Truckinon

I am scared to death right now. I think it is mental illness combined with alcoholism. My life is falling apart and I don't know what to do. I have suffered with depression but this is worse, my mind won't slow down. I think about drinking to just shut it all off.

doggonecarl

I understand the fear and how paralyzing it can be. But everything you've ever accomplished in your life you accomplished by moving past the fear of the unknown into the realm of action.

Take action and recover.

totfit

I thought all kinds of things. Thought I was going crazy from time to time, either while drinking or when I did not drink. I found 90% of the issue went away after I was sober a short time even. Most of the remainder of it went away after I was sober for a while. I do of course have fears and other issues, but they don't seem like overwhelming "monsters" as they were before.

ScottFromWI

Drinking actually makes it all worse unfortunately. Alcohol is a depressant, so if you are already depressed it's like trying to put out a fire with gasoline.

Have you considered rehab or therapy? Getting some outside help to break the cycle can do wonders.

Anna

One thing you can do to slow down your mind is to focus on your body. Slow your breathing and breathe deeply because shallow breathing will encourage anxiety. Slowly focus on your body and gradually relax yourself.

Dee74

how are you doing now truckinon?

D

AdelineRose

Alcohol is actually making your depression and anxiety worse, almost all the people I know that thought they HAD to have a substance in order to numb their mind or cope with life found that after a couple weeks to a month they already were seeing a HUGE improvement in their depression, stress, and anxiety.

Have you come clean with your doctor and thought about seeing a psychiatrist and a substance abuse counselor? Although getting clean REALLY helped with my anxiety, depression, and mood swings...I needed more than just being clean since I also suffer from mental illness. It can't hurt to talk to a professional and get a psych evaluation done.

Do you have a recovery plan?

Hevyn

I'm glad you're with us, Truckinon.

Gottalife

False Evidence Appearing Real may be true but would have been a little too trite for me.

I remember one particular day at the end of a bender, holed up in my friends flat with all the curtains pulled. My father was outside calling my name. He just wanted to know I was ok. I was terrified, hiding behind a couch on my hands and knees shaking like a leaf.

Yet, in reality, I had nothing to fear. The trouble was, as a chronic alcoholic, I was something of a sranger to reality.

Zaec

I have been suffering with anxiety and panick attacks. One night I thought I was going to die and pressed the panic button for the security to come.
There were many more nights following as well as thinking my life is the worst. I was sad and depressed and considered suicide as a solution. Let me tell you, that all changed for me. I now look at life differently. My life is not bad at all. In fact through sober eyes I am actually blessed!

Give sobriety a chance and you will see this sadness and fear will lift. Remember substance abuse screw with out brains and make us think and feel all kinds of crazy stuff.

cairn

Truckin, you sound just like me. Here's what I'm discovering:

Fears attack me like paralyzing hornets...ur supposed to run when that happens. What do I do? Bunker down...sit in it...panic... ego gonna solve this - loves puzzles - look how well the intellect served - wait - umm ya that other time...once...

Self pity self loathing self centered fear self reliance self will run RIOT, though we usually sure don't like to think so!...Easier to sit self absorbed in impossible fear and guilt and shame and humiliation and helplessness than get up off the couch and make a correction, i get to just self-obsess on my absolute favorite puzzle!

We can NOT wish these things away. We can become willing to HAVE them removed. Frankly, they do suck. Willingness. Seems to me you are already doing this. Not gonna fix everything overnight, we look for patient progress, punctuated at times by severe setbacks!

Someone said to you in another thread - 'perhaps there is a better way'. Self reliance is good as far as it goes but it doesn't go far enough! Our mad scientist ego does NOT want to surrender! But nobody quits a game they still think they can win.

'We learn whenever we are seriously disturbed our first need is to quiet the disturbance.' Someone else mentioned repeating a short line that has struck us as meaningful recently. Talk things out, write things out, consider them critically, one pressing problem at a time. A *degree* of peace of mind...a degree of honesty...humility...

We discover we do receive guidance to the extent we stop demanding it on our terms. We are no longer running the show. FIRED!

