wheresthefun

I'll never know.

gaffo

I was thinking about this the other day in the context of "What would you tell your 17 year old self?" and I thought I wish I could have told myself that drinking and cigarette smoking is a terrible waste of time and money and that I should stop immediately. It gets easier and I can use the money to make my life easier and not waste my younger years feeling like crap half the time.

I remember a couple of people talking to me about drinking but it seemed like they were hedging around it. When I was a kid smoking was tolerated everywhere by everyone and alcoholism was an open secret. Drinking and smoking made me look and feel grown up. Ha! Later I was the leader of the party and no one was going to tell me anything.

zjw

great post!!

I wish I new then that I was doing ok i as alright I was on the right track there was nothing wrong with what i was doing and that I did indeed have the ability to choose to feel crappy or not.

INstead I kinda started chaseing after what everyone convicned me I should chase after. what i should be what i should do etc.. as a result i spent a lot of time striving but never arriving at a happy place. and IN order to deal with all the struggle of that I drank and smoked etc... all the while thinking this is just what you do its what anyone does its normal when it wasnt.

I dont have any regrets really because I can also think of a lot of reasons why going through all the nonsense i put myself through was actually beneficial.

for example what good would I be at helping another alcoholic sober up if i had never become one? or if i was still drinking?

I'm happy tho now to know that I can follow after the things I want to follow after and that make ME happy and not have to drive myself nuts trying to live up to wtvr anyone elses expectations of me are.

tho at times its still a struggle. But thats just life.

fripfrop

The only thing I could think of where anyone could have stopped me,is if they had built a time machine. Then they could have taken me forward year by year and shown me the slow and painful descent into the pit.

Coldfusion

I think if I had gone to AA meetings sooner, I might have stopped drinking sooner.

zjw

yep fripfrop thats a good point. If i new then what i know now... tho I woudlnt know now if i didnt go through it all then.

it is what it is all we can do is learn from it I suppose.

zjw

yeah first AA meeting i saw a grown man cry in front of strangers because his daughter had just busted him with a 6 pack. He went on to tell how he had snuck to the next town over to buy it so no one in the local town would know and how he hid it on the porch as he drank them one by one.

this was an incredibly sobering meeting. I thought geeze how did i end up here? this is it? grown adult and managed to land my butt at an AA meeting. It was very REAL for me at that point.

Corse

I grew up around drugs and alcohol and violence. I don't like to blame others for my problems, but i think it is a fact that if my parents helped me out when i was in need, i would not be where i am today. I am only 18, but i have already gone through 6 years of hell due to alcohol and other substances.

fred59

I did not care what others thought I made a choice to live a certain lifestyle and embraced it until it stopped working. I knew at 21 I was addicted to alcohol and rode the wave until I crashed at 31.

SoberLife90

Nobody could have gotten me sober. My family urged me to go to rehab or do something to stop doing drugs, but nothing they said could have encouraged me to actually quit. It is truly by the grace of god that I am sober today because when I went to rehab I didn't want to get sober.

zjw

we dont always get to choose the cards we get dealt but we can choose how we will play them.

I got crapped on as well from my parents. Mine could have and should have done a lot of things. tehre is a part of me that is STILL pissed off about it too. But geeze I gotta move forward and quit being angry over it etc...

hang in there corse you'll get this figured out.

Forward12

Nothing would have changed it. I remember when I was about 19 and my dad found a bottle of jack I had. I wasn't an alcoholic at the time, but he dumped it out, told me about our family history of alcoholism, if I wanted to go to AA with him, etc. I just brushed it off. Had a great relationship with a girl who towards the end became very concerned of my drinking, I just brushed it off.
My therapist told me I need to stop drinking if I wanted to get better, I would stop by the liquor store after every appointment.
Alcohol is something we don't truly realize what a monster it is until years, sometimes decades later, when it has completely bashed us into the ground.

zjw

forward12 your right alcohol sinks its claws in deep and you dont even realize its the problem.

