me now.

^^^ bingo, and thanks dude

I quit for a week in early July and seriously cut down, I lost ten pounds. So hey that's at least something under my belt. Then I had too much at the Mekons show in late July and partially blacked out the end of the evening :(

I'm sure my reduced consumption had a lot to do with that, but wow that's happened like 2 times in my whole life, the other was when I was a dumbass 17-year-old on cheap white wine

just out of curiosity how much were y'all drinking on a day to day basis?

I don’t have any serious allergies but I just think it: “you cannot do that thing”.

this is me and romantic relationships -- but at least i am fairly able ~now~ to drink in moderation -- sometimes i slip up (like Friday night). Anyway, best wishes!

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