Accept our selves and circumstances exactly as they are for the moment. All of us are shipwrecks and the disaster area of those who know us. There's a line in the wife or family chapter, says 'the alcoholic's past is a family asset, and quite frequently it is the only one.' What harebrained drunk ever come up with that line???! But here, how we ever going to relate to the next lost soul who the world rejects, if we have no troubles ourselves?! On that, we believe, our very lives will depend, and for that our history and present difficulties will serve us well. Self-centeredness, that, we think, is the root of all our troubles... Bankruptcy. Receivership. Restructuring. Conversion of assets. It's all good. In business, nobody trusts a man who never failed before.

Surrender. Willingness. Relax take it easy don't struggle. The right answers *will* come after we tried this for awhile. You are in good company and you know it. But your reliance must be on your own creator. For us last gaspers, either there is a cosmic Imaginary Friend or there isn't, and he is everything or he is nothing. We quit trying to run life. It wasn't working and booze about to do us in, we finally became oh, experimental in the life advice arena. lol. It totally works dude. If you think you're kicking yourself now, wait till you test it out some more. lol

Everything can be mended. Ask all through the day what our next step is to be. It's usually under our feet Then to summon the will to do it Asking our creator to show us how to be helpful to others, that our attention be directed. We're not as lazy and useless as we suspect - our energies are so tied up in inner conflict we have none left for actual right living.

Oh, there's always the pitch for 'mental illness' - not my fault - taxpayers and professionals must care for me henceforth. Drugs and a ward and a babysitter and an excuse
hmmm. Uppers, downers, middlers, and then the halidol shuffle. Brilliant. We shake down all the mighty counselors without, and ignore the one within.

It's okay to be just another also-ran. Feeling inadequate, we struck out and simply had to be number one people in everything we did, work or play. In defeat we were bitter. Never was there any sense of true partnership, one among many. Hey, even if we won the rat race, we still be just a rat. Not what life was about. These steps mean the end of isolation and futility, and the joyful discovery of what we really wanted.

Oh and when my going gets REAL intolerably unspeakably godawful, now, I just love to turn my attention to all the trouble the sober world perpetrates on their own, without any help at all from us alcoholics lol. Serenity is just a few headlines away. So easy to see in others what we hardly see in ourselves

Sorry to take up so much space, and dunno if it encourages you at all, but i wanna thank you for sharing your frustration, we need you!!! I have to go through what i have to to learn what i gotta learn. We drinkers absolutely insist on learning the hard way! Cheers.

Oh what a gift the giver gives when we see ourselves as others see us.

Centered3

I am sorry you are going through this. I've been there. I couldn't understand why my anxiety and depression worsened when I stopped drinking. Then I realized it was because the drinking temporarily shut off the nonsense that was going on in my mind. Just not drinking is not enough. I needed to go to AA and work a program to learn how to stop the nonsense in my head that drinking had temporarily drowned out.

I was taught that all that stuff going on in my head are all lies. False Evidence Appearing Real. It was all fear-based originating from early on in life. Drinking only made me think they were gone.

The step work taught me how to quite it all down and what to do when it started to come back.

Alcoholism IS a mental illness. Drinking was my solution. Then AA taught me the healthy solution to replace with drinking to avoid being a "dry drunk" living in what the big book calls "the bedevilments".

Truckinon

Since I posted I have doubled down on recovery. Many meetings, talking with other alcoholics, two visits to my therapist, writing my fourth step, reading the big book. And thank you all for your great responses.

I have decided against medications for now. I am coming up on two years sober. Life situations are crushing me. I blame myself for my indecision, procrastination and inaction. I have so much guilt and shame along with fear and anxiety. It's all my fault and I hate myself for what is happening to my family.

cairn

Oh you will be so fine, and so will your brood When we start to get willing to finally face ourselves, we go through so much turmoil. Pride and fear beat us back and back and back. Don't have to look, don't wanna look, can't make me, no!

Finally glimpsing how my own conduct has destroyed my security and standing, and confounded those about me, has been like peering through venetian blinds. Ugh. And hell ya we will wallow in 'so much guilt and remorse that nothing but oblivion looks possible as a solution'! But that is just pride in reverse. Not humility at all - and *that* my friend is what we so desperately need, and once the tears and fears subside, and we see the mystery unfold as to why we have acted as we have, the relief and humor become indescribable. Fear our instinctual demands won't be met put us in every possible conflict - with ourselves, others and life.

