utopia

well its only my 5th day in aa but i think it just means a lot of yets havent happened, that i am in an earlier stage of the , the drinking....i came to SR to deal with having alcoholism in my family, only now am I grasping that I too might have this disease......because i had the occasional bender, but cracks have started showing and im remembering whan i ve hurt and been hurt, sure i didnt wander to bottle shops but i can never guarantee my behaviour when i am drunk. I think if I focused ont eh differences I would leave but now im too scared too, to drink again and see....getting clarity in a jail cell with noone left in my life about my drinking is not somethig i want....so im goin to do my best to keep coming back to aa and not drink, cos I WANT TO STOP DRINKING rather then caught up in semantics cos that's a easy thing fo rme to do

Bobcat17

I would probably qualify as 'functional alcoholic'. I am still trying to figure it out, but I know I rationalized and justified the drinking with excuses already mentioned above--I have a great job, no blackouts, hangovers, DUI, etc... But I found myself getting more depressed as time went on--this despite drinking more and more beer as I got older.

Maybe something just clicked in my brain that this isn't a good way to live. I am a thin person and sometimes my right side has a dull ache right where the liver is--hopefully there isn't damage. Will probably call my doc about it soon.

I was certainly 'functioning' in terms of doing my job well enough and taking care of everything else, but I certainly wasn't thriving or excelling in any area of my life. I was just existing and getting more depressed about it as time went on. All the beer I drank didn't change those things.

GracieLou

I agree with this and for some, such as myself, that stage lasted decades.

When I started drinking, I drank alcoholically and I believe my alcoholism would have taken a different road if I had not had children.

This does not mean I was a great mother, I wasn't but I did place functioning above drinking for some of my career. I got the dishes done, I washed the clothes, I cleaned the house, I shopped for food but I did them quickly so I could drink. Like others, I worked, I paid bills though rarely on time, I had a car, I had no DUI but thats because I just never got caught, I had a home but we moved a lot due to lack of paying rent, we had food and clothes and that is what I thought it meant to live.

Job, roof, car, clothing, food. These are the things I was able to provide. Never the best mind you and many times below standards but standards were never on my radar. So I functioned and provided.

What I did not provide was unconditional love, emotional stability, caring, honesty and hope. I was never there for my children or anyone else for that matter in those ways because I didn't know how. I didn't know there was another way to live.

Drinking robbed them and me of that.

So while my children can look back and say they always had food, clothes and shelter, they can't look back and say they had a loving caring mom.

Not only did I use the phrase functioning alcoholic, I wore it like a badge. I am not like the others. I have all this so I am not that or not that yet.

Then came the day that I was barely functioning. I didn't care anymore, there was nothing to care about anymore. I never saw how far down I had fallen. Right before the bottom I still thought I was in the same place I was twenty years earlier. I didn't see it at all until I smacked the wall.

In Bill's Story he make a comment about losing his mind or his body and he didn't care which one. I felt that way. In my case my mind was falling apart faster than my body was.

I went from the stage of functioning alcoholic many years earlier to straight alcoholic but I could not see the move from that stage because the terms that go with that had not changed. I still had the roof, the car and a job but doing these things or maintaining them at the end was almost impossible.

I was living that way for decades and I never saw the unmanageability. I never saw that my need to control everything and everybody was damaging. It was how I survived.

I hit an emotional bottom and my sanity was barely intact. I no longer had the mental or emotional capabilities to maintain the illusion that I was a functioning alcoholic.

I didn't remove the word "functioning" before alcoholic, my alcoholism did it for me.