Threshold

This is where trust comes in. When I read this, I see your own will threatening to rear up and do you in. Your will, somewhere has set a boundary...that you will trust recovery ONLY so far...and then if it doesn't meet up to your preset expectation, you have given yourself permission to use again. Uh Uh...ain't gonna work.

You haven't really given up your will, you just shortened it's leash a little, put it in the back room, ready to let it out as soon as you decide that recovery isn't what you want it to be.

I've caught myself playing this same game with recovery. I take it on a test run...ride it down the roughest most impossible roads I can find and the second I feel a bump declare it a failure...and say I may as well keep my old rusty rattling death trap of addiction..since recover CLEARLY has nothing better to offer me...

I did that and danced the relapse boogie for better part of a year.

Then I said...OK, where do I sign? And I BOUGHT relapse, traded in addiction and now recovery is the only ride I have. NO GOING BACK...because addiction has been sent to the junk yard and dismantled.

As long as any of us keep allowing for some level at which we know we will break, can't hold out, etc, then we are doomed because we all know from experience that YES, life will reach that level.

Deciding to live sober is committing to live sober...no matter what. No matter what life throws at us, to trust that sobriety can and will get us through and is up to the challenge, that we no longer need our addiction ever again. NO EXCEPTIONS.

I am not pointing fingers bubba...I saw, in what you posted, the things I had been saying to myself over the past several months, the bargains I made with sobriety, the deals I cut...I never really gave sobriety a fair chance...when things got hairy...I'd say "it's not working" and use again..so how could I ever really know?