When did you stop grieving
Member
Join Date: Mar 2016
Location: Texas
Posts: 95
I went through a self-pitying time about how I would never be able to have fun or connect with a person on an intimate level again because I gave up partying. LoL I still have some of that self-pity, which intellectually I know is just fear but feelings-wise it's still somewhat there, unfortunately. Not sure if it will ever leave.
I still feel regret about the ways I behaved during my partying phase, I feel guilt for the opportunities I ruined and the bridges I burned, and I feel sad about how I felt like I had to get drunk and/or high to be human. Not sure if those feelings will ever leave either.
I still feel regret about the ways I behaved during my partying phase, I feel guilt for the opportunities I ruined and the bridges I burned, and I feel sad about how I felt like I had to get drunk and/or high to be human. Not sure if those feelings will ever leave either.
Reality...what a concept!
Thread Starter
Join Date: Nov 2014
Location: CT, USA
Posts: 1,232
Thank you all for your wise words.
I am certainly not grieving for what was killing me. I am grieving for what, to me anyway, was a crutch that I ran to for any reason.
I wish I could say I had something else in my life that I could feel that way about.
Guess I just need to keep searching.
I am grateful for all of your responses and for my sobriety. I miss my Mom who passed from an awful disease, but would never wish for her to still be here, suffering. It's kinda like that...the grieving.
I am certainly not grieving for what was killing me. I am grieving for what, to me anyway, was a crutch that I ran to for any reason.
I wish I could say I had something else in my life that I could feel that way about.
Guess I just need to keep searching.
I am grateful for all of your responses and for my sobriety. I miss my Mom who passed from an awful disease, but would never wish for her to still be here, suffering. It's kinda like that...the grieving.
quat
Join Date: Jul 2013
Location: terra (mostly)firma
Posts: 4,823
Sorry to hear of your mother's passing.
To further a very touching and pointed analogy, your time with your mother was real and her absence causes pain , grieving. Are you fully satisfied that what you miss about alcohol was just as real? Did drinking actually provide or act as an aid in whatever reason you had for using it? Had it once helped to solve an issue?Did it really provide a respite , a 'cost free timeout'? Surely it always comes with requisite consequences, perhaps minimal at times but costly and enduring as a lifesyle, yes?
Crutches are aids to healing, things that help us to move forward. the 'break' alcohol affords us is more a ball and chain, freezing us in place , a cosmic timeout that only stops us from dealing with feelings, situations and our feelings about those situations. A drinking session is like hitting a pause button on the universe , but instead of the 'show' restarting at the end of it , we are then thrust back into the action saddled with the same 'reasons' still unresolved, and with the added deficit of having let that much of our lives slip by, missed, and unretrievable.
We all have only a limited amount of time and life is filled with many things , wonderful things and terrible, please try and not waste any of it grieving something you probably never had.
Crutches and aids come in many sorts, why do you think alcohol was the 'one' for you ? I suggest it was an addiction and nothing else, an addicition you can be well rid of , nothing to grieve for. But that is up to you to determine.
To further a very touching and pointed analogy, your time with your mother was real and her absence causes pain , grieving. Are you fully satisfied that what you miss about alcohol was just as real? Did drinking actually provide or act as an aid in whatever reason you had for using it? Had it once helped to solve an issue?Did it really provide a respite , a 'cost free timeout'? Surely it always comes with requisite consequences, perhaps minimal at times but costly and enduring as a lifesyle, yes?
Crutches are aids to healing, things that help us to move forward. the 'break' alcohol affords us is more a ball and chain, freezing us in place , a cosmic timeout that only stops us from dealing with feelings, situations and our feelings about those situations. A drinking session is like hitting a pause button on the universe , but instead of the 'show' restarting at the end of it , we are then thrust back into the action saddled with the same 'reasons' still unresolved, and with the added deficit of having let that much of our lives slip by, missed, and unretrievable.
We all have only a limited amount of time and life is filled with many things , wonderful things and terrible, please try and not waste any of it grieving something you probably never had.
Crutches and aids come in many sorts, why do you think alcohol was the 'one' for you ? I suggest it was an addiction and nothing else, an addicition you can be well rid of , nothing to grieve for. But that is up to you to determine.
Member
Join Date: Apr 2012
Location: northern michigan. not the U.P.
Posts: 15,281
Originally Posted by Vinificent 
Thank you all for your wise words.
I am certainly not grieving for what was killing me. I am grieving for what, to me anyway, was a crutch that I ran to for any reason.
I wish I could say I had something else in my life that I could feel that way about.
I am certainly not grieving for what was killing me. I am grieving for what, to me anyway, was a crutch that I ran to for any reason.
I wish I could say I had something else in my life that I could feel that way about.
i found new solutions. to find those solutions i had to search, speak with others about my problems, listen,take what they suggested and put it into action, and see what the results were.
and the results were, and still are, awesome!
