Originally Posted by Ethos23

I noticed that a few of the posts on this thread have gotten a bit off track from the original question I posed. I certainly understand the need to take sobriety seriously, but I think the more important thing is to focus on your "wins" rather than your "losses." Sure, you could tally up the days at the end of the year and say, I allowed myself to drink X number of days. What is truly important is the fact that we learn from our mistakes. If we do, we are moving in the right direction and at the end of the day our wins wil far outnumber our losses. If I simply restarted the clock, I would personally feel that the previous sober-days were somehow gone. That is one thing that got me to where I was when I decided to quit. I focused on the negative. The negative needs to be focused on long enough for us to learn from it, and thats all.

I know that when I posted about my slip-up, there was some degree of concern as to whether we, as humans, have the abilty to simply slip up. I know that certain academics take the position that there is no such thing as a slip up. I think that makes as much sense as certain theories in finance/economics, where we say that X holds true, ceteris paribus, which is the latin for "all else being equal."

Sorry for my rant. I am of the mind that given real world conditions, yes, a mistake can take place. If none of us made mistakes in our recovery, these forums would not exist and recovery would be a piece of cake. When a mistake does occur, we need to take advantage of it because it is is a source where we can gain a great degree of knowledge about ourselves.

If I never wanted to make a mistake in my recovery, I would have never vowed to get sober.