'Maybe you never really stopped Dan'
Well maybe you didn't, but who cares? If you white knuckled it or not really doesn't matter dearheart. You quit drinking for some months and then you did what comes so naturally for us drunks. You drank! Whether you thought you were cured/didn'tcare/lostyourfaith/gotHALT/thoughtyoucouldsneakone doesn't really matter. You drank because YOU COULD!
That was a part of my early recovery too... To tell you the truth, my life was so messed up that even though I knew I was powerless over alcohol and my life was indeed unmanageable, I still wanted so desperately to feel some power that I would sneak into a liquor store on the way home from a meeting and sit in my car saying to myself " ahhhhhh" All I wanted was to get a little reprieve from my anxiety, depression, lonliness and ever present mind garble and I hadn't learned any other way of getting those things. Just cuz I had spent a few years trying to stay sober didn't mean I had all the tools I needed to get through those still completely chemically twisted first months without booze! The urges to drink (for whatever reason) do truly diminish and even disappear with time. Getting sober is a process.. it is not an event!
So KNOW you're gonna want a drink.. this disease is so baffling. A couple of good friends and I were talking about a really good friend who has cancer and is terminal. The first thing that went thru my mind is "if I had terminal cancer I could drink!" Howz that for a sick mind? I've been sober for a few years and still these kind of "brain farts" of my addiction still pop up in me occasionally.
I remember the brain drama I went thru in early sobriety... everything in recovery was some mystical thingy out there where I just couldn't wrap myself around it! I lost patience easily and of course, I wanted it all now. People that had one whole year amazed me... I thought any one who said that their obsession for alcohol had been lifted was some kind of bliss ninny!! It's so hard to believe how chemically fu#ked up we are in early recovery... The process
is like peeling an onion.. I have a few months more than 3 years sober and except for the occasional addiction brain fart, I rarely ever think of a drink.... but if I did I have learned the hard way to white knuckle it through that feeling and NOT act on it. If I act on it I will cross my own boundaries and my self esteem will fly out the window and I will feel doomed to be the piece of crap I once thought I was. I am determined to NOT let my past become my future again.
So ((((( DD ))))) please feel great that you and your HP had the flash of brilliance to come back to sobriety. Feel proud of yourself and even just a tad superior that you have the courage to change. It takes real guts! You will get all you want..
So whether your spirituality talks you out of it or you white knuckle it
DON'T DRINK! just because you can.
yours in sobriety,
Michele