Inventory becomes your bearers share in alcoholics anonymous. You have a head start over us pride blinded types who have been so long so goshdarned sure everything was always everyone else's fault! How could people TREAT me this way lol! How could god if there was one rip me off like this!

Don't exaggerate your part, we are Fact finding and Fact facing and you and your competent advisor are performing life saving surgery and you will kick yourself for not seeing it sooner and man, you *will* laugh again. We are seeking balanced perspective and that may come and go for awhile till it settles.

When I got fatally crushed, I was oozing in suicide muck, couldn't even find a god after trying so hard too, lol, how unkind is that, and as i was imagining the great steel plate coming over to seal me in my catacomb, my version of my creator actually showed up. Stood there, looked at me, poked a corner of my steel - and - it crumpled, and collapsed away, nothing but a flimsy sheet of mylar film lol. You're doing this to yourself, he said. Immediately the smile kicked in, I knew it was true.

Yes we have to go on living, but not at all on the former basis. Self centered fear driven demands didn't work. How incredibly fortunate to learn this. Progressively swallowing and digesting more and more of these unpleasant truths, has been humiliating and nutritious, just like being forced to eat liver and kidney beans. Blech.

But these steps mean the end of isolation and the coming of the most incredible years of your life. Straight out of painful ego puncturing, fundamental lessons for living are learned, and when I sit, now, and count myself, I am truly coming up with more than one.

We are really not much different than our fellows, just more extremely obsessed and outta balance and damned defiant.

When we go to start repairs, just a little at a time. Your creator will show you how to put things in order, continue to rely there first and foremost. Every chance to be honest now is a becoming a thrill and a pleasure for me as i grow. Prepare to be blown away Yes, it's okay to smile when you see it. People *want* us happy and free. Human? Just human? sheez. where's my order damn. lol

When the pencil falters, we remind ourselves what this step has meant to others - release from a lifetime of solitary confinement and a step into the bright sunshine. It's okay to put on real dark sunglasses for awhile... Can even add a little trenchcoat...for effect... lol Convict. lol

Old fella at a meeting, says 'don't do like me, 25 years sitting around these damned meetings hoping something would rub off. 25 years of irritation and discontent. Finally decided to take that good moral look at myself. 3 years amazed living ever since...'

Cheers! The absolute BEST years of your life are ahead! Convict. Lol!

Yo - look out AA. Incoming...another blind about to see lol

Truckinon

Thank you cairn. I have been trying to call my best friend in AA all morning but can't get him. I just want to scream " I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE!!!!!!!!" I think you said just about what he would have.

I don't want to drink and I don't want to die but I think about both. I am just so full of depression and I will admit self pity.

Truckinon

cairn, I forgot to mention, you have quite a writing style. I have to read it a couple of times for it to sink in but it all makes sense. I'm going through a rough time here but I want so much to become unblocked, to get the channel to the sunlight of the Spirit as they say. I have had glimpses and that is what keeps me going, the thought that life could be like that.

I truly appreciate your help and everyone else that have replied .

cairn

You are exactly where you need to be, and everything happened for a reason. God don't make no junk. Your roots have grasped new soil - I can recognize what has been happening to me in you. Those damned AAs were right lol Them glimpses will become a working part of the mind, it is the sunlight for which we strive, and the rains will come, and clouds threaten, and winds howl and blow us where we need to be. Keep trusting your creator, test your thinking by that new consciousness and trudge on You *need* this information about yourself - you'll see!

I know my writing is offbeat. I live in my own world, communicating with people is new to me, I'll get better at it, except when i don't want to. Thanks for letting me shove my crumpled note thru your mail slot, convict lolol Cheers! Lots of extra pencils at the bulk section in the grocery store! Lol

Caramel

Cairn, your writing is brilliant!

Berrybean

Why not contact someone else in AA if you can't get hold of your best friend. What about your sponsor? (If you haven't got a sponsor and aren't working the steps, then that would be a good next step).