Catch 22
Join Date: Jun 2016
Location: South Africa
Posts: 327
I understand what you are saying. I also grieve. I miss my old life, the socialising, celebrating success and achievements by getting plastered, sitting in the sun boozing with friends and talling gibberish. I do not know how to get over this loss. It feels as if life will never be exhilarating again.
EndGame
Join Date: Jun 2013
Location: New York, NY
Posts: 4,677
There's a popular misconception that we only grieve the passing of something good in our loves, or of someone we liked or loved. In many cases, it is the people and things with which we had (and continue to have after their passing) a conflicted a relationship that make grieving complicated and prolonged. In conflicted relationships, our working so hard to make the relationship work for us takes so much time and effort that the attachment is much stronger than the attachments we have with people and things that are less conflicted.
There is a corollary to this in interpersonal relationships: Because it's much more difficult and takes much more effort and other personal resources to create a friendly or even workable relationship with someone who we, for whatever reasons, do not like initially, the relationship thus forged becomes more valuable than those relationships that were born with relatively little conflict or effort. On every level of human activity, those things that we work for become much more valuable to us than the things we are simply given.
When our relationships with people and things we've lost include abuse, neglect, torment and/or negative consequences, we are left having to fight with ourselves over all the damage we either allowed or passively endorsed in the relationship. There is no one or no thing left to fight in any tangible way, which never helped anyway. We don't just "feel better" or "get better" by virtue of the loss alone, and often things are much worse for us when what or whom we engaged in conflict is no longer as "present" or present in the same way as it was previously. As above, although such attachments are often not perceived as being "better" than less conflicted relationships, they always involve a stronger connection or attachment that stays with us, often looming larger than ever, and long after the person or thing is gone. Or lost.
The fundamental error in concluding that "bad people, things or experiences are in the past, the past is the past, and it no longer matters," though convenient in terms of our not requiring ourselves to work through the difficult feelings related to such people and things, this attitude also and only provides those people and things, and the feelings attached to them, greater strength which grows without either our knowledge or consent. Usually until it's too late to do something about it. I've never, meaning not once, seen any evidence to the contrary in either my personal life or in my substantial (in terms of genuine contact with people) and diverse career across cultures, generations, gender or personality traits. I'm talking about grieving the death of a friend or loved one, abused spouses and children, combat veterans who present with PTSD, both victims and perpetrators violent crimes, with what is initially perceived as simple loss.
Emotional pain and damage does not just "go away" or heal by thinking through it from a position of assumed or perceived clarity, by "making sense of it," by reading books, or by talking to other people. And, certainly, nothing changes by pretending that everything is okay. We can't just "walk it off." One of the formidable obstacles in helping people in such circumstances is that many, if not most, either don't know that this is what they're doing, or they deny it in the service of keeping alive in the present the conflicted relationship they had in the past. Part grudge match, and part loving concern mixed with the fear of losing that which they never had, of losing the love and care and, in the case of alcohol, life's remedy, that they never had and was never on offer, even when holding onto the unresolved conflict interferes with daily functioning. When we engage life as a problem to be solved, then our tendency is to search for an answer, not from within, but from all versions of external distraction at our disposal.
The stakes are always high, and our way of dealing with this kind of loss is always extreme. Facing the reality that the conflict itself was the only substantial element of the relationship, the only thing that kept it alive, is equivalent to acknowledging that there is not and never was anything in it for me to be in the relationship -- a crippling hit to self-esteem -- to the way we see ourselves, and to our way of being in the world. It's an unhealthy type of emotional insurance against an anticipated annihilation of the self. And, as many of us have amply demonstrated, we'll go to any lengths to defend against surrendering the conflict, no matter what the cost.
"Forgetting" is not the same thing as letting go. Forgetting works against letting go and against healing to the extent that, the less conscious or aware we are of our inner conflicts, the more powerful they are. The quick version of letting go is "working through;" working through the typically intense feelings unveiled, experienced and acted (out) on as a result of the relationship. No one ever creates feelings within us that weren't already there, so looking to "fix things on the outside," or looking anywhere else (like drinking to obliteration) never works and often makes things worse.
I paid a very high price to learn the important things I needed to learn in my life. I think it's always that way. I've learned, for me -- maybe I'm even convinced -- that the more defensive I am about something -- like own rationalizations around the harm I did to myself and others while drinking, and other people's confronting this -- the more I'm obliged to do something about it. The more defensive I am about something, about anything, the more likely that which I'm defending needs to be addressed. And not "someday." The trick is to stop doing things that I need to rationalize or defend.
Though I may at times have grieved parts of my drinking life, I haven't for a long time regretted that I put down the drink, and I haven't romanticized drinking to such an extent that I would want to start again, for any reason. There is always so much more to do.
There is a corollary to this in interpersonal relationships: Because it's much more difficult and takes much more effort and other personal resources to create a friendly or even workable relationship with someone who we, for whatever reasons, do not like initially, the relationship thus forged becomes more valuable than those relationships that were born with relatively little conflict or effort. On every level of human activity, those things that we work for become much more valuable to us than the things we are simply given.
When our relationships with people and things we've lost include abuse, neglect, torment and/or negative consequences, we are left having to fight with ourselves over all the damage we either allowed or passively endorsed in the relationship. There is no one or no thing left to fight in any tangible way, which never helped anyway. We don't just "feel better" or "get better" by virtue of the loss alone, and often things are much worse for us when what or whom we engaged in conflict is no longer as "present" or present in the same way as it was previously. As above, although such attachments are often not perceived as being "better" than less conflicted relationships, they always involve a stronger connection or attachment that stays with us, often looming larger than ever, and long after the person or thing is gone. Or lost.
The fundamental error in concluding that "bad people, things or experiences are in the past, the past is the past, and it no longer matters," though convenient in terms of our not requiring ourselves to work through the difficult feelings related to such people and things, this attitude also and only provides those people and things, and the feelings attached to them, greater strength which grows without either our knowledge or consent. Usually until it's too late to do something about it. I've never, meaning not once, seen any evidence to the contrary in either my personal life or in my substantial (in terms of genuine contact with people) and diverse career across cultures, generations, gender or personality traits. I'm talking about grieving the death of a friend or loved one, abused spouses and children, combat veterans who present with PTSD, both victims and perpetrators violent crimes, with what is initially perceived as simple loss.
Emotional pain and damage does not just "go away" or heal by thinking through it from a position of assumed or perceived clarity, by "making sense of it," by reading books, or by talking to other people. And, certainly, nothing changes by pretending that everything is okay. We can't just "walk it off." One of the formidable obstacles in helping people in such circumstances is that many, if not most, either don't know that this is what they're doing, or they deny it in the service of keeping alive in the present the conflicted relationship they had in the past. Part grudge match, and part loving concern mixed with the fear of losing that which they never had, of losing the love and care and, in the case of alcohol, life's remedy, that they never had and was never on offer, even when holding onto the unresolved conflict interferes with daily functioning. When we engage life as a problem to be solved, then our tendency is to search for an answer, not from within, but from all versions of external distraction at our disposal.
The stakes are always high, and our way of dealing with this kind of loss is always extreme. Facing the reality that the conflict itself was the only substantial element of the relationship, the only thing that kept it alive, is equivalent to acknowledging that there is not and never was anything in it for me to be in the relationship -- a crippling hit to self-esteem -- to the way we see ourselves, and to our way of being in the world. It's an unhealthy type of emotional insurance against an anticipated annihilation of the self. And, as many of us have amply demonstrated, we'll go to any lengths to defend against surrendering the conflict, no matter what the cost.
"Forgetting" is not the same thing as letting go. Forgetting works against letting go and against healing to the extent that, the less conscious or aware we are of our inner conflicts, the more powerful they are. The quick version of letting go is "working through;" working through the typically intense feelings unveiled, experienced and acted (out) on as a result of the relationship. No one ever creates feelings within us that weren't already there, so looking to "fix things on the outside," or looking anywhere else (like drinking to obliteration) never works and often makes things worse.
I paid a very high price to learn the important things I needed to learn in my life. I think it's always that way. I've learned, for me -- maybe I'm even convinced -- that the more defensive I am about something -- like own rationalizations around the harm I did to myself and others while drinking, and other people's confronting this -- the more I'm obliged to do something about it. The more defensive I am about something, about anything, the more likely that which I'm defending needs to be addressed. And not "someday." The trick is to stop doing things that I need to rationalize or defend.
Though I may at times have grieved parts of my drinking life, I haven't for a long time regretted that I put down the drink, and I haven't romanticized drinking to such an extent that I would want to start again, for any reason. There is always so much more to do.
Member
Join Date: Jun 2010
Location: California
Posts: 2,693
When I quit I actually did not grieve. I felt so horribly terrible every single day and it had caused such havoc in my life. I had been diagnosed with a health condition due to alcoholism and I was sick, sick, sick every single day.
I suppose I was angry at myself for letting it get so bad. I did miss the days when I was just simply a heavy drinker and still enjoyed it. But that was about five years before I actually stopped.
So if I ever find myself missing it I remember that what I am missing is not the drinking at the end. It was the drinking at the beginning which was a lifetime ago.
Most people I know are light/normal drinkers. They never drink more than two and rarely drink more than once a week. These people showed me that you don't need alcohol to have a happy life.
One thing I knew for sure is that when I was drinking I did not have a happy life.
The longer you are sober the less you miss it. In fact, you start to see it for the monster it really is (to alcoholics).
I suppose I was angry at myself for letting it get so bad. I did miss the days when I was just simply a heavy drinker and still enjoyed it. But that was about five years before I actually stopped.
So if I ever find myself missing it I remember that what I am missing is not the drinking at the end. It was the drinking at the beginning which was a lifetime ago.
Most people I know are light/normal drinkers. They never drink more than two and rarely drink more than once a week. These people showed me that you don't need alcohol to have a happy life.
One thing I knew for sure is that when I was drinking I did not have a happy life.
The longer you are sober the less you miss it. In fact, you start to see it for the monster it really is (to alcoholics).
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