I can't afford treatment.
 

What do I do? Not eligible for govt. health insurance or welfare type stuff, any ideas?

The Salvation Army offers free rehab programmes in many parts of the US
The Salvation Army Family Stores: Rehabilitation Program

This is a national database of rehabs - enter your general location and then hit the select services button - you can refine your results to payment type etc

Substance Abuse Treatment Facility Locator

D

Every state has a county run rehab/detox that works on a sliding scale.

How serious are you about getting and staying stopped?

Help is out there :)

Other than for detox treatment is not a necessity and even detox can be supervised by a physician if one is not too bad off. Create your own "treatment plan". Most people get sober without treatment, AA, or any other formal program. There is not single most effective way to do it other than to quit drinking. Treatment gives one time in a safe environment, but there are other ways you may arrange this also. Remember, lack of treatment is not reason not to get sober.

I couldn't afford treatment either. I also had little ones, so "going off" to treatment was not feasible in my case. Like totfit said, I made a "treatment plan". I still follow it to this day (with adjustments, of course). I posted it on SR.

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. That's what happened to me.

AA has helped many millions stop and stay stopped. In the beginning the more meetings the better and they are free until you can make a donation your comfortable with, say 50 cents or whatever. Reading a lot of posts here are quite beneficial also. KEEP COMING AND BE WELL

Go to hams network , look up odds of having alochol
Withdrawal .

Good starting point .

Think I'm going to do the whole taper down thing, I'll need support from this board, someone or someone(s) to hold me accountable though

I see you opted to not follow any of the suggestions offered here. I wish you luck on 'tapering'. I personally don't know any alcoholic that was successful with that method but there's always a first and I hope you find something that works for you. Keep coming and posting.

Actually I have been thinking over it for awhile, its probably my best bet right now and I have a pretty good idea on how to go about it. The most successful way for me to do it would be to not keep more beer in my house than I plan on drinking, buy it in pints, not cases, I can truthfully say I do have a degree of control when drinking, because I have exercised it before. I will be keeping a log of everything on here as I go about it.

Also, I think my situation is slightly different, I have only been drinking around 3 months, and only during evenings, at this point I could say it is right on the edge of becoming a real problem, but not quite there yet, the point in stopping is because if I don't now, it will get to a bad point. For three months it has been a 12 pack a day, every evening, a few nights I have seen myself going over those 12 and if I buy liquor I simply don't exercise self control, it's harder to tell how much you're really drinking and you end up wasted by the time you realize it's too much, therefore I have removed it from my house, a week ago in fact, and I have no desire to get any more.

I sincerely do wish you the best of luck. I can only speak from my own experience as an alcoholic. I have said many times that just because a person gets drunk doesn't make them an alcoholic. For myself I could NEVER control my drinking.

I hope Dee does not beat me up for that but if you are drinking only in the evenings and beer, just go cold turkey. That's what I did. The first 3 days will be a bit rough but then it gets much better. Tapering will only prolong the physical withdrawals and very few people taper off successfully.

Most of us held out for as long as humanly possible.

Welcome to the club.

I can't do that, the whole reason I have been drinking is to self medicate anxiety, it will flare to an unbearable point and I will cave, I don't see a problem with withdrawals being much of an issue tapering as I have cut back successfully before without any noticeable problem, it's really only a matter of determination.

great people there with big loving hearts
 

that's where some of my friends have went for a jump start on their recovery

did not cost them a dime

great people there with big loving hearts for the drunks and addicts


Mountainman

Alcoholism is, more than anything, a loss of control: I drank even when I did'nt want to. I've heard many in AA describe themselves as alcoholics (no control) from the very first drink. Alcoholism has nothing to do with how long you've been drinking.

This may not make any sense to you, but I detect an "alcoholic thought process" in your posts. It is familiar to me because I have it as well, and it has taken much time and effort (and AA) for me to overcome it. What an alcoholic thinks is reasonable, others often see as insane. It's a thinking problem, not a drinking problem. Beware half measures and procrastination.

I had to surrender my "brilliant" thinking to the direction of AA (which really IS brilliant). I finally acknowledged that I could not overcome my insanity through my insane thinking.

Best of luck and, better yet, may you be blessed with successful recovery.

And the fact is that only a small percentage of alcoholics get any treatment beyond detox. AA is full of them. Sometimes treatment merely turns people into educated drunks. I don't know anyone who has been able to think their way out of alcoholism. I was in treatment 6 times. But I stayed sober in AA.

I couldn't taper because once I had one...another one didn't seem like such a big deal, and so on, and so on.

If you have a reasonable amount of control why not draw a line in the sand? Go cold turkey and make today day one, instead of day one being potentially 2 weeks from now. Doesn't that sound exciting? If you can't buck up now what makes you think you will when you've tapered down to 2 beers at night. You're going to guzzle down those two beers within 15 minutes and then think to yourself "Man, it's still early and I don't feel sleepy yet. Perhaps a couple more...just to calm me down..."

I used a saying, "If not now then when?" If I couldn't make today day one then I knew I wouldn't be able to make it a week from today. I kept pushing my date back until I was able to make today my day one.

"down here we got our act clean yesterday, and we have plans of cleaning up our act tomorrow, but what we never do is clean up our act today."

I could never afford treatment either. But when I wanted to I was always able to find somewhere.