when i got sober i had so many problems on that list of problems alcohol was nowhere to be found. it was not until i was a year sober that i realized really the main problem all along was the alcohol..

i was the type who when told i had a drinking problem i'd open the fridge count them all and rattle off how many are in there and say i dont see what the problem is theres plenty! ::facepalm::

tomsteve

yup,and they did- they walked away from me.
my sons mom had a talk with me once about my drinking and how it was effecting my relationship with my son. when she was done talking I said," I gotta go get a 12 pack, need anything from the store?"

nothing anything anyone said would have helped. I had a wee bit of an ego problem.

and if I was able to go back and talk to my young self? I wouldn't waste my breath.i wouldn't listen because I already knew everything.
I had to go through what I had to go through to get where I am today and im quite content with life today.

Fly N Buy

It's a fair question and the common response is no - one has to be ready. I was of that mind early in recovery as well.

Today I'm not certain that's entirely correct. I see some thrust into rehab who seem to get the message of love or judicial consignment. Perhaps this get's some on the right path.

Words only slowed me down briefly. An intervention with rehab might have put me on a sober path earlier. Then again, maybe not..........

2ndhandrose

I'm glad you updated us, slipped! And, congrats on 7 years sober

I have pondered this question, less in terms of my own self, and more in terms of younger family members on my side and my husband's side.

I have come to the conclusion that while sharing information doesn't hurt, ultimately, like anything in life, a lot of us insist on experiencing our own mistakes, no matter the cost.

I know that is my story, no one could have stopped me or changed my path. I did what I wanted to do, no matter what the conversations around me were.

You are living an excellent example

EndGameNYC

If you think that someone could have talked you out of drinking, educated you out of drinking, scared you out of drinking, loved you out of drinking, or bribed you out of drinking, then good luck with trying the same thing with someone who's in the thick of it.

Whodathunk

Nope, not anything anyone could have done to help me. I was the person who did not have a drinking problem. I was a weekend drinker only at parties in high school, picked up steam in college, then happy hours after work, then drinking before getting home to drink with my wife, then then then then then..........

I DUI did not stop me. Got probation for 2 years, that did not stop me. I gamed the time from drinking to my meeting in case I got pee tested. I need to drive for my business, that would have been it for my business.

I had to finally read 'my own personal point' and that point for me was clarity that at that moment I needed help and I needed to not drink anymore, because I was at the edge, keep on and I would die in one way or another. And I went to AA that day.

I had to find it myself.

fantail

Slipped, from your update I feel like I should add to my answer that my father is a sober alcoholic. I never knew him drinking, he quit when I was very very young (and he actually never got too bad -- he'd just seen enough in his family to know where he was going). So he warned me many many times when I was younger, especially as he saw that I liked to drink.

It didn't stop me. I thought he was being overly sensitive, because I was just partying like other people my age.

But I will say this... when it got bad, I understood very quickly what was happening. I mentioned in my other post that my spiral was fast. At 26 I realized for the first time that I wasn't just a heavy drinker, I was probably "a little bit" addicted. From there it was a quick descent. I quit for the first time at 29, got a good stretch. Had a horrible relapse for a year and a half, then quit again as I was turning 32. About to turn 33 now with a year sober and I know that this quit is the one. I have no doubts anymore about whether or not I can drink.

My dad wasn't able to save me from alcoholism, but I do believe he saved me a lot of time. In a weird way the knowledge of what was happening made me worse... as soon as I knew I was addicted, I started drinking like a textbook alcoholic. I guess in the back of my mind I knew I was going to have to quit, and I was in denial and just went nuts with it. As awful as that was, it escalated the problem to the point where I had to quit. I couldn't have lived like that for 30 years. And then once I did finally accept that I had to quit, I quickly became hopeful. Because I have my dad as an example that living sober is possible, that you can be sober and normal, etc.

Good luck to you and your son. Sorry for writing a book here!

MIRecovery

Nope. It took a very long time before I wanted to not drink more than I wanted to drink. All of my loved ones were full of BS. The only problem I had was a drank a little to much. What was the big deal?