Originally Posted by
eemag71 
i almost wish i would hit bottom. i haven't lost a job or anything. infact i got promoted this year and consistently get good reviews for my job performance despite the fact that i'm hungover all the time.
I was also what you would call a functional alcoholic. Had an excellent paying job, earned regular promotions, was well respected by my colleagues, worked lots of hours . . . but I was miserable. Hated the job and all the cr@p that went along with it and drank my way through it. I told myself that I needed and deserved to drink after working 50-60 hours a week. I lived my life in one of two states of mind: I was either drunk or I was hungover.
Originally Posted by
eemag71 i don't believe in AA because i believe that i choose to drink, it's hard not to but it's still my decision to go to the store but this forum has a lot of activity so thats why im posting here. add to that that i'm agnostic and it makes AA almost impossible but i'm considering choosing my higher power to be a lucky rock that i found 15 years ago when i was a kid and scared and it made me feel better. that's not logical at all... is that insane? probably, but so is alcoholism.
are there any other agnostic/atheist people here who have found a higher power that's not spiritual? and if you were a functional alcoholic, what made you stop? this is probably a repost but i'm too tired to search.
I also chose to drink. Every morning I swore I wasn't going to drink and every day I got home from work and the first thing I did was to make the decision to open another bottle. I believe that's what alcoholics do.
I almost didn't go to AA because I was an athiest. A very wise man with 37 years of sobriety said to me, "Don't let the fact that you don't believe in God get in the way of your being sober." He was right and I held onto that statement for a long, long time. I still hold onto what he said to me. I'll hold onto anything that keeps me sober.
I was so tired of my life that I decided to go to AA and become a sober woman no matter what. Every time I heard someone share about God or their Higher Power, I was angry, annoyed, jealous, frustrated, sad . . . . and none of those feelings changed the way I felt. I still didn't believe in God but I wanted to be sober more than anything else I could imagine.
It found it difficult to share in meetings that I didn't believe in God. People were trying to be helpful when they said "Fake it till you make it" or "You have to find a HP or you'll drink again" or "You can use the tree that was in my sponsor's back yard until you find a Higher Power of your understanding."
All of that just made me angrier.
I can't fake. I am who I am and I'm not capable of being insincere enough to fake what I don't believe. I couldn't believe in the tree in her sponsor's back yard. Having to fake a belief in God was the one thing I could imagine that would have sent me running right back to drinking again.
I used to think, "'What if I was to say, 'My program believes that you have to stop believing in God or you'll drink again?'" Was that enough to make someone else stop believing in God? Would they be able to fake it until they make it? No. They wouldn't be able to do that any more than I was able to put my faith in a God I had no relationship with.
It took five years before I came to terms with the fact that it was OK for me to feel the way I did. But I kept going to AA and I was still sober.
After a lot of soul searching, my Higher Power became the spark that I believe came at the very beginning of time and created everything that is here today and everything that came before. I have no idea where that spark came from and I don't need to know. The Universe and all of its' beauty is my Higher Power.
So use your Rock. Use whatever it takes for you to stop drinking and become a sober person. Don't let your belief that you "choose to drink" or that you are an athiest get in the way of being sober.
I could think of a hundred excuses to keep drinking but I couldn't think of one good reason. I'm betting you can't think of one good